For so many reasons, Autumn is one of the best times for reading! It’s all about the feeling, those cold breezes and darker evenings, and the fall season just makes us want to curl up under a blanket with a big book. The Write for Harlequin team has read endlessly this season, and we’re here to share our favorite books of the last couple months with you. Hopefully you’ll find something to add to your to-read list for the last couple weeks of the season before winter arrives.
Caroline Timmings is reading…
The Aunt Dimity series by Nancy Atherton. These are adorable, cozy, engaging mysteries. I stumbled upon this series a few years ago when I picked up Aunt Dimity and the King’s Ransom at a bookstore, not knowing that that is the 23rd installment in the series. There are currently 25 published titles in this series. Based on this experience, I can tell you to make sure to start with the first in the series. I think it really helps you connect with the heroine Lori. The series is very cool, featuring a down on her luck protagonist who goes through a Cinderella-type story to find happiness with the help of her late mother’s best friend Dimity—who just so happens to be dead and inhabiting a blue journal as a wise and all-knowing spirit. Together, Dimity and Lori solve all sorts of crimes and mysteries, and we also get to enjoy recipes at the end of every book. And, of course, Lori finds love and family with her own prince charming. These books are light and always pleasant to read.
Emma Cole is reading…
Hailey Piper’s All the Hearts You Eat: I love everything I’ve read of Hailey’s and All the Hearts You Eat is no exception. Epic in emotional scope but taking place in a strange little small town, the story is told by various narrators and is at times heartbreaking, at times visceral and intense, and always fantastic. I love Hailey’s writing style, and this book really swings for the fences, a long (but not too long) and fabulously realized story of love and death and identity that just worked so well for me. I think we’ve seen some really fantastically interesting takes on vampires recently, from Nat Cassidy’s Nestlings to Johnny Compton’s Devils Kill Devils, and Hailey both nods to classic vampire stories and puts her own unique vision on the page in a way that feels both new and familiar. Really loved this one.
Sofia Ajram’s Coup de Grace: A bleak and haunting story, Weird with a capital W and incredibly moving. The tone shifts wildly throughout, funny and horrifying, sometimes in the same breath. I’m sure it’s been comped to House of Leaves a million times over, and the comparison isn’t wrong, necessarily. But this is a much tighter, much meaner story, really digging into the scabs and sores of life, pulling the protagonist apart and looking back at the reader explicitly and indifferently. Prose is great, some incredibly interesting choices being made, and I will be thinking about this book for a long time.
Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation: My first VanderMeer but definitely not my last. There’s a reason Jeff has become so well-known in Weird fiction, and Annihilation is a huge part of that. Incredibly compelling, opaque in a way that feels frustrating at first but if you let yourself be carried away by the story and the writing, you come to appreciate the unapologetically, deliberate strangeness. Annihilation is one of VanderMeer’s most accessible books, and with it he builds a world that offers you plenty of mysteries and very few answers, in the best way.
Natalia Castano is reading…
I’ve been reading Olga Dies Dreaming by Xóchitl González. It’s an honest and exciting story told from the point of view of two Latinx characters, Olga and her brother, Prieto. Their family immigrated from Puerto Rico, but they live and work among the white upper-class community of Brooklyn, while they face a complicated family history, political corruption, and the aftermath of the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico’s history.
Rebecca Garnett is reading…
Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors: This book is in the running for my favorite book of the year. It follows 3 sisters – Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky – who are returning to New York a year after the death of their other sister, Nicky. It is a story about grief and identity and addiction, but most of all, it’s a story about sisterhood. I’ve never read a book that so perfectly encapsulated the feeling of that relationship. This book also has that magical quality where it makes you care so deeply about these characters whilst also wanting to shake them silly over some of the decisions that they’re making. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and more than anything, it made me want to call my sisters.
We hope that you’ve found a recommendation or two and that you are as excited for your upcoming reads as we are!
