24 Works of Fiction and Poetry to Read This Fall

Fall is full of harbingers of change: Air is brisk, daylight becomes fickle, leaves turn red. There is perhaps no better way to ground such a time of transformation and impermanence than with a great new read. Become seduced by the undercover spy-for-hire at the heart of Rachel Kushner’s thriller “Creation Lake”; ring in Sad Girl Autumn with “Intermezzo,” a characteristically cool Sally Rooney title about two brothers grieving their father’s death; or get swept up in the kaleidoscopic journeys of multiple narrators living in and under the ocean in Richard Powers’s “Playground.” Whatever your mood, these books — among many other reads coming this fall — will provide an escape, a shift in perspective and engrossing new worlds to cozy up to this season.

See our nonfiction picks.

September

Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner

A disgraced F.B.I. agent turned freelance operative infiltrates a rural French commune of environmental anarchists in Kushner’s latest thriller, which grapples with a question that has preoccupied philosophers and scientists for centuries: What, at our core, makes us human?

Scribner, Sept. 3

Small Rain, by Garth Greenwell

A writer discovers that he has a rare disease and lands in the I.C.U. Confined to bed and forced to confront his mortality, the narrator contemplates love, art, beauty, family — everything that makes up the complicated terrain of life.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept. 3