Your Shelf Life: 5 Books to Read in October

Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan has a much-anticipated historical thriller in Manhattan Beach. Set during the Great Depression and subsequent war, it follows a young Brooklyn woman working as a diver and a nightclub owner who may be the key to her family’s mystery.

Fresh Complaint is the first collection of short stories from Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. The stories were written throughout his career, and many of them were first published in The New Yorker.

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Hollywood luminary Tom Hanks’s first work of fiction—a collection of short stories titled Uncommon Type: Some Stories—features typewriters, his favorite collectible.

Nicola Lagioia won Italy’s most prestigious literary prize for Ferocity, a thriller following a man’s search for answers about his sister’s mysterious death in 1980s Southern Italy.

A gang member’s path to redemption, a family dealing with mysterious deaths and mental breakdowns, and other high-stakes stories of immigration and broken dreams fill Daniel Alarcón’s collection The King Is Always Above the People.

Your Shelf Life: 5 Books to Read in October