Your Shelf Life: 5 Books to Read in September

Two unrelated characters travel to Israel to quiet their existential malaise in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark. The acclaimed author of The History of Love explores regret, marriage, and theology in this funny and heady work.

After her husband commits suicide, a pregnant woman finds guidance in a local convent in Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour. An exquisitely written book by the bard of Catholicism about Irish immigrant experiences in early-20th-century Brooklyn.

Printed IssueSubscribe and get 1 year for $18

Every literature lover who dreams of studying with Toni Morrison will devour The Origin of Others, a new collection of her Harvard lectures on race, literature, and otherness.

Journalist Jessica Bruder joins transient low-income Americans, many of them senior citizens, who live in RVs and travel the country looking for seasonal work. She tells their funny, heart-wrenching stories in Nomadland.

Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere explores what happens to the progressive Shaker Heights neighborhood of Cleveland when a mysterious artist moves to town and issues of race and adoption divide the community.

Your Shelf Life: 5 Books to Read in September