New & Recommended Fiction

Here it is: the long-awaited next novel by the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger. Her Fearful Symmetry is entirely different in tone than The Time Traveler’s Wife, but just as captivating. Her Fearful Symmetry centers around a set of twins that has moved to London after inheriting their aunt’s flat, located right outside Highgate Cemetery. In the same way that The Time Traveler’s Wife unfolds as a story that must be experienced, not talked about, this new novel has that same quality. Without giving too much away, I will say that the themes explore love and the idea of loving too much; identity and loving too little; acceptance and freedom; fear and holding on; and the suggestion that life beyond death and life in the here and now are not as separate as we think. Niffenegger has presented me with a problem: I know that I am supposed to believe that time travel is fictional, just as I am supposed to think that hauntings aren’t possible, but the author gives her works such grace, such humanity, such…realness, that I’m now convinced that Audrey Niffenegger is something different: She is not a writer who imagines fiction, but she somehow lives it. How else could she get the fantastical so right? —S.M.C.

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake blew me away with its dark descriptions of our world gone awry; in her new novel, Atwood gives center stage to a religious group that was previously only a side note. While Year of the Flood is technically a sequel, I felt excited and terrified to witness the horrific global meltdown again, from another perspective. I’ve never encountered a better storyteller than Atwood, and I loved experiencing multiple dimensions of what, we are warned, may be our future. It’s a crazy story she’s created, and it couldn’t feel better to return to it. —K.M.S.

Of all the big literary books coming out this fall, this was the one that I personally was most looking forward to. Byatt, perhaps best known for her Booker Prize–winning Possession, has not disappointed. Her novel picks up on many things familiar from her earlier works, including her interest in fairy tales and her consummately researched portrait of an earlier England. This tale begins when the lives of three boys from different backgrounds converge in 1895 in a British museum. This mammoth novel, with its large cast of characters, unfolds from this deceptively simple start. Byatt’s fans will not want to miss this one. Neither should you. —Seana Graham

In what may be Vonnegut’s final batch of stories published, he reprises his metaphysical quandaries and slapstick insights with a collection as worthy as any in his career. Despite the glut of fantastic novels and short stories Vonnegut published in his long, illustrious career, there will never be enough of his prose to satisfy the devoted. I recommend parceling out these tales, digesting them slowly. His loss to the literary world is palpable, and with Look at the Birdie, we’ve been granted one last reprieve before the book must finally close. So it goes. —Z.G.R.

Nabokov’s will stated that the fragments of his last novel, The Original of Laura, should be destroyed. Luckily for us, his wife defied his wishes and held onto them. Now being published for the first time by their son Dmitri, Nabokov’s final work—a darkly funny meditation on mortality—is a stunning tribute to Nabokov’s genius. —M.M.