The first Sri Lankan novelist to win the Booker Prize since Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 laurels for The English Patient, the North American release of Karunatilaka’s searing satirical magical-realist epic is anxiously awaited. It’s 1989, and the ghost of a war photographer has seven days to find out who killed him during the Sri Lankan Civil War. “We admired enormously the ambition and the scope and the skill, the daring, the audacity and the hilarity of the execution,” the chair of this year’s judges panel said during a news conference. “It’s a book that takes the reader on a roller coaster journey through life and death.” (Nov. 1)

As you may glean from the allusion to James Bond, this is a supervillain caper – a mischievous one, in which an Ivy League math prof researching the concept of nothing teams up with an astrophysicist to attempt a heist at Fort Knox. The writer is a UCLA English professor, and his novels play with genre, language, and racial and gender assumptions: Telephone was a Pulitzer finalist and The Trees (a hilarious and eviscerating horror-comedy that confronted the legacy of racism and lynching in America) was shortlisted for the recent Booker Prize. Any new Everett novel tops my list, and this one’s already on Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 fiction of 2022 list. (Nov. 1)

Ten years ago, Emmy-nominated actor Eriq La Salle, who memorably played Dr. Peter Benton for eight seasons on ER, wrote his first novel and it was “summarily rejected by every publisher in the industry.” The multi-hyphenate persevered and self-published in small quantities, even as he went on to direct and produce TV shows like Law & Order, CSI, Chicago P.D. Now, at 60, he has landed a worldwide book deal for his gritty thrillers about NYPD detectives and an FBI agent investigating high-profile serial killings. The series debut has been called “a modern-day parable masquerading as a crime novel.” (Nov. 1)

This previously unpublished novel by Dunn, who died in 2016, is a major moment in a literary season crammed with big moments. Avid readers familiar with the American novelist’s work will know her bestselling 1989 comic novel, Geek Love, and its cult status as a magnum opus. This striking autobiographical novel, written 50 years ago, examines the present and past of a reclusive woman after a serious mental breakdown. She reflects on her time at a liberal arts college in the late 1960s, at the peak of the women’s liberation movement, with bizarre, brash and blackly humorous memories that reveal a complicated relationship to the counterculture of her youth, a curdled idealism and the naïveté and failures of the era—with nary a trace of sentimentality. (Nov. 1)

Anticipation is high for this dark academia novel set in The Cloisters, the famed gothic museum and garden at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a pair of young curatorial assistants – one privileged, the other less so – form an intriguing alliance. The atmospheric tale, about a deck of Renaissance tarot cards that might hold the secret to predicting the future, will remind riddle-loving readers of the fascinating art-history mystery at the heart of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s 1990 novel about a 15^th century chess painting, The Flanders Panel. (Nov. 1) 

This elegiac novel from the two-time Pulitzer finalist (The Sweet Hereafter, Cloudsplitter) is being called his best work in years. It’s about a man who, in 1971, recorded for posterity his personal history of growing up in the early 20th century. Since he was raised in a traditional and inclusive community of Shakers near what would later become Disney World, it allows Banks, 82, to contrast tolerance with discriminatory labour politics, and make the telling of this life story into a portrait of America. (Nov. 8)

Critics and authors like Ann Cleeves are raving about the first book in a new crime series from Denver-based Khan, a British-born Canadian human rights lawyer who specializes in military intervention and war crimes in the Balkans. When the body of a missing young Syrian refugee is found nailed to the door of a mosque in a posh fictional Colorado suburb, it sparks an investigation into other disappearances of girls from immigrant backgrounds. The thought-provoking novel explores the rise and fall-out of fear, prejudice and police corruption in a contemporary multicultural community. (Nov. 8)

You don’t expect a story set over the course of a friend’s hospice death to be so funny, but that’s part of what makes Newman’s novel a buzz-worthy book. Edith and Ashley have been best friends for most of their lives; “Edi’s memory is like the backup hard drive for mine,” is how Ash puts it as she spends her days trying to keep her messy life together while caring for Edi, who’s dying of ovarian cancer. Dedicated to the author’s own late best friend, this novel full of life celebrates longtime female friendship and captures the joy, happiness and bewildering grief of life’s final moments — with lots of laughter as you read through tears. (Nov. 8)

Those who can pry themselves away from Lesley Manville’s magnetic performance in Magpie Murders (the TV adaptation of the prolific British writer and producer’s  engrossing 2016 novel) will be rewarded with another ingenious puzzle, and it’s full of the flavour of London’s West End theatre scene. The twist? This whodunit is set in a meta-fictional universe where playwright Anthony Horowitz, the narrator and an amateur sleuth, is the prime suspect in the murder of a critic who wrote a harsh opening-night review. (Nov. 15)

Beloved British journalist and author India Knight is back with a modern reimagining of The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford’s masterpiece of aristocratic Englishness. As in the original 1945 comedy of manners, the impetuous decisions of flighty Linda Radlett are narrated by her cousin Fran, who’s been sent to live with her eccentric relations at their sprawling Norfolk farmhouse. Add the avant-garde fashion designer and next-door neighbour Lord Merlin to the mix (played by Fleabag’s hot priest Andrew Scott in last year’s BBC adaptation of the novel) and sardonic Mitfordian mischief ensues. (Nov. 29)

There are enough private B.C.-island compounds and super yachts to call this page-turner, rooted in the corrupting power of greed, the Canadian Succession-meets-Sackler dynasty drama. The wealthy brothers in the Toronto-based novelist and screenwriter’s latest book coax their estranged sister into doing whatever it takes to help (actually, prevent) their father, an ailing business mogul, from marrying his much-younger nurse and disinheriting them. Their sister had long ago disavowed the family and fortune built on corrupt business practices in order to lead a life of altruism and care for her disabled daughter, Lily. But as this gripping literary suspense novel shows, whoever coined the expression “wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice” never met a rapacious heir. (Nov. 29)

In the 18th instalment of the bestselling Canadian writer’s crime series, it’s spring in the beloved fictional Quebec village of Three Pines (murder capital of Canada!) and the winter thaw has revealed many things buried and forgotten – including old memories. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and longtime colleague Jean-Guy Beauvoir must urgently revisit details of the tragic homicide that brought them together to solve their first case. As ever, what the Quebec-based author crafts is less a procedural and more a character study probing the contours of human nature, empathy and morality. (Nov. 29)