Something New Under the Sun: A Novel

"I was a big fan of Alexandra Kleeman’s 2016 debut You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine , which was a numbly dystopic story of obsessive friendship and consumerism. Kleeman’s new book Something New Under the Sun , freshly out, is an equally unsettling story of Hollywood development hell in a future California so racked by climate change as to resemble Hell itself. Part cli fi , part social satire, this is literary fiction with a bite, for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh and Emma Cline. I’m also excited about Ruth Ozeki’s brilliantly inventive new novel The Book of Form and Emptiness (Sept 21); Dave Eggers’ tech industry satire The Every , which is his follow-up to The Circle (Oct 21); and past Five Books interviewee Elizabeth Day ‘s latest novel Magpie (Sept 2) . Plus don’t miss the new novel from Kia Corthron, the acclaimed playwright and author of award-winning doorstopper The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter ; this latest work, The Moon and the Stars , is a coming-of-age tale see through the eyes of a biracial girl in New York in the years leading up to the American Civil War . Oh, heaps. But I’ll be quick. There’s a new novel from Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Doerr ( All the Light We Cannot See ) —another sweeping literary epic that shifts from the past (1453 Constantinople) to the present (contemporary Idaho) to the future (an interstellar voyage). Cloud Cuckoo Land is a ambitious and moving book; a “magical literary puzzle”, according to Kirkus, which would make an excellent book club choice. I’ll also be looking out for The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , the first novel by the poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, the new Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads , and We Are Not Like Them, by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza, which focuses on the aftermath of the shooting of a Black teenager in Philadelphia."