Chicago - October 12, 2009

Leafing Through It

Best New Fall Reads

You threaten to up and join the circus at the mere thought of windchill. Don’t get left in the cold. Spend the fall juggling these new books.

Clown Around
In Greg Olear’s darkly funny Totally Killer, a desperate college grad lands a job at a publishing house. The catch: To keep the gig, she has to off someone.

Stand-up comedienne Elna Baker once dressed a head wound with a maxi pad while on a date and lived to tell about it in her memoir The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance.

Hire Wires
The lives of three Midwestern strangers become mysteriously intertwined when Dan Chaon blurs the real and imagined in his thriller Await Your Reply.

Garage sale addict and accidental detective Jane Wheel contends with a vintage haunted house, disappearing Halloween collectibles, and a would-be murderer who may or may not be a ghost in local author Sharon Fiffer’s Scary Stuff.

Another nail-biter, Derek Nikitas’s The Long Division (out October 27) follows a thieving housecleaner, her estranged son, and a relentless deputy on a murderous chase.

Magic Touches
Lauren Grodstein conjures the drastic steps a father takes to derail his son’s relationship with an older, unstable woman in A Friend of the Family (out November 10).

In The Kids Are All Right, four brutally honest siblings take turns telling the true story of how they were orphaned, separated, and reunited.

They all have a ring to them.

Photo: Courtesy of Amazon

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