Want to get the latest book news delivered to your inbox each day? Sign up for our daily Book Pulse newsletter.

Big Books of the Week

Dirty Thirty by Janet Evanovich (Atria) leads holds this week.

Other titles in demand include:

Absolution by Alice McDermott (Farrar)

From a Far and Lovely Country by Alexander McCall Smith (Pantheon)

Being Henry: The Fonz…and Beyond by Henry Winkler (Celadon)

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due (Gallery/Saga; LJ starred review)

These books and others publishing the week of October 30, 2023, are listed in a downloadable spreadsheet.

Book Clubs, Booklists & Remembering Matthew Perry

Beloved actor Matthew Perry has died at the age of 54. NYT has an obituary, an appraisal, reactions, and a list of his best performances. Perry published his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (Flatiron), last year. 

Jenna Bush Hager chooses The Sun Sets in Singapore by Kehinde Fadipe (Grand Central) as her November book club pick.

Slate offers a reading list for understanding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Foreign Policy also has a list. PopSugar shares “11 Books and Films About Israel and Palestine, Recommended by Scholars.” And The Atlantic’s “Books Briefing” recommends 10 books to read about Israel and Palestine.

Publishers Weekly releases its list of the best books of 2023. 

AudioFile names October’s best audiobooks.

Librarians and Booksellers Suggest

Three Indie Next picks publish this week:

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due (Gallery/Saga; LJ starred review)

“The Reformatory had me on the edge of my seat, in sheer terror throughout. While there are definitely ghosts in this one, it’s not the ghosts that’ll scare you—it’s the living. Fenton Haddock is a character that will haunt your dreams.”—John Cauley, The Doylestown & Lahaska Bookshops, Doylestown, PA

Being Henry: The Fonz…and Beyond by Henry Winkler (Celadon)

“I adore Henry Winkler. Loved him as the Fonz, love his books for dyslexic readers, and I have loved his other roles. I’ll probably never get to sit in a diner booth as Henry talks about his life over a cup of coffee. Being Henry is the next best thing.”—Mary O'Malley, Skylark Bookshop, Columbia, MO

The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters (Catapult)

“A wonderful debut about a missing Indigenous child and the parallel lives of two families—from the loss that echoes through the lives of the berry pickers, to a rancid secret that erodes the other family. A tender, compelling novel.”—Keith Vient, Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington, DC

In the Media

People’s book of the week is Absolution by Alice McDermott (Farrar). Also getting attention are The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl (Spiegel & Grau) and The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters (Catapult). Mindy Kaling, who now has her own imprint, Mindy’s Book Studio, shares her recommendations: Sphere by Michael Crichton (Harper), White Teeth by Zadie Smith (Vintage), The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (Mariner), and The Pelican Brief by John Grisham (Doubleday). 

The “Picks” section spotlights Pain Hustlers, based on Pain Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup by Evan Hughes (originally published as The Hard Sell), on Netflix.There is a feature on Henry Winkler and his new memoir, Being Henry: The Fonz…and Beyond (Celadon). Plus, recipes from JJ Johnson, The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table, written with Danica Novgorodoff (Flatiron), and Aarti Sequeira, Unwind: A Devotional Cookbook for the Harried & Hungry (DaySpring). 

Reviews

NYT reviews The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters (Catapult): “But if plot is not Peters’s strength, she excels in writing characters for whom we can’t help rooting”; A City on Mars : Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? By Kelly Weinersmith & Zach Weinersmith (Penguin Pr.): “This book will make you happy to live on this planet—a good thing, because you’re not leaving anytime soon”; and Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel (Callaway Arts & Entertainment; LJ starred review): “In a way, the book enshrines a history that Dylan has already slipped away from, a history where he’s determined not to get trapped.”

The Guardian reviews Baumgartner by Paul Auster (Atlantic Monthly Pr.): “Auster’s turbo-charged kickstart ultimately takes us on a ride without destination—yet who would blame him?”

NPR offers a paired review of Madonna: A Rebel Life by Mary Gabriel (Little, Brown; LJ starred review)—“We still only know what Madonna wants us to know about her, and when—and it’s always on her terms”—and The Woman in Me by Britney Spears (Gallery)—“Readers will come away with a much more profound understanding of both Spears’s fragility and the fierceness that has carried her through.”

Washington Post reviews George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle by Philip Norman (Scribner): “What is it then? Mostly a dutiful recounting of the life of a poor but happy kid who loved rock-and-roll with a purity that precluded the need to get famous and whose response to becoming one of the four most celebrated people on the planet turned him into a seeker and a churl, a mystic and a misogynist.”

Briefly Noted

NYT Magazine has a feature profile on National Book Award winning author Sigrid Nunez, whose latest novel, The Vulnerables (Riverhead), publishes next week.

Italian artist Mara Cerri writes about how she adapted Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend into a graphic novel, at Washington Post. 

Grace Elizabeth Hale discusses her new book, In the Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning (Little, Brown), with LA Times. 

NYT recommends two books for a mental vacation: Madeleine L'Engle’s A Circle of Quiet (Harper One) and Julie Orringer’s How To Breathe Underwater (Vintage).

The New Yorker deciphers “What Britney Spears’s Memoir Has to Say.”

CrimeReads suggests 10 new books for the week.

NPR recommends 5 new YA ghost stories. 

FoxNews highlights “18 must-read classic books.”

LitHub lists the best book covers of the month and 25 paperback releases this month. 

Authors on Air

CBS Sunday Mornings interviews Pidgeon Pagonis, author of Nobody Needs To Know (TOPPLE Books & Little A), about being intersex and shares an excerpt from her book. 

Jeanette Winterson discusses her latest book, Night Side of the River (Atlantic Monthly), with NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. 

NPR’s All Things Considered highlights a conversation with violinist Natalie Hodges, author of Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance And The Science Of Time (Bellevue Literary), about performance anxiety, on Back from Broken podcast.

Want to get the latest book news delivered to your inbox each day? Sign up for our daily Book Pulse newsletter.