As fall settles in, it's time to don your sweatshirts and sweatpants, brew a hot cup of coffee and curl up on the couch for a long weekend of reading. Autumn is the perfect opportunity to break open those books you neglected during the warm summer months, and luckily there are dozens of newly-released books to keep you entertained for the rest of the year.
We've selected 12 of the best fall fiction releases that are the perfect companion to a warm blanket and and an afternoon of relaxation.
Do you have a fall read already picked out? Let us know in the comments below.
SEE ALSO: 8 Book Recommendations From MashableReads
1. Bleeding Edge Author: Thomas Pynchon
"It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dotcom boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. With occasional excursions into the Deep Web and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channelling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the Internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we've journeyed to since." iBooks Description
2. Babayaga Author: Toby Barlow
"Will is a young American ad executive in Paris. Except his agency is a front for the CIA. Zoya is a beautiful young woman wandering les boulevards, sad-eyed, coming off a bad breakup. In fact, she impaled her ex on a spike. Add a few chance encounters, a chorus of some more angry witches, a strung-out jazzman or two, and a weaponized LSD program. But while Toby Barlow’s Babayaga may start as just a joyful romp though the City of Light, it quickly grows into a daring, moving exploration of love, mortality and responsibility." iBooks Description
3. The Goldfinch Author: Donna Tartt
"Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthralling force and acuity. It combines unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and breathtaking suspense, while plumbing with a philosopher's calm the deepest mysteries of love, identity, and art. It is a beautiful, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate." iBooks Description
4. The Affairs of Others Author: Amy Grace Loyd
"A mesmerizing debut novel about a young woman, haunted by loss, who rediscovers passion and possibility when she is drawn into the tangled lives of her neighbors. Five years after her young husband’s death, Celia Cassill has moved from one Brooklyn neighborhood to another, but she has not moved on. Celia believes in boundaries, solitude, that she has a right to her ghosts. Amy Grace Loyd investigates interior spaces of the body and the New York warrens in which her characters live, offering a startling emotional honesty about the traffic between men and women." iBooks Description
5. The Signature of Things Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
"A glorious, sweeping novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure and discovery. Exquisitely researched and told at a galloping pace, The Signature of All Things soars across the globe — from London to Peru to Philadelphia to Tahiti to Amsterdam, and beyond. Along the way, the story is peopled with unforgettable characters: missionaries, abolitionists, adventurers, astronomers, sea captains, geniuses, and the quite mad." iBooks Description
6. At Night We Walk in Circles Author: Daniel Alarcón
"Nelson’s life is not turning out the way he hoped. That is, until he lands a starring role in a touring revival of The Idiot President, a legendary play by Nelson’s hero, Henry Nunez. And that’s when the real trouble begins. Nelson’s fate is slowly revealed through the investigation of the narrator, a young man obsessed with Nelson’s story — and perhaps closer to it than he lets on. In sharp, vivid, and beautiful prose, Alarcón delivers a provocative meditation on fate, identity, and the large consequences that can result from even our smallest choices. " iBooks Description
7. The Rosie Project Author: Graeme Simsion
"Meet Don Tillman, a brilliant yet socially challenged professor of genetics, who’s decided it’s time he found a wife. And so, in the orderly, evidence-based manner with which Don approaches all things, he designs the Wife Project to find his perfect partner: a sixteen-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the drinkers, the smokers, the late arrivers. Arrestingly endearing and entirely unconventional, Graeme Simsion’s distinctive debut will resonate with anyone who has ever tenaciously gone after life or love in the face of great challenges." iBooks Description
8. Enon Author: Paul Harding
"In Enon, Harding follows a year in the life of Charlie Crosby as he tries to come to terms with a shattering personal tragedy. Grandson of George Crosby, Charlie inhabits the dynamic landscape of New England, its seasons mirroring his turbulent emotional odyssey. Along the way, Charlie’s encounters are brought to life by his wit, his insights into history, and his yearning to understand the big questions. A stunning mosaic of human experience, Enon affirms Paul Harding as one of the most gifted and profound writers of his generation." iBooks Description
9. The Circle Author: Dave Eggers
"When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. What begins as the story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge."iBooks Description
11. The Lowland Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Namesake comes an extraordinary new novel, set in both India and America, that expands the scope and range of one of our most dazzling storytellers: a tale of two brothers bound by tragedy, a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past, a country torn by revolution, and a love that lasts long past death. Masterly suspenseful, The Lowland is a work of great beauty and complex emotion; an engrossing family saga and a story steeped in history that spans generations and geographies with seamless authenticity." iBooks Description
12. At The Bottom of Everything Author: Ben Dolnick
"It’s been ten years since the 'incident,' and Adam has long since decided he’s better off without his former best friend, Thomas. But when he receives an email from Thomas’s mother begging for his help, he finds himself drawn back into his old friend’s world, and into the past he’s tried so desperately to forget. As Adam embarks upon a magnificently strange and unlikely journey, Ben Dolnick unspools a tale of spiritual reckoning, of search and escape, of longing and reaching for redemption — a tale of near hallucinatory power." iBooks Description
Reminder: As part of MashableReads, we're having Twitter chats with our fiction and non-fiction authors coming up soon, so mark the date and time in your calendars!
Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath on Oct. 21 at 5:30pm ET
Caleb Crain, Necessary Errors on Nov. 5 at 5:30pm ET
Image via iStockphoto, Antclausen