ClutchLIT

Vanities, Books & Totes

Style and substance abound in this selection of smart bags and great fiction—befitting the season, some are scary, but all are scary good

MODEL HOME

In Rivers Solomon's haunting drama, Ezri and their sisters return to their parents' house in the gated Dallas community where they were the only Black family and where an agonizing truth about the past awaits. (MCD)

A REASON TO SEE YOU AGAIN

From Jami Attenberg, doyen of absorbing family excavations, 37 years in the life of the Cohens: a closeted patriarch, his foundering widow, their daughters, poles apart. (Ecco)

REJECTION

Obsessively readable, acerbic, Foster Wallace-inflected: In seven linked stories, Tony Tulathimutte's characters—feminist incel, zealous start-up guy, spurned woman, rejected author— fail to connect. (William Morrow)

INTERMEZZO

A chess prodigy in his early 20s and his brother, a 30-something lawyer, navigate various relationships (their own thorny one, plus complicated romances) in Sally Rooney's compelling latest. (FSG)

THE MIGHTY RED

Louise Erdrich sets her rich saga against the backdrop of the 2008 economic crash in North Dakota, where the teenage daughter of a woman trucker is set to marry a farming heir while wooed by another man. (Harper)

IN THE DISTANCE

Published in paperback by the indie Coffee House Press in 2017, Hernan Diaz's best in show of an underdog debut—a surreal Western about a Swede's adventures—appears in hardcover for the first time. (Riverhead)

BLOOD TEST

In an Ohio town beset by opioids, an insurance salesman learns that he's genetically predisposed to violent crime—and, to hilarious effect, finds himself barreling down a deadly path in Charles Baxter's tender tale. (Pantheon)

THE EMPUSIUM

Olga Tokarczuk's "Health Resort Horror Story" finds a young tuberculosis sufferer seeking treatment in the Silesian mountains, where questions of gender, class, and mysterious murders arise. (Riverhead)

Keziah Weir