Sara Balabanlilar | Marketing Director, Brazos Bookstore | There, There by Tommy Orange

“Orange’s debut novel tells the stories of 12 Native Americans in linked segments as it leads up to their collective attendance at the Big Oakland Powwow. This book is in turns ferocious and poetic as Orange describes the breadth of Native experience: its past, present, and future, its plagues and its beauties.”

John Kwiatkowski | Event Coordinator, Murder by the Book | Past Tense by Lee Child

“The 23rd book in the Jack Reacher series. It’s such a favorite that the store owner named the store dog after the main character.”

Rich Levy | Executive Director, Inprint Houston | Washington Black by Esi Edugyan 

“This book follows the title character, George Washington Black, from the time he is an 11-year-old field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation in 1830 on his journey into adolescence, the world of science, and a kind of freedom. As always, nothing is simple. Edugyan is a terrific writer.”

Sarah Bird | Brazos Bookstore | Sept. 12

The Austin resident and 2012 Texas Literary Hall of Fame inductee launches her 10th novel, Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen, which honors the only woman to serve in the all-black U.S. Army regiment known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

Craig Johnson | Murder by the Book | Sept. 19

Western crime fiction has few better noose-tighteners than Johnson, whose wonderfully deadpan Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire inspired the eponymous A&E/Netflix series. In new offering Depth of Winter, Walt fights to rescue his daughter from a Mexican cartel.

Esi Edugyan, Meg Wolitzer | Inprint | Sept. 24

Man Booker finalist Edugyan reads from her third novel, Washington Black (see right), which grapples with the struggle for freedom against the crushing forces of slavery and colonialism. And Wolitzer digs into The Female Persuasion, her 11th novel, hailed by Kirkus as “a feminist blockbuster” for the #MeToo moment. 

Jodi Picoult | Brazos Bookstore | Oct. 6

With some 14 million copies in print, Picoult’s books have won over legions of fans touched by the author’s realism and humanity. Her 24th novel, A Spark of Light, hinges on a hostage crisis at a women’s-services clinic and the connection between a police negotiator and a patient. 

Barbara Kingsolver | Inprint | Oct. 22

The bestselling author of The Poisonwood Bible and many other acclaimed books reads from her latest novel, Unsheltered, which follows two families separated by centuries but united by a house in rural New Jersey and lives that seem to be unraveling.

Jonathan Lethem, Gary Shteyngart | Inprint | Nov. 12

In The Feral Detective, Lethem, the author of Gun, with Occasional Music and Motherless Brooklyn, conjures yet another idiosyncratic sleuth: Charles Heist, the laconic loner who scours California’s Inland Empire for his client’s missing daughter. Satirist Shteyngart, of Little Failure and Absurdistan, will read from new novel Lake Success.