Cozy up with this list of fall’s top paperbacks

There’s something about a crisp fall day that just makes you want to curl up in an armchair and read a good book, right? (Preferably, as is often the case at my house, with a purring cat squeezed in next to you.) Here are some fall reading ideas from the season’s new crop of fiction paperbacks, perhaps destined for an armchair near you.

• “Harbour Street,” by Ann Cleeves (Minotaur Books, $16.99). This tale of a murder investigation during the holidays is the sixth installment in Cleeves’ popular British mystery series featuring D.I. Vera Stanhope. It’s the inspiration for the television series “Vera” starring Brenda Blethyn and airing on PBS.

• “Fates and Furies” by Lauren Groff (Penguin, $16). Groff’s third novel, a National Book Award finalist, is the story of a marriage, told from the point of view of husband Lotto, then from that of wife Mathilde. President Obama named it as his favorite book of 2015; in a Seattle Times review, Misha Berson called it “one of the most absorbing, intimate accounts of a modern marriage I’ve read in a good while.”

• “The Past” by Tessa Hadley (Harper Perennial, $15.99). A quartet of adult siblings, with various family members, gather at a crumbling seaside home in Somerset once owned by their grandparents. Reviewing the book last winter, I was struck by Hadley’s soft, delicate prose, and by the way that manse came to life on the page: “close the pages of ‘The Past’ and you can picture the house, smelling its faint dampness and reading the stories in its weary walls.”

• “Thirteen Ways of Looking” by Colum McCann (Random House, $16). The ever-dazzling Irish author of “Let the Great World Spin” returns with a collection of short fiction. In my Seattle Times review last fall, I admired McCann’s eloquent wordplay, particularly in the wondrously meandering yet deeply moving title story of, seemingly, an ordinary day.

• “So You Don’t Get Lost In the Neighborhood” by Patrick Modiano (Mariner Books, $14.95). Should you wish to get a taste of French writer Modiano, who won the Nobel Prize in literature for 2014, this slim suspense novel might be a good start. The Los Angeles Times notes that it begins with a Stendhal epigraph — “I cannot provide the reality of events, I can only convey their shadow” — that is “an almost perfect evocation of the book, not to mention Modiano’s career.”

• “Under the Udala Trees” by Chinelo Okparanta (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $14.95). In her first novel, Okparanta tells a story of a young gay woman named Ijeoma coming of age in Nigeria, where she must hide her true self. The New York Times notes Okparanta uses few stylistic flourishes, preferring “to step aside and allow Ijeoma to plainly tell her story, giving the novel an intimate feel.”