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.”