In this comprehensive list, we’ve got everything from debuts and memoirs to short story collections and highly anticipated novels. Shelbi Polk compiles books to check out this October for Shondaland

We’re ready to leave behind the sweltering heat of summer and welcome the cozy season. Essentially, it’s time to hibernate and read.

And what a selection we have coming this fall! Zadie Smith, Lauren Groff, Jesmyn Ward, and Jhumpa Lahiri are all gracing us with new work. Alongside this stunning fiction selection, we’re getting memoirs from Kerry Washington, Barbra Streisand, and Viet Thanh Nguyen!

But until things actually start cooling off, you can find me sweating in a sweater with one of these books on my lap and a mug of hot cider burning my palms.

10 | A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial

Viet Thanh Nguyen is best known for his stirring fiction, but he’s also edited story collections by refugee writers and written his own critical work on the ways that the violence manifested from the Vietnam War have been remembered in Vietnam and surrounding countries. Now we’re getting a memoir tracing Nguyen’s own journey from early childhood in Vietnam to adolescence and adulthood in the United States, couched in wider historical trends and cultural narratives around refugees. Nguyen’s life experience, decades of scholarship, and fantastic storytelling are sure to make this memoir a perspective-expanding read for many of us who were raised with a very specific understanding of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam.