Fall is finally here, there’s a hint of an autumnal snap, and, for good or bad, the beginnings of a bookstore blockbuster or two such as Grisham or Sparks has dropped at your feet, causing you to trip and fall flat on face. Get used to it.

FICTION:

Run by Ann Patchett

As she did in her bestselling novel Bel Canto, Patchett merges seemingly dissimilar lives to show how intimately humans can connect in a work about what defines family and the lengths we will go to protect our children. When two families come together in a traffic accident during a snowstorm, and a woman has thrown herself under a car to protect a stranger. It quickly becomes clear that the families — a poor, single black mother with her 11-year-old daughter and a white, Irish Catholic, former Boston mayor with a biological son and two adopted black college-aged sons whose much-loved wife died over 20 years ago — have a connection that transcends racial factors. Run explores the depths of parents' love of their children, whether biological or adopted, and of each other.

Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

"Sometimes I think I write more about class than I do about place, anyway,” Richard Russo once said in an interview. “But the class stuff, writing about blue-collar folks, is something I've been doing right from the start ... It's a world I know pretty well, and its people seem worth talking about to me."

Now Russo, in his rewarding sixth novel, the absorbing, bittersweet, and multi-faceted Bridge of Sighs, gives as much vent to a sense of place as he does to descriptive character and "class stuff." In an assured balancing act, the author masterfully reconciles and interweaves local color and social mobility with pertinent characterization as he plays a little temporal leapfrog amongst the lives of three families as they interconnect and clash throughout a five-decade course of social and cultural history in downbeat upstate New York.