October is perhaps the most anticipated month of the 2024 editorial calendar. The reason is simple: there are a number of highly anticipated novels coming out – the superlative is a must – which will make it difficult for even the most resolute reader to make choices. in the library. The prize for most awaited novel rightfully goes to The city and its uncertain walls by Haruki Murakami, the most Western of oriental writers, the most important Japanese author of contemporary fiction, who returns to fuel the expectations of his readers after five years of absence from the publishing scene. It does so with a summer love story, a story that navigates between dreamlike and surreal atmospheres, which explores lost time and regret.

The final part of also arrives in bookstores Septologyan unprecedented world-work by 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse. With A new namethe Norwegian author thus lowers the curtain on his personal exploration of the human condition on an all-round reflection on the human being and on what he is capable of feeling within himself. The Egyptian writer André Aciman also stops in Italy, to be precise in the capital, with his A sentimental education (Guanda), an intimate and at times ironic memoir, in which he opens a window on his eccentric family, offering a gallery of perfectly delineated portraits and allowing a living and pulsating Rome to emerge.

Among Fazi’s most interesting proposals it stands out The insatiable by AK Blakemore, true story of a man tormented by an insatiable hunger in revolutionary France. A novel characterized by stylistic and narrative elegance, unanimously recognized as one of the best books of the year in England. After the great success of The eighth life And The missing lightthe latest work by Nino Haratischwili will be released by Marsilio, The cat and the general. The Georgian writer returns to look into the abyss that lie beneath the rubble of the Soviet empire: in a story full of tension, she tells of the war on the field and in people’s minds, of crime and punishment, and of the desire for peace and redemption.

Adelphi enriches its large catalog of works written by Shirley Jackson by publishing The road beyond the wallwhich appeared for the first time in 1948 but remained unpublished in Italy. It is set in a fictional town in the United States, inhabited mainly by women, as men are forced to move to San Francisco to work. In one of her first tests as a narrator, Jackson appears already armed with her sharpest tools: irony and jaunty humour, with which she clearly portrays the poisoned climate that envelops and imbues all the characters in her novel. Beloved by the public for her Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (entered the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the 21st century), Nord publishes Gabrielle Zevin’s latest novel Elsewherean original modern fairy tale that investigates with profound delicacy the meaning of love and loss, a novel that transcends genres and categories, a true contemporary classic.

The month of October closes – it will be released on the 22nd – another highly anticipated novel, Resolution by Irvine Welsh, the most important author of the so-called ‘chemical generation’. This is the last chapter of the series started with Crimein which the Scottish writer once again gives voice to the obsession of his protagonist, the former detective Ray Lennox, with the search for and punishment of the guilty, whatever the cost. Lennox, determined to overcome his darkest days.

The city and its uncertain walls (Einaudi)

(Haruki Murakami; release date October 1). Seventeen years old for him, sixteen for her, first love, the time of an unforgettable summer. Between walks along the river or by the sea, hopes whispered on a bench and dreams entrusted to the lines of a letter, she tells him of a city surrounded by high walls: stone bridges, the watchtower, a clock without hands , a library.

“The real me lives there”, the girl tells him, and there he will be the Reader of dreams. Then, suddenly, she disappears. The key to finding her is that city. But only those who desire it with all their heart will be able to overcome its walls.

A new name (The Ship of Theseus)

(Jon Fosse; release date October 1). Asle is an elderly, widowed painter who lives alone on the south-west coast of Norway. In nearby Bjørgvin another Asle, also a painter, lies in hospital, consumed by alcoholism. But the two Asle are nothing more than two sides of the same coin, distant but similar versions of the same person, of the same life, of the same being grappling with insistent and tormented existential questions.

In the novel that closes the cycle of Septology by Jon Fosse we follow, on a journey back in time, the lives of the two Asles: the narrator meets his lifelong love, Ales, joins the Catholic Church and begins to earn a living trying to paint the darkly colored images that are imprinted in his mind.

A sentimental education (Guanda)

(André Aciman; release date October 1). Driven by President Nasser’s growing hostility towards the Jews, in 1966 André Aciman’s family was forced to leave Alexandria, Egypt, abandoning their wealth and comfortable life. Waiting for them at the pier in Naples is the irascible and stingy Uncle Aaron, who has lived in Rome for years and who rents them an unlikely apartment in a working-class neighborhood. Money is tight and sixteen-year-old André must attend a school at the other end of the city with his brother, which forces them to take very long bus rides in the early morning.

Thus begins Aciman’s Roman year, a complex year full of new sensations, characterized by the shame felt towards his companions for the Spartan living conditions, by escapes to the library and to his own bedroom to immerse himself in the pages of novels, by the discovery of body and love, from nostalgia for Egypt and uncertainties about the future. But in Rome starting to feel at home isn’t that difficult. It will be a letter from Hunter College in New York that will mix the cards on the table again, and will finally take the author where he had always dreamed.

The insatiable (Fazi)

(AK Blakemore; release date October 1). The young Tarare, less than thirty years old and already on his deathbed, tells his life story to the nun who assists him. There is a lot said about him, it seems that he ate all sorts of creatures: objects, animals, even a little girl. The bastard son of a young unmarried woman, he was orphaned by his father the day he was born. To support him, the mother is forced to prostitute herself, and does so before his eyes. This is how he grows up, Tarare, and when he is a boy his mother’s new partner kicks him out of the house.

Thus begins his long, desperate wandering around France, which will see him join a gang of thieves to become a freak with his binges, then join the revolutionary troops in the hope of being fed, until he becomes a spy who ingests secret messages to take them behind enemy lines. His insatiable, boundless, monstrous appetite will never abandon him: eternal outcast, unwanted, desperate, his is nothing other than hunger for love. A love he will never find.

The cat and the general (Marsilio)

(Nino Haratischwili; release date October 8). In December 1994, a troop of the armed forces of the Russian Federation is stationed in a small Muslim village in the Caucasus, with the aim of appeasing Chechen separatists. From that village, where the clans reign supreme and the war threatens to crush any hope of freedom, Nura dreams of escaping. She’s seventeen, and she’s beautiful. One night, before the eyes of a young soldier, witness and perhaps accomplice, the Chechen girl is the victim of ferocious violence.

Twenty years later, that idealistic, literature-loving soldier has become the General, a hard-hearted, iron-fisted man who has risen through the ranks of Russian society to become a wealthy oligarch. When he meets the Gatta, the stage name of an actress of Georgian origin who awakens the image of Nura in him, the General thinks he can restore balance to an affair that has marked his life and thus silence the memory of the cruelest of all nights. The moment of reckoning has arrived.

The road beyond the wall (Adelphi)

(Shirley Jackson; release date October 8). The whole story takes place in the imaginary town of Cabrillo, in a typical street of the American suburbs still inhabited – it is 1936 – by a Wasp majority (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) who do not give up on the arrival of the invaders: Catholics, Jews, Chinese. And it takes place almost entirely in the absence of the men, who are forced to move to nearby San Francisco for work.

Of the women who live on Pepper Street, Shirley Jackson penetrates the thoughts and habits as only she can; and penetrates homes, cleverly deciphering the code of furnishing and garden care. In fact, the sunny facade veils the daily horror and dark secrets: infidelities, racial prejudices, morbid malignancies, tensions ready to explode – and which will explode on time.

Elsewhere (North)

(Gabrielle Zevin; release date October 8). Liz doesn’t know how she ended up in Elsewhere. She only knows that she can no longer go back and is therefore forced to stay in that strange place made up of white beaches, elegant buildings, crowded shops; a place where she knows no one and where no one can get sick, or grow old, or die. And the reason is simple: they are already dead. Just like Liz, who was in a car accident. Now she too will follow the fate of all the other inhabitants of Elsewhere, becoming younger and younger, until she becomes a newborn again, ready to be sent back to Earth.

The three ladies of the kiosk in Tokyo (Garzanti)

(Areno Inoue; release date October 15). In the Shibuya district, numerous workers cross the large crossroads of two of Tokyo’s largest streets, walking with their heads down and at a fast pace. But there is a little corner where everyone slows down, attracted by the intoxicating smell of fresh noodles and fried rice. In that corner there is the kiosk of three ladies, Koko, Matsuko and Ikako.

For years they have been cooking non-stop because they are convinced that the right recipe can help customers who are looking for something more than a hot meal. They argue that the right ingredients can bring people back to their past and give them a key to turning the present around for the better. For them it is a mission, perhaps because the three cooks also feel a great sadness on their shoulders. But the arrival of the young courier Susumo, with a kind look, changes everything. Finally it’s their turn to taste the flavors that can untie the knots of regret and lighten the weight of memories.

Resolution (Guanda)

(Irvine Welsh; release date October 22). Former detective Ray Lennox, determined to overcome his darkest days, has abandoned Edinburgh once and for all to move to Brighton. Before long, his addictions and obsessions gave way to a new lifestyle. However, everything is destined to change again.

The meeting with Mathew Cardingworth, an elegant, charismatic and respectable successful industrialist, awakens in Lennox silent memories that have haunted him for decades, dragging him into a spiral of anger and frustration. Nothing is really as it seems, and as old truths resurface they inevitably bring new consequences. What links Cardingworth to the disappearance of a group of foster children, and what connection is there between this strange character and the terrible violence Lennox suffered as a child?