Saturday afternoon at the library, and some upcoming picks

It's around 3pm, the crowds have started to disperse (such as they were, on this very slow Saturday of Labor Day weekend), and I've already written brief reviews of four out of five novels for my November "What We're Reading" column for NoveList. Since I'm totally incapable of reading fiction at the reference desk, it's a good time to go through the list of forthcoming historical novels and pick out some titles that look to be worth reading. (It's either that or read the scintillating letters-to-the-editor column from the local paper, which someone happened to leave behind on one of the study tables; reading them always makes me want to move back to Boston. Which would you choose?)

Last week, I went through the online catalogs from Penguin, Time Warner, and Simon & Schuster imprints, and posted blurbs for the historical novels found therein. If you haven't been to the HNS forthcoming books page in a while, you'll find some new things there.

Janice Graham's The Tailor's Daughter (which Amazon seems to be mixing up with Maggie Bennett's novel of the same name), out in October from St. Martin's, features a deaf woman in Victorian England who "sets off on a treacherous journey that will lead her into a world of deception, murder, and madness." It boasts a nice blurb from Philippa Gregory. And I know I've seen that cover image before, somewhere...

Not that it needs any more publicity than it's getting, but I've been hearing great things about Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons. I almost took it for myself to review for HNR before "reader's block" hit me, and figured I owed it to the novel to send it to someone else. Forthcoming October 3rd from Random House.

My review of Barry Unsworth's The Ruby in Her Navel is finally posted on Amazon, if you look for the Booklist mention. Also October, from Doubleday/Talese. I warned you about the major spoilers in the Publishers Weekly review, though, so beware. The novel's definitely worth reading, and no, there's not a word in my review about its taking at least 75 pages for the plot to get moving. (Which I blogged about several months ago, if anyone remembers.) Why not? Because I only had 175 words to work with, and I decided it didn't matter in the end.

Isabel Allende has a new book forthcoming in November, Ines of My Soul, a biographical novel about Chile's founding mother. I've yet to read her Zorro, but I was impressed by both Daughter of Fortune and Portrait in Sepia; among other things, they taught me that "magical realism" wasn't a literary style to be feared.

I've also been hearing very good things about Donna Gillespie's Lady of the Light, volume 2 in a series that began with The Light Bearer, which finally found an American publisher after years of being available only in German.

What novels are you looking forward to?