Fill your Amazon wish list now..

The Washington Post has a review of Fall books for your anticipatory pleasure. Among the forthcoming delights:

Dan Simmons The Terror. Man, oh man, oh man, am I psyched for this. First Dan Simmons can really write and he can tell a great story. He has great base material, in this case the real life disappearance of the Terror and Erebus. These two ships left England in the 1850s to try and find the Northwest passage. The ships disappeared north of Canada. Some corpses were later found but the deaths remain a mystery (read more here.) Simmons takes this interesting story and add some sort of horrible Arctic beastie come to get the poor adventurers. Oooo, I am excited, excited, excited. Here is the first chapter if you are desperate.

Margaret Atwood: Moral Disorder and other stories. A set of linked stories involving a 20th century Canadian family. Not much to go one, but I've really liked her recent work, so I have no reason to doubt this one.

Robert Harris: Imperium. Harris goes back to the well of ancient Rome following the improbably good Pompeii. Why improbable? Anyone who reads books (in English) knows what happened at Pompeii, so its great he managed to make it so tense and exciting. This one is about Cicero and the decadent late Republic period.

Thomas Mullen: Last Town on Earth. Hmmm, this is a maybe as it is first novel, but the subject is interesting. A small Pac NW town closes off the outside world to avoid the 1918 Spanish flu. Then it gets in. Like I said, maybe.

William Boyd: Restless. Another maybe. Boyd wrote one of my favorite novels ever (Any Human Heart) and had written a number of Graham Greene-esque novels of Western follies in the Third World. Here Boyd crosses a bit into Furst territory with a modern woman learning her aunt was a minor figure in the spy world of the 1930s. Could be good.

Murder in Amsterdam: Ian Buruma. This one will have the chattering classes talking overtime. It concerns the murder of Theo Van Gogh, who made a movie that criticized Islam. So someone killed him for it. The book explores whether a hyper-tolerant nation (Holland) can live with an intolerant subculture (militant Islam) that is willing to use violence. As I said, should get people talking.

There is lots more on the list, I just picked some that jumped out at me.