10 books you should read in October, including David Bowie's Moonage Daydream and William Shatner's Boldly Go

In the America imagined by Celeste Ng in Our Missing Hearts, the “Preserving American Culture and Traditions” Act is the chilling law of the land, installed after the Crisis, a devastating era credulously blamed on China. Unpatriotic books are destroyed; teaching actual American history is disallowed. Asian Americans face prejudice and violence, and all parents pay a steep price for resistance: Voice dissent, and the government takes away your kids—the so-called missing hearts. Twelve-year-old Bird last saw his poet mom three years ago, after her writing was co-opted as an anti-PACT rallying cry. Now an unexpected message sets Bird on a dangerous quest to find her outlawed book—and then to find her. Ng’s previous novel was the twisty, bestselling , the basis for the Reese Witherspoon . It’s easy to envision Our Missing Hearts—bold, powerful, and timely—soon making its way to the screen.

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s Nights Of Plague is a deeply detailed work of historical fiction, one he began writing years before Covid. The setting is imaginary—Mingheria, a Christian- and Muslim-populated island in the shrinking Ottoman empire of 1901—but the hallmarks of a deadly outbreak ring true: the slow and inept government response; the rumors taken as fact; the deep suspicion of science. And the seemingly impossible task of getting everyone to agree on best steps, much less take them. “Quarantine is a labor of unity and collaboration,” insists Bonkowski, the sultan’s scientist charged with containing the disease in Mingheria. Optimistic that people will abide by restrictions for the sake of public safety, naive Bonkowski is quickly assassinated, accused of bringing disease to the island. The search for the truth behind the murder, along with Mingheria’s fight for survival, carries the narrative through nearly 700 pages. (For his efforts, Pamuk remains under investigation in his native Turkey, accused of insulting Kemal Atatürk and the Turkish flag in​​ Nights Of Plague. Politics is its own kind of pestilence.)

Bowie fans, rejoice: Moonage Daydream is back in print. Two anniversaries are in play for this reissue: It’s been 50 years since ’s album The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, and 20 years since the original U.K. publication of Moonage Daydream, the vault-opening, limited-edition collab between Bowie and photographer Mick Rock. Chronicling the Ziggy era, or more specifically, as Bowie put it, “the UK/US Stardust times,” Daydream showcases Bowie’s comments as sparked by hundreds of Rock’s tour, promo, and backstage images. Peppered throughout are hand-written pages, typed tour schedules, show posters, and other ephemera. Among broader tour memories and anecdotes of fellow rockers (Elton John, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and more) are fine-grain details like some inspirations behind Bowie’s alter ego: Daniela Parmar and a Kansai Yamamoto model (for Ziggy’s iconic red, cropped hairstyle), Samantha in Bewitched (for his anchor-symbol face-art in the “John, I’m Only Dancing” video), painter Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (for the composition for a print ad). Don’t fake it, baby—lay the real thing on me.

You may know from t, or , or the Twitterverse’s enraged reaction to her 2019 tweets about FOTB’s unexpected sixth-season renewal. (She’d been planning to start other projects and was upset at the thought of missing out on them.) The drove her to her fifth-floor balcony, where she became frightened of what she might do; a friend found her and got her to a hospital. This is the incident most readers will be aware of, but Wu doesn’t linger on it in her memoir (“I never actually wanted to kill myself”), and instead focuses on growing and moving past it. From her childhood in Virginia to her Hollywood success, Wu shares the stories that made her her, including how she finally stood up to a handsy producer, though she never reported his behavior (which she regrets). She’s open about sex, even when it comes to difficult memories. Wu is a smart and entertaining writer, but gossip hounds may starve; she doesn’t name names, or she changes them, unless the story is positive. (Randall Park sounds like a pretty nice human, by the way.)

Depending on how generous you are with the definition of memoir, this might be Shatner’s ninth autobiographical outing. At 91, the Star Trek actor is still hungry for more adventures, more outlets to express himself—and more work. (He hosts a History show, recently dropped another spoken-word album, and is writing lyrics for his next.) Shatner delivers on his subtitle, offering musings about nature (and his deep regret at having hunted for sport), the beauty of life, and … the erotic energy of toasted rye bread. The man is nothing if not in touch with his emotions. He recalls how last year he rode Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to the edge of space; the sight of the vast, cold expanse filled him with unexpected dread and moved him to tears. Another recollection delivers on the title’s unintentional promise of going, boldly: Midway through the premiere of his one-man show in 2012, he shat(nered?) his pants. Quickly announcing a “technical difficulty,” he ran offstage, changed, then stepped back into the spotlight to finish his show, a testament to his work ethic. Not all the material here is fresh, but much of it is fun.An aside for fans of celeb memoirs: This month has a pre-holiday bumper crop. Besides Shatner and Wu, there are titles from Jemele Hill, Tom Felton, Ralph Macchio, Geena Davis, Sam Heughan, and Chelsea Manning, as well as posthumous fare from Paul Newman and Alan Rickman.

Prize-winning poet Maya Phillips is a critic at large for The New York Times; in that role, she most frequently covers theater. But in Nerd, a collection of thought-provoking and often personal essays, Phillips dives deep into thoughtful analysis of pop culture and fandom—Saturday morning cartoons, , shojo , and more. She is an inveterate and passionate fan, consuming broadly and gleefully, dropping references to and in the same breath. Her enthusiasm is contagious and her erudition illuminating, on topics including the difficulty of finding Black spaces in fantasy and sci-fi; self-discovery and identity-building in fan communities; and the superhero-boom-based evolution of convention culture. For most folks, Nerd will likely put some cool new-to-you titles on your radar.

Redheaded Damon Fields, nicknamed Demon Copperhead, hails from a dirt-poor holler in southwest Virginia, where adulthood comes awfully early for the poor kids. From the outset, it’s a hard-knock life for Demon: dead dad, addict teen mother, abusive stepdad, then foster-care homes that are at best uncaring and at worst abusive. He sets out to save himself by finding extended family, and later by excelling at high school football, but after an injury leads to pills, neither strategy works out the way he hopes. Folksy but never cheesy, Kingsolver’s lyrical prose brings to life an under-examined corner of the country in this coming-of-age tale. And if it rings a bell, your literary antennae are well-tuned: Kingsolver adapted much of the plot from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (even the cover nods to it).

If you’re a literature lover who also likes to laugh, pop this gem into your online cart right now (along with Baking With Kafka from 2017). Revenge Of The Librarians is a collection of single-page, color, usually multi-panel cartoons that take on all things literary-related, from first drafts and book fests to critics and font selection. (The London-based Gauld’s work appears weekly in The Guardian’s Books section, where these comics first ran.) With dry humor and his unmistakable drawing style, Gauld jokes about genre, Jane Austen openers, poetry police, a Samuel Beckett advent calendar (behind one of the doors: darkness), summer reading suggestions for conspiracy fans (including Across The World In Eighty Days), and plenty more. A true treat for readers.

He’s written a children’s book, reportage, essays, novellas, and a Booker Prize–winning novel, but short stories are ’ sweet spot. Liberation Day, his fifth collection, includes nine stories (five previously published in The New Yorker); the title story is a powerhouse, but they all pack mean emotional punches. A recurring theme (“Liberation Day,” “Ghoul,” “Elliott Spencer,” and to some degree “A Thing At Work”) is the exploitation of people in service of capitalism or private interests. Both deep sincerity and dark humor are on display throughout. “I guess one never realizes how little one wants to be kicked to death until one hears a crowd doing that exact same thing to someone nearby,” says the protagonist of “Ghoul” (the setting: a theme-park-like environment—classic Saunders). 

It’s the day of the annual Ghost Festival in central Taiwan’s rural Yongjing, when spirits return home from the land of the dead. Very much alive but also returning to Yongjing is Keith, who long ago fled his parents’ rigid, traditional expectations by moving to Europe, though he has spent the last decade in German prison for killing his partner. Newly freed, he is nevertheless a captive of his past. A harsh, loveless upbringing haunts him and his siblings; of seven kids, six were unwanted: the first five because they were girls, the youngest, Keith, because he was gay. Keith’s return is the structural backbone, but author Kevin Chen gives voice to the whole family, living members as well as dead, dropping hints at surprising skeletons in the closet as he slowly, mesmerizingly reveals the family’s secrets, as well as the agonizing circumstances of Keith’s crime.