This year, the sound of the publishing machine cranking back into gear after the summer hiatus echoed far and wide, with autumn's first two non-fiction big hitters – Tony Blair's A Journey and Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design – both breaking out of the literary ghetto and making the leap into the news pages.
Either book would pass the time as you wait for the next episode of Mad Men – but if the thought of spending a long winter evening in the company of our former prime minister (or, for that matter, M theory) sends you leaping for the remote, fear not: the fiction shelves are well-stocked too this autumn. You may be dimly aware that Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was published here recently (although as Franzen says, that version was an old draft; the "real" Freedom is only available as of Monday). But what else should be on your must-read list?
After missing out on the Booker in 2009, Colm Tóibín is back with a beautifully turned short story collection, The Empty Family. And Philip Roth's latest novel, Nemesis, in which he returns to Newark to tell the story of a 1944 polio epidemic, will be available from Thursday.
Another heavyweight producing perfect fireside fare, Peter Ackroyd delivers twice over: first with The Death of King Arthur, a retelling of the legend of Camelot; second with The English Ghost, a collection of ghost-sightings over the centuries.
If all of this still feels too frivolous, turn to The New Nobility, an inside look at the KGB by a pair of fearless Russian journalists, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. Charting the organisation's heyday, decline and creeping return to power, it promises to raise the hairs on your neck as effectively as Ackroyd's ghost stories. "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child" runs Corinthians 13:11. "When I became a man, I put away childish things." So it was in the King James Bible; so it is for readers, come the autumn.
