Pick up a good book: New reads coming out this fall to entertain, inform, spark the imagination

Fall's cooling balm is upon us, bringing with it slightly more moderate warm days, shorter daylight hours and, for book lovers, newfound inspiration to curl up with a fine read.

The array of new books for this fall is vast, of course, and anyone who thought thought books were about to be a rarer art form has only to see the flurry of activity for the new J.K. Rowling book, "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," to be set right on that matter.

People love books and, as long as the imagination and thirst for an engaging story are alive within us, they will likely always be cherished. Storytelling is almost as old as we are, and the book meets that need for stories to stir our souls.

Here are a few of the books on tap this autumn that may make some noise in the imaginations of readers:

 

Nathan Hill, "The Nix"-A novel that's received praise from no less than John Irving, "The Nix" combines several intriguing elements: a mother-son story, political upheaval, the Internet age and a family's hidden history sprawled over 640 pages.

 

John Grisham, "The Whistler"-Bestselling attorney-turned-author John Grisham, born in Arkansas, is back with a new tale involving the legal realm-judicial impropriety, specifically, regarding a casino on Native American-owned land, with a disbarred lawyer, a judicial conduct investigator and even the mafia all tangled up in the plot.

 

Nicholas Sparks, "Two by Two"-A successful ad exec must negotiate his new life when he loses all that gave him a firm footing in the world in this new novel from Sparks, author of "The Notebook," his first of many bestselling volumes.

 

James Dashner, "The Fever Code"-Next up as a prequel for "The Maze Runner" series from Dashner is this novel. Dashner is a wildly popular young adult speculative fiction author. "The Maze Runner" series has spawned two dystopian sci-fi films so far with a third on the way in 2018.

 

Janet Evanovich, "Turbo Twenty-three"-Hijacked bourbon and playing sleuth at an ice cream factory are just some of the plot twists in Evanovich's latest page-turner about her favorite bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum.

 

Margaret Atwood, "Hag-Seed"-The celebrated Canadian author returns with her special twist on Shakespeare's wondrous play "The Tempest," a tale that drops a down-on-his-luck theater director into prison for a job: teaching drama.

 

Michael Chabon, "Moonglow"-The Pulitzer Prize winner returns with a new novel, billed as an existential "speculative autobiography," according to Chabon's Website, stories arising from a grandfather's deathbed tales.

 

Zadie Smith, "Swing Time"-The critically-acclaimed British author takes the reader from London to West Africa in this novel about two friends, both of whom dream of becoming dancers, who grow apart as they age into young adulthood. Smith, whose accolades include the Orange Prize for Fiction, was raised by an English father and Jamaican mother.

 

Bruce Springsteen, "Born to Run"-The Boss tells his story in this musical memoir.

 

Cathy O'Neil, "Weapons of Math Destruction"-Harvard-educated data scientist Cathy O'Neil explores the downside of Big Data's mathematical models that affect our everyday lives, from loan applications to assessing students, and the unfairness built into their use.

 

Elizabeth Letts, "The Perfect Horse"-Subtitled "The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis," this dramatic tale explores the real-life rescue mission to save the purebred horses Hitler snatched in order to build a master race of horses.

 

Neil DeGrasse, Michael A. Strauss and J. Richard Gott, "Welcome to the Universe: An Astrophysical Tour"-Three top astrophysicists take readers on a galactic thrill-ride through the cosmos, tackling such celestial subjects as the life of stars, an expanding universe and possible extraterrestrial life.

 

T.C. Boyle, "The Terranauts"-Employing three first-person narrators, acclaimed novelist Boyle spins a yarn set in the Arizona desert about an enclosed ecosystem and the attempt to sustain life and order inside of it by eight scientists chosen to live inside the compound.

 

Jonathan Lethem, "A Gambler's Anatomy"-Backgammon dynamo Bruno Alexander's takes his talents across the globe until his luck runs cold in this tale from the author of the great "The Fortress of Solitude," leading Bruno to face a few existential questions.

 

Margot Lee Shetterly, "Hidden Figures"-Subtitled "The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race," this is Shetterly's non-fiction account of African-American women who who did critical work at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory during the Jim Crow era.