5 British Books to Look Out For in the U.S. in October

October is a huge month in UK publishing. October 3 is known as Super Thursday – the day on which more books are published than on any other in the year. 426 hardbacks launch that day, including many celebrity memoirs, in preparation for gift-giving season. Chances are you’ve heard of most, if not all, the authors I’ve listed below: they are all living legends in the UK, and all of their books are likely to fly off the shelves not only in the UK but further afield.

Who Am I, Again? by Lenny Henry (Faber & Faber, October 1, 2019, audio and ebook only)

My fellow Gen Xers know Sir Lenny Henry best as one of the founders of the charity Comic Relief, which he launched in 1985 alongside Richard Curtis, the screenwriter of Notting Hill and Love Actually fame. The charity has raised well over £1 billion since then, primarily through Red Nose Days, national TV events that makes us laugh and raise money to alleviate poverty in the UK and Africa. But before all that, Lenny Henry grew up in the Midlands with his Jamaican parents and found that his humour helped subdue racist bullying and enabled friendships and snogs – then a successful career in show business. But 1970s Britain was a complicated place for a black teenager, even a successful one – and Who Am I, Again? tells of Lenny Henry’s coming of age against that backdrop.

Grand Union by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press, October 8, 2019)

At this point, bestselling author Zadie Smith probably needs no introduction. Gary Shteyngart has called her “the best writer of our generation” and the Times Literary Supplement says that in this first collection of short stories she “is virtuosic, as ever, on family and friendship, and her ability to write about large-scale social injustice without losing her neutral novelist’s gaze is breathtaking”.