Christmas hits Reykjavik hard. Shop windows blaze, fake trees blink everywhere, and Santa impersonators are working overtime. Except for one hotel Santa—found dead in the basement, half-dressed with a knife through his chest. Enter Erlendur, looking as cheerful as you'd expect. This Icelandic noir wraps murder in holiday lights and doesn't apologize for it.

There's this brutal moment when you watch your parents age. You see their weakness, their vulnerability, their bodies failing them. It's a preview of what's coming—their inevitable disappearance. Fontanel captures this with zero sentimentality. This fall release cuts straight to the bone of what it means to grow up while watching those who raised you grow old.

The title references Biafra's flag—that short-lived African nation I mostly associate with famine images. You know, those first televised pictures of starving Black children with swollen bellies and flies. Adichie goes way deeper than those images. She gives voice to the war, the people, the devastation. This isn't history at a distance. It's visceral.

Every year I do this roundup. All the books I've tackled from this fall's literary flood. French titles, international ones, the whole mess. Some hit hard, others miss completely. Here's what I made it through this season—the good, the overrated, and everything between.

Corrigan, tiny mining town in Australia, 1960s. Hot summer night, two teenagers stumble upon a classmate's body hanging from a eucalyptus tree. Her face is beaten—this wasn't suicide. Silvey's debut drops you into small-town racism, teenage confusion, and murder all at once. Australian gothic done right.

Joseph Vaughan grew up in Augusta Falls, rural Georgia. When this story opens in 1939, he's twelve and just lost his father. Life's hard for him and his mother. But he's got loyal friends—Reilly Hawkins and the others. Ellory builds a Southern gothic that spans decades, where childhood innocence collides with adult darkness.

Mountain village, somewhere near a border. Brodeck has lived here his whole life. Now the villagers want him—minor bureaucrat that he is—to write a report about something terrible. One angry night, they committed an act they can't take back. Claudel writes about collective guilt, wartime trauma, and how ordinary people become monsters.

New York, 1916. Every day men descend underground to dig what will become the subway connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn. Irish, Italian, Polish—they come from everywhere. Nathan Walker arrives from Georgia, bringing his own story. McCann excavates the city's foundations and the immigrant dreams that built them.

Thought I'd read everything about the Holocaust. Then Hilsenrath surprises me by telling it from the executioner's perspective. Max Schultz and Itzig Finkelstein—born the same day on the same street in a small German town. What Hilsenrath does with their stories is audacious, disturbing, unforgettable.

Summer project: excavate my reading pile. Found this collection by a mostly forgotten English humorist. All these stories take place in early 20th century English gentry. Garden parties, hunting expeditions, country estates. Saki's wit is sharp and dry as bone. Like Wilde without the melodrama.