Autumn, Halloween, Samhain, Dia De Los Muertos, Spooky Season, October... Whatever you choose to call this time of year, themes of death and decay abound. Maybe the veil between worlds thins, and spirits come out to remind us of the cycle of destruction and renewal. Maybe thoughts of our ancestors occupy our minds, inviting us to reflect on the past as we prepare for the future. Maybe the cooler weather encourages us to slow down and rest after a busy summer.
Whether you're in the mood for a literary memento mori, some spine-tingling magic, or just think bones are cool, here are some books featuring skeletons and bones - some just on the cover, some on the pages - all guaranteed to keep you reading through the season.
From Publishers Weekly, "Pringle's mummy experts are livelier than a crypt full of stacked corpses. This is high praise given how successfully the author animates the dead in this delightfully macabre piece of mortuary globe-trotting... …
From the publisher, "A lively, illustrated exploration of the 500-million-year history of bone, a touchstone for understanding vertebrate life and human culture. Human bone is versatile and entirely unique: it repairs itself without…
From Library Journal, "Pattison follows the story of abrasive and methodical scientist Tim White's frequent conflict and occasional collaborations with other paleoanthropolologists as his team search out early hominid fossils in Africa.…
From Kirkus reviews: "A cheerful popular-science romp through the matter that makes up our skeleton... Switek does his duty by bone science, but his heart is in bone disease and bone culture. The best fossils (human included) contain…
As a plague ravages the Italian city of Bari in the year 1087, a Benedictine monk named Nicephorus dreams of a visitation from Saint Nicholas. Things spiral out of control from there as the abbot and city officials interpret the dream as a…
From Library Journal: "This engrossing novel, set during the gold rush years of the 1850s, begins as a gritty, unapologetic homage to pulp Westerns (with perhaps a nod to Cormac McCarthy as well). In the final pages, however, as the …
Keisha's wife Alice has been missing for so long that Alice is presumed dead. But when Keisha sees Alice in the background of a news segment, she hits the road in search of answers. Getting a job at the same trucking company Alice worked…
From Kirkus Reviews: "A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education. Max is gifted, but if you’re thinking “honors student,” think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they…
Seemingly isolated characters, including the author herself in the epilogue, tell a series of interlinking stories set during and after the 1980 Gwangju uprising in South Korea. Each perspective gradually converges over the life and death…
A young woman flounders after being expelled from her PhD program following the death of her lab partner. With nothing else to occupy her intellect, she falls into various obsessions, namely the search for a poison that is its own…
Learning a new language? Forget Duolingo and consider the invite-only total immersion program at The Centre, which uses isolation and guided meditation to guarantee full fluency in any language in just ten days. But this opportunity is…
Andrew arrives in Nashville to start work on a masters degree at Vanderbilt, still reeling from the apparent suicide of his best friend, Eddie. Already haunted by a childhood accident that left the two with a profound bond, Andrew starts…
In the small English town of Featherbank, mysterious and malicious Charlie Crabtree brings together a group of fellow tormented teenagers, promising revenge against their school bullies. 25 years later a copycat murder that looks eerily…
17th Century Oxford: When a young scholar is murdered and a woman is found guilty and sentenced, the case seems cut and dry. But the four witnesses who narrate this book give four very different accounts of what happened. Meanwhile, the…
Suburban mother Rob and her uncanny daughter Callie go on a mother-daughter vacation to Rob's childhood home in the Mojave desert, thinking some time alone together will help Rob get to the bottom of Callie's more unsettling behaviors.…
Four stories starring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan include "First Bones," which reveals how she got her start in the lab, and "Bones on Ice," in which she must identify a mummified corpse found on Mount Everest. The…
A cozy, magical mystery-romance set in the wild west during a zombie apocalypse. A marshal tasked with killing zombies (called "drudges" in the book) is so lonely that he starts writing anonymous letters to a "dear friend," not realizing…
From Booklist: "Chandrasekera follows two entwined souls through an endless cycle of reincarnation and destruction in this slipstream novel, a poetic saga about identity and memory, colonialism and revolution, connection and commitment. It…
From Publishers Weekly, "Durst (Race the Sands) sets this richly drawn fantasy in a world where magic wielders called bone makers use animal bones to animate lifeless objects. Twenty-five years ago, Kreya Odi Altriana and her fabled…
"Political intrigue, necromancy, and identity struggles collide in Mueller’s lush but overlong debut. A prisoner on an elegant leash, Charm runs the Orchard House, a brothel where the men of Boren mingle and talk politics, and where the …
