Five must-reads coming to shelves in September

If it seems like books and movies get longer each fall, it’s not just your imagination.

Publishers and Hollywood execs figure we spend more time indoors as the temperatures start to dip and that we have more bandwidth to immerse ourselves in books and movies that require (or think they require) a little extra space to unveil their stories. With beach reads behind us, fall also tends to be a bit more serious, so it’s the likeliest time to find more leisurely paced awards contenders on screen and on the page.

Right on trend, doorstoppers are on the way later this fall from National Book Award winners Thomas Pynchon and Adam Johnson. While bookstores wait for them to arrive, we have two 700-pagers in our lineup of books we can’t wait to read this month:

Clown Town, Mick Herron

It’s a big month for fans of “Slow Horses,” the hilarious and thrilling spy series. The streaming version returns to Apple TV+ with its fifth season Sept. 24. It’s based on Herron’s fifth book about the scrappy, much-maligned band of spies who operate out of Slough House, a headquarters that supplies the basis for the rest of the British spy industry’s derogatory nickname for them. Herron, meanwhile, is way ahead of the series — “Clown Town” is the ninth of his “Slow Horses” books, which are every bit as funny, exciting and surprisingly poignant as the TV show. (Sept. 7)

The Elements, John Boyne

Dublin-based Boyne always seems to be one book away from literary superstardom. His novel for young people, “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” was a bestseller (and was made into a successful movie) but his adult titles are bigger hits around the world than they have been in the United States. In what’s being described as the most ambitious novel by the author of “The Heart’s Invisible Furies‚” “Elements” begins as four stories of four separate groups of characters, but the strands are woven together by Boyne’s themes of crime and morality. (Sept. 7)

The latest thriller from the Twin Cities author of “Esther” (and Loft Literary Center teacher) begins with a bang. Narrator Hannah is in a car that’s speeding toward northern Minnesota with a possible maniac in the driver’s seat, severe memory issues and the fear that she has just committed a murder. Proceeding from that grabber of an opening, she eventually gets to Duluth and readers eventually find out whodunit (if it wasn’t her). (Sept. 23)

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai

Desai won the Booker Prize for her last novel, “The Inheritance of Loss,” and the big name blurbers are like shirtless cadets climbing up a big greased pole as they try to out-superlative each other and sing the advance praises of her new one — including Ann Patchett, who wrote that she “wanted to pack a little suitcase and stay inside this book forever.” It won’t take forever but you will need almost 700 pages worth of time to tackle “Loneliness,” an epic love story about two young people whose romance stretches out over decades and continents. (There’s strong “Love in the Time of Cholera” energy in this one.) (Sept. 23)

The Secret of Secrets, Dan Brown