10 books to add to your reading list in September

Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles — fiction and nonfiction — to consider for your September reading list. FICTION Small Rain: A Novel By Garth Greenwell Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 320 pages, $28 Greenwell’s previous work amply demonstrate his brilliance in writing about sex and desire, as well as his brilliance with language. The Women Behind the Door: A Novel By Roddy Doyle Viking: 272 pages, $29 Readers first encountered the addicted and abused Paula Spencer in Doyle’s 1996 “The Woman Who Walked Into Doors” and again in the 2006 “Paula Spencer.” They’ll be glad to find her, at 66 a widow and grandmother, content with her job, her boyfriend Joe and her children’s stable families. Tell Me Everything: A Novel By Elizabeth Strout Random House: 352 pages, $30 Strout’s Amgash books, of which this is the fifth and final installment, began with “My Name Is Lucy Barton”; few of us could have predicted that narrator would wind up in Maine during the pandemic or that she’d be living with her ex-husband William. Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life By Brigid Schulte Henry Holt: 432 pages, $32 The journalist who brought us 2014’s “Overwhelmed,” about our overcommitted lives, returns with a book specifically about what doesn’t work when it comes to the American way of employment.