The ten best autumn reads

Today John Walsh shares his list of "The Ten Best Autumn reads" in the Independent.

The top three:

House of Meetings By Martin Amis

Unbowed by his last encounter with the critics, the nation's top literary stylist surges back with this bitter evocation of a slave-labour camp in Stalin's gulag where two brothers are in love with the same woman.

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

The Booker Prize winner. An elaborately structured story that moves between the Manhattan, seen through immigrant eyes, and an Indian hill town where a teenage girl lives with her grandfather and dreams of romance.

Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins by Rupert Everett

Public school drama queen hits London stage, Paris and Hollywood and has sex with almost everybody. The most enjoyable showbiz autobiography since Niven's The Moon's a Balloon.

Amis and Desai have recently had their moments (here and here) on the blog. Of Everett's memoir, John Preston predicts in the Telegraph:

there's surprisingly little sex in Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, but it should still do well – simply because it's extremely well written, very funny and manages to balance satisfactorily high levels of bitchiness with equal amounts of personal candour.

--Marshal Zeringue