Four Trending September Titles: Albom’s The Time Keeper, Tan’s The Garden of Evening Mists, Byrne’s How Music Works, and Wade’s A Father First

Sure, you’ll want to get James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge’s Zoo and Zadie Smith’s NW, No. 2 and No. 6 on next Sunday’s New York Times Hardcover Fiction best sellers list. And Kevin Powers’s much-touted debut, The Yellow Birds, made the list’s top 30 and is an impressive No. 183 in Amazon’s rankings. But here are some September titles trending now that I don’t want you to miss.

A fable about the first human to count the hours, Mitch Albom’s The Time Keeper (Hyperion. 240p. ISBN 9781401322786. $24.99) debuts next Sunday in the top spot on the hardcover fiction list and is already No. 23 at Amazon. Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists (Weinstein. 2012. c.350p. ISBN 9781602861800. pap. $15.99), an example of “redemptive power of storytelling…that juxtapose[es] Japan’s ignominious war history with glorious moments of Japanese art and philosophy” (LJ 9/15/12), was just shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Talking Heads cofounder David Byrne’s How Music Works (McSweeney’s. 352p. ISBN 9781936365531. $32), in Amazon’s top 100, traverses the music world from folksong to opera to rock to show how music is shaped by time and place. And Dwyane Wade, the eight-time All-Star for the Miami Heat, writes about fatherhood in A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (Morrow. 352p. ISBN 9780062136152. $26.99). Get ’em all.