This is an amazing season for lovers of books. Already this month we’ve seen the release of new work by Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon, and Junot Díaz. Salman Rushdie’s, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, came out yesterday and was quite well reviewed. J.K. Rowling’s first book of adult fiction comes out next week. October will bring us Dennis Lehane, a Pete Townshend memoir, and Tom Wolfe, while new books from Barbara Kingsolver and Ian McEwan come in November.

My prediction for the biggest book of the fall is J.R. Moehringer’s Sutton, which will be published next Tuesday.

Bank robber Willie “the Actor” Sutton, who had spent about half of his adult life in prison, was granted a surprise commutation by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller (a former banker) on Christmas Eve, 1969. Sutton left Attica and, for a price, granted exclusive access to a New York Daily News reporter, Edward Kirkman.

Moehringer takes this premise and fictionalizes the next 24 hours, driving Sutton, a reporter, a photographer, and the reader around New York City in a more or less chronological history of Sutton’s life. From the turn of the century Irish slums of Brooklyn to life in and out of crime (and prisons) during the Depression to a handful of years spent as an escapee prior to recapture, it is masterfully presented.

A former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the L.A. Times, Moehringer’s only previous book was The Tender Bar: A Memoir, an excellent account of growing up on Long Island where he was raised in the culture of a corner tavern. I suspect that Sutton began as a biography — there was obviously a considerable amount of research that went into this — and evolved into Moehringer’s first work of fiction as the result of an exasperating attempt to get into another’s head.

Sutton will have broad appeal. It’s a superb work of fiction. It’s clever. It’s guy stuff. It’s historical. It speaks to lovers of New York and to haters of banks.

That should be just about everybody.

This Week

Jeanne Marie Laskas, author of Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work, Wednesday, September 19th, 7:15 p.m., Decatur Library, sponsored by Georgia Center for the Book, free.

Tim Darnell, author of The Crackers: Early Days of Atlanta Baseball, Monday, September 24th, 7:15 p.m., Decatur Library, sponsored by Georgia Center for the Book, free.

Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, Tuesday, September 25, 7 p.m., Jimmy Carter Library, sponsored by Georgia Center for the Book, free.