Take a nice long walk off a literary pier with fall's big books. First, Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan makes her maiden deep dive into historical fiction with the vivid Manhattan Beach (Scribner). Anna Kerrigan, a child of the Great Depression, embraces the toughness she learned from her mysteriously vanished father by training as a professional diver at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. She is single-mindedly focused, a girl amid a sea of boys. But it's not long before she becomes entangled with an irresistibly dangerous man who submerges them both in the shadowy past.

Everything must go when the newly divorced Jules Ep stein, of Nicole Krauss's Forest Dark (Harper), decides to liquidate his life and travel to Tel Aviv. With a well-aimed arrow of auto-fiction, Krauss fires a Brooklyn-based writer named Nicole into this remarkable narrative, herself a victim of writer's block who must grapple with her marital disintegration. Starting with the decline, if not the disintegration, of the Soviet regime, Masha Gessen's the Future Is History (Riverhead) tracks totalitarianism through the lens of a generation raised in post-Communist Russia.

On the home front, Hillary Rodham Clinton explains What Happened (Simon & Schuster) during the election upset of the century. Across the pond, Annalena McAfee'sHome (Knopf) is deep-fried in all things Scottish. And whether on the line or crossing over it, Maria Sharapova is Unstoppable (Sarah Crichton). Love, all.