Cool reads for cooler nights

In midsummer, when it's often too hot to have a plan or even an opinion, the prospect of fall books seems unreal. But here they come, just over the horizon, like the thundering army in the old movies.

Thinking you might need a strategy for the upcoming onslaught, we've been poring over catalogs and advance reviews, and compiled this sketch of notable books due out over the next three months.

Starting with fiction, Isabel Allende plunges into South American colonial history in ``Iné s of My Soul," a novel of Iné s Suá rez , 16th-century mistress of Pedro de Valdivia , conquistad or of Chile. Richard Ford , who won the Pulitzer for ``Independence Day" in 1995, returns with ``The Lay of the Land," another in his Frank Bascombe chronicles.

Charles Frazier's bestselling novel of the Civil War, ``Cold Mountain," won the 1997 National Book Award. His novel, ``Thirteen Moons," tells of a boy in the early 19th century sent to run a trading post in Indian territory. Another anticipated sophomore outing is ``Paint It Black" by Janet Fitch , whose ``White Oleander" was an Oprah Winfrey choice.

John le Carre and Ward Just are veteran chroniclers of moral men in the cynical fields of world power. In le Carre's ``The Mission Song," a gifted African interpreter finds himself a pawn of British intelligence with less than noble aims toward a failed state. In Just's novel ``Forgetfulness," an American whose wife is killed, apparently by terrorists, is tempted to personal vengeance. Brookline's Leslie Epstein returns to the world of World War II in ``The Eighth Wonder of the World." An American architect wins a contest held by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini to build a tower to the greatness of the Fascist state.

Turkish Elif Shafak is doubtless the only writer on this list whose book may land her in jail. A character in her satirical novel, ``The Gaze," mentions the Armenian genocide, which has brought the author an indictment for ``insulting Turkishness."

Alice McDermott , winner of the 1998 National Book Award, again dips into the lives of an Irish-American middle-class family in ``After This." She won the National Book Award for ``Charming Billy" in 1998. A different sort of family story is Cormac McCarthy's ``The Road." In a dystopian future, a man and his son wander a blasted scene, en route to the sea, in the wake of unspecified ``concussions."

For short-story fans, new collections by two Canadian masters: Alice Munro (``The View From Castle Rock" ) and Margaret Atwood (``Moral Disorder" ). ``All Aunt Hagar's Children" is the long-awaited collection by Edward P. Jones , whose first novel, ``The Known World," won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. Boston's Dennis Lehane offers a quintet of stories, ``Coronado" ; far from the Mystic River, settings include small-town South Carolina and Texas.

In nonfiction, two authors of surprise recent bestsellers try to do it again. Harry G. Frankfurt , author of the 2005 hit with the unprintable name, writes ``On Truth." In 2004, Mireille Guiliano made the title ``French Women Don't Get Fat" a national buzzphrase. She goes Gallic again with ``French Women for All Seasons," a sort of grab-bag of ways to be cool a la francaise .

This being an election year, it's striking how few low-key, unimpassioned books on politics there are. Of the coolheaded books that try to explain and inform, one is sure to be ``The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008," by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris . Halperin is the mastermind of ABC's political blog, The Note, and Harris writes for The Washington Post. Another could be ``Brave New Ballot," by Aviel Rubin, who explores the failures of electronic voting machines.

On the arguments over security vs. liberty, John Yoo , architect of many of the Bush administration's most controversial anti terrorism policies, has his say in ``War by Other Means." Harvard professor Charles Fried, former solicitor general of the United States, has a more scholarly view in ``Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government."

Biography brings ``Andrew Carnegie," by David Nasaw, who in 2000 wrote a best-selling biography of William Randolph Hearst. The life of a famous Cantabridgian is ``William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism," by Robert D. Richardson.

Then there are the great artists. A legendary cinema vamp (``I used to be Snow White, but I drifted") is profiled in ``Mae West: It Ain't No Sin," by Simon Louvish. Neal Gabler offers ``Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination." And William S. McFeely of Cambridge, whose biography of Ulysses S. Grant won the Pulitzer Prize, has written ``Portrait: A Life of Thomas Eakins. "

In ``What I Know for Sure," TV host and commentator Tavis Smiley tells what his subtitle calls ``My Story of Growing Up in America." In 2000, Michael Patrick MacDonald related his tormented South Boston childhood in ``All Souls: A Family Story From Southie." He's back with what came later, in ``Easter Rising: An Irish American Coming Up From Under."

In ``Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War," Nicholas Lemann tells of a massacre of blacks in 1873 Louisiana, the start of a repression ending the hopes of African-Americans in the South for almost a century. Harvard's William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub of the University of Chicago focus on the present in ``There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America."

Every year, there seems always to be a notable book about Shakespeare. Ron Rosenbaum has produced ``The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascos, Palace Coups." Not a study of the perennial authorship controversies, the book delves into other issues: how the plays should be understood and performed, and what scholars have argued and believed about the elusive greatest man of letters.

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.