Editor’s Note: Sara Nelson is the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, the industry’s leading news source, covering every aspect of creating, producing, marketing and selling the written word in book, audio, video and electronic formats.

Now that the election is over — and I can barely stand to read the relentless bad news in the papers — there’s only one place left for reading refuge. My suggestions for a season of facing fiction:

Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking. OK, it’s not fiction. It’s (another) memoir from the actor/author of Postcards from the Edge. But it reads like fiction, especially the part about the year Fisher’s mother, Debbie Reynolds, gave Fisher and her grandmother (!) vibrators for Christmas. Apparently, you don’t even have to make this stuff up.

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff. Recently sold to the movies, this novel that compares a fictionalized version of the real-life 19th wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young with a contemporary 19th wife might have been more successful if Mitt Romney had stayed in the presidential race. But this book, at least, deserves to stay around.

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. Anglo-Dutch estranged husband in New York after 9/11 becomes obsessed with … cricket. Really. And it’s good.  Great, even. 

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, which won the Man Booker Prize this year is particularly apt at this moment because of its depiction of contemporary India. As I said, I’m not reading the news, but I am learning just as much — and enjoying it more —  reading this.

And if I get really ambitious:

Roberto Bolano’s 2666, THE novel of the year for the brainy set. The young people in my office swear that the Chilean author, Bolano, who died in 2003, is the heir to  the whole crew of Latin American stars, and the book sounds less like Gabriel Garcia Marquez than like the lesser-known Three Trapped Tigers, by Guillermo Cabrera Infante. (Spoken like the Latin American Studies major I once was.) We’ll see. Have I mentioned it’s nearly 900 pages long?