Sept. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Dan Brown, author of “The Da Vinci Code,” the best-selling adult novel of all time, returns to bookstores next week with “The Lost Symbol.” The big question for publishers is whether it will kill the competition or inspire people to toss more books into their shopping carts.

“The Lost Symbol” features Robert Langdon, the mystery- solving Harvard University professor played by Tom Hanks in the “Da Vinci Code” movie. The publishers haven’t distributed advance review copies, but they’ve said it takes place over a 12-hour period in Washington.

Doubleday, Brown’s U.S. publisher, is planning a first printing of 5 million copies. His U.K. publisher, TransWorld, will print 1 million. The book hits stores on Sept. 15 in both countries.

Brown leads a blizzard of big names on the shelves this season. Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers, Nick Hornby, John Irving, Stephen King, Jonathan Lethem, Lorrie Moore and Philip Roth all have fiction coming out, while Sen. Edward M. Kennedy heads the nonfiction highlights with his memoir, “True Compass,” to be published on Monday by Twelve.

The novel I’ve been most looking forward to is Moore’s “A Gate at the Stairs” (Knopf), her first book in 11 years. Moore’s prose is the opposite of Brown’s -- dense, witty, crackling with wordplay. It’s easy to see what took her so long; every sentence feels patiently constructed and polished.

The story is set in the year after Sept. 11 and concerns a Midwestern girl, Tassie, whose brain is set on fire at college.

“Twice a week, a professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of stunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James’s masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie,” Moore writes.

Dystopian Fantasy

Atwood’s first novel since the Booker-shortlisted “Oryx and Crake” is another dystopian fantasy, “The Year of the Flood” (Doubleday U.S., Sept. 22; Bloomsbury U.K., Sept. 7).

Eggers’s “The Wild Things” is based on Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book, “Where the Wild Things Are,” and the coming movie version, which Eggers wrote with director Spike Jonze (McSweeney’s, Oct. 1).

“Juliet, Naked,” brings Hornby back to his original preoccupations, music and love (Riverhead, Sept. 29; Viking U.K., Sept. 1). A 12-year-old boy mistakes a woman for a bear in Irving’s “Last Night in Twisted River” (Random House U.S., Oct. 27; Bloomsbury U.K., Oct. 19).

King has been working on “Under the Dome,” about a Maine town that’s inexplicably surrounded by an invisible force field, for 25 years; it’s a hefty read at 1,088 pages (Scribner, Nov. 10; Hodder & Stoughton, Nov. 10).

‘Chronic City’

Lethem has become known as the bard of Brooklyn; he moves across the East River for “Chronic City,” set on Manhattan’s glittering Upper East Side (Doubleday, Oct. 13; Faber & Faber, Jan. 7). In “The Humbling,” Roth delivers a slim book about an aging actor (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Nov. 2; Jonathan Cape, Nov. 5).

It’s hard for an unknown writer to break out in a season filled with so many superstars. The book I’ll be recommending to friends looking for a discovery is Michelle Huneven’s “Blame” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 9), a gripping tale about a hard-drinking California history professor who wakes up in jail after a blackout to find that two Jehovah’s Witnesses have been found dead in her driveway.

Huneven brilliantly describes Patsy’s years in jail, her life afterwards and her gradual, rocky embrace of Alcoholics Anonymous:

‘Rich Boy Wastrels’

“Patsy recoiled at the loser litanies and simplistic religiosity. She might have a genetic propensity for alcoholism, but she’d always stayed on track, accumulating degrees and honors and publications in spite of a concomitant taste for liquor, pharmaceuticals, and rich boy wastrels. She’d been valedictorian and Party Hardiest in high school, the first in her family to matriculate into a University of California grad school and a California correctional institute. She, at least, had range.”

On the nonfiction side, Jon Krakauer explores the life and death of former pro-football player Pat Tillman, who was killed by friendly fire while fighting with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, in “Where Men Win Glory” (Doubleday U.S., Sept. 15). Krakauer, who spent almost five months researching in Afghanistan in 2006-07, excoriates the killing’s “cynical cover- up sanctioned at the highest levels of government.”

Neil Sheehan returns with his first book since “A Bright Shining Lie” won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award 20 years ago. “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War” tells the story of the nuclear arms race (Random House, Sept. 22).

Taylor Branch’s “The Clinton Tapes” is based on 79 interviews Branch conducted with Bill Clinton in the White House (Simon and Schuster in the U.S. and U.K., Sept 29).

Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s memoir, “Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters,” recalls his heroic landing on New York’s Hudson River (Morrow, Oct. 13).

(Laurie Muchnick writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Laurie Muchnick in New York at lmuchnick@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: September 12, 2009 00:01 EDT