Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) -- With so many books in the stores, we’re often asked for recommendations. Here’s a list of recent literary fiction.

“The Infinities” by John Banville. Published by Picador in the U.K.; will be released by Knopf in the U.S. in February.

Sometime before dawn, Adam Godley lies in a coma inside his ramshackle rural pile, Arden. This will be no ordinary midsummer day. The god Hermes is holding back daybreak so that Zeus can have his wicked way with Adam’s daughter-in-law, Helen. For an hour, her cuckolded husband, young Adam, paces the corridors in a semiconscious state that renders everything “unreally real.”

So opens Banville’s new novel, a lofty, often wry look at the lowly business of being a mortal.

“Homer & Langley” by E. L. Doctorow. Published by Random House in the U.S.; will be published by Little, Brown in the U.K. in January.

Homer and Langley Collyer became famous in 1947, when they were found dead in their Harlem mansion. They weren’t easy to extract: The entrance hall was choked with gargantuan piles of junk and old newspapers. The police got in through the second story, eventually excavating their way to Homer’s corpse. The house was so clogged with detritus that it took an additional two and a half weeks to locate Langley under a stack of toppled debris. But Doctorow sees the Collyers as something more than paranoid recluses, making the case that they were bright oddities “living original self-directed lives unintimidated by convention.”

“Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel. Published by Fourth Estate in the U.K. and Holt in the U.S.

In her dazzling new novel, the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize, Mantel brings Thomas Cromwell barreling out of the shadows to reclaim his rightful place as an early architect of the English Reformation and a compellingly modern hero. The book takes place during uncertain times in England. After 18 years of marriage, King Henry VIII still lacks a male heir and is looking to cast off his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and take another, Anne Boleyn. There are executions, coronations, seductions: The court hums with intrigue, with Cromwell at the center of it.

“Inherent Vice” by Thomas Pynchon. Published by Penguin Press in the U.S. and Cape in the U.K.

The novel is set in Los Angeles in 1970 and stars a diminutive hippie P.I. named Larry “Doc” Sportello, who stays blitzed on enough marijuana to paralyze Cheech and Chong. This may be the author’s funniest book, which is saying something. It’s also his most relentlessly, even defiantly pop. The convoluted plot begins with the disappearance of a real-estate magnate and his girlfriend, who happens to be an ex-girlfriend of Doc’s. He picks up their traces in classic Raymond Chandler fashion: by questioning what seems like 2,000 characters from every walk of L.A. life.

“That Old Cape Magic” by Richard Russo. Published by Knopf in the U.S. and Chatto in the U.K.

Russo’s new novel begins with one wedding and ends with another. In between the hero’s marriage falls apart for the most subtle of reasons. Griffin and Joy have been married for 34 years. Incredibly, their problem seems to be their parents. Russo is a sensitive, intelligent writer with an abundance of sympathy for the foibles of middle-aged men.

To contact the reporter on this story: Lili Rosboch in New York erosboch@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 13, 2009 12:36 EDT