You might want to check the supplies of cocoa and tea, because that little taste of rain we just had portends a wet winter; it's an El Niño year.

Book lovers should be gloating “Let it rain!” because this looks like our year.

Here are just a few of the early fall fiction temptations.

Dan Brown is back with Robert Langdon in “The Lost Symbol,” releasing Tuesday, this time probing the connections of Freemasonry and Washington, D. C. Washington pols and critics reportedly are waiting breathlessly.

Book club favorite Anita Diamant, who captivated so many with "The Red Tent," gives us “Day After Night,” young women escaping to Israel from Nazi Germany.

Anita Shreve, who specializes in couples under great stress, “A Change in Altitude,” puts her protagonists in a Kenyan tragedy.

Lorrie Moore sets her post-9/11 novel, “A Gate at the Stairs” in the Midwest with a 20-year-old punster as her protagonist.

Margaret Atwood imagines another dystopia in “The Year of the Flood,” with much of the human race wiped out. (Guess: She'll somehow find the humor in that.)

Audrey Niffenegger, whose "The Time Traveler's Wife" was recently released for the big screen, follows it up with “Her Fearful Symmetry,” set in a London cemetery.

E.L. Doctorow's “Homer & Langley” examines the famous Collyer brothers, whose hoarding of old newspapers and other debris was world class. (Could have you putting down your book for a bit of tossing out.)

Kazuo Ishiguro, author of the lovely and melancholic "Remains of the Day," with another evocative title in “Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall,” stories connected by music.

Popular Spokane native author Sherman Alexie ("Smoke Signals") lightens it up with “War Dances,” a collection of stories.

Anne Rice, dominatrix of vampire novels for years, left the field for Christian themes about the time lots of competition moved in. She returns Oct. 27 (just in time for you-know-what!) with a hybrid of popular themes in “Angel Time: Songs of the Seraphim.” A killer meets an angel who gives him a chance at time travel to right some wrongs.

Sophie Annan Jensen is a book lover and retired journalist. She lives in Lucerne.