Every month we break down our most excitedly awaited new book releases. Here are our picks for November....
Wish You Were Here, Jodi Picoult
Release date: November 30th
Genre: Fiction
Available on Amazon
Art imitates life in Wish You Were Here. Diana O’Toole has her life perfectly mapped out and with her 30th birthday on the horizon, she is right on target to get engaged to her doctor boyfriend. When a virus breaks out in the city, Finn encourages Diana to go on their nonrefundable trip to the Galapagos Islands without him. Soon, Diana finds herself quarantined on the island during the pandemic and begins to reexamine her choices and priorities in life.
Five Tuesdays in Winter, Lily King
Release date: November 9th
Genre: Short Stories
Available on Amazon
Told in the intimate voices of unique and endearing characters of all ages, these short stories explore desire and heartache, loss and discovery, moments of jolting violence and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A bookseller's unspoken love for his employee rises to the surface, a neglected teenage boy finds much-needed nurturing from an unlikely pair of college students hired to housesit, a girl's loss of innocence at the hands of her employer's son becomes a catalyst for strength and confidence, and a proud nonagenarian rages helplessly in his granddaughter's hospital room. Romantic, hopeful, brutally raw, and unsparingly honest, some even slipping into the surreal, these stories are, above all, about King's enduring subject of love.
These Precious Days, Ann Patchett
Release date: November 23rd
Genre: Essays
Available on Bookdepository
In These Precious Days, her first nonfiction work in eight years, Patchett turns the lens back not just on herself but on the relationships she’s forged throughout her career as a writer too, in essays that vary in length but seamlessly balance Patchett’s piercing emotional and intellectual insights with a welcoming charm. Still, the justified centerpiece of the collection is the title essay, which charts her unlikely friendship with Tom Hanks’s assistant Sooki Raphael during quarantine, after Hanks recorded the audiobook for Patchett’s previous novel, The Dutch House (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize). Enchanted by Raphael’s outlook on life and her abilities as a painter, Patchett documents their journey together in the most intimate of terms as Raphael deals with a terminal cancer diagnosis. It’s an unforgettable portrait of love, loss, and the wonders of friendship that will leave you both devastated and dazzled.
A Marvellous Light, Freya Marske
Release date: November 2nd
Genre: Fantasy
Available on Bookdepository
Robin Blyth has more than enough bother in his life. He’s struggling to be a good older brother, a responsible employer, and the harried baronet of a seat gutted by his late parents’ excesses. When an administrative mistake sees him named the civil service liaison to a hidden magical society, he discovers what’s been operating beneath the unextraordinary reality he’s always known. Now Robin must contend with the beauty and danger of magic, an excruciating deadly curse, and the alarming visions of the future that come with it—not to mention Edwin Courcey, his cold and prickly counterpart in the magical bureaucracy, who clearly wishes Robin were anyone and anywhere else. Robin’s predecessor has disappeared, and the mystery of what happened to him reveals unsettling truths about the very oldest stories they’ve been told about the land they live on and what binds it. Thrown together and facing unexpected dangers, Robin and Edwin discover a plot that threatens every magician in the British Isles—and a secret that more than one person has already died to keep.
A Face for Picasso, Ariel Henley
Release date: November 2nd
Genre: Memoir
Available on Bookdepository
At only eight months old, identical twin sisters Ariel and Zan were diagnosed with Crouzon syndrome -- a rare condition where the bones in the head fuse prematurely. They were the first twins known to survive the disease. Growing up, Ariel and her sister endured numerous appearance-altering procedures. Surgeons would break the bones in their heads and faces to make room for their growing organs. While the physical aspect of their condition was painful, it was nothing compared to the emotional toll of navigating life with a facial disfigurement. Ariel explores beauty and identity in her young-adult memoir about resilience, sisterhood, and the strength it takes to put your life, and yourself, back together time and time again.
Our Country Friends, Gary Shteyngart
Release date: November 2nd
Genre: Fiction
Available on Bookdepository
In Our Country Friends, Gary Shteyngart turns his antic gaze on a subject that’s decidedly more challenging to mine for comedy: the pandemic. As a deadly virus spreads, the book’s eight characters retreat 120 miles north of New York City, to an idyllic Hudson Valley estate where they burrow themselves in an “unconscionably lovely” existence consisting of gossip, gourmet meals, and petty grievances. A mash-up of Anton Chekhov’s fiery Uncle Vanya and Terrace House, the meditative Japanese reality show about a bucolic house share, the book bobs along as the mostly middle-age players, including a successful app developer, a famous actor, and a comely young essayist whose collection about America’s poor made a splash before its inevitable cancellation, mull their diminishing relevance in a world whose new values are being written on the fly. Written in what feels like real time, this book is not as fully baked as the author’s previous works. But with its spot-on details that capture the absurd side of the darkness (the aerobically skittish elbow bumps, a prestige restaurant known for its hand sanitizer), Shteyngart has undertaken a quarantine project more entertaining and enduring than any loaf of sourdough. His sketchbook is an often amusing artifact of a godawful time, testament of a whirring mind that refuses to rest in place.
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