Looking for something new to read? Browse our fiction picks for November! Includes titles by Harriet Clark, Joe Bond, Annie Proulx and many more.
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations.
The Hill
Harriet Clark
Suzanna Klein was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals.
Now, every Saturday, Suzanna lines up at the prison gates among the other children, each dressed as if for celebration. Inside there is a nursery and a cemetery; there are watchful guards and distractable nuns; there are women counting down to release and women like Suzanna’s mother, who will never be released.
At home, Suzanna is raised by her grandmother, who is entirely unforgiving of her daughter’s crime and refuses to visit the prison. Surrounding Suzanna are her grandmother’s friends, who know one another from their years in the Communist Party and still spend extended cocktail hours debating the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Though these women once insisted on changing the world, they are torn between teaching Suzanna how the world works and shielding her from it.
The Man Who Read Books
Rachid Benzine and Sam Taylor
One morning, during a ceasefire in Gaza, a young photographer wanders far from his hotel and into the narrow alleys of the city. Roaming aimlessly, he stumbles across an old man, surrounded by stacks of books.
As the photographer raises his camera, the bookseller asks him to listen to his story first. ‘For isn’t there a story behind every gaze? The story of a life. Sometimes of an entire nation.’
The story that unfolds encompasses exile and imprisonment, resistance and political disillusionment, the joy of watching your children grow up and the tragedies that tear your loved ones from you. They say that when an old man dies a library burns.
Day after day, the photographer returns. Year after year, Nabil shares the books that helped him understand and, in some cases, survive these events – from the Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish and Mourid Barghouti to Gabriel García Márquez, Frantz Fanon and Ernest Hemingway.
Stolen Things
A.M. Howell
December 1919. War widow Della Pemberton consoles herself through a life of petty theft and her beloved tonic for female disorders. But, when a stranger arrives at her home claiming it belongs to him, her world is upended when she discovers the man’s left behind a small baby.
The arrival of the child thrusts Della into a frightening new reality after a series of unexplained events; the delivery of baby gifts, an infant’s bone found in the attic, and peculiar noises within the walls of the house at night.
When she receives a note predicting she’ll commit murder, Della realises someone is out to do her harm. But with her own health worsening and a small baby to care for, she discovers that fighting for the truth and her life will come at the highest of prices.
Hope House
Joe Bond
They came from the streets, the sticks, and every place in between. They’ve stolen cars, dealt dope and hurt people. They’ve been hurt themselves. They’ve been labelled ‘delinquents’ and cast out from their families – if they ever had a family at all.
Their futures promise prison – or worse – but for now, they’ve been brought together to live in an old house on a hill, and see about getting themselves – and each other – right.
Spirited, angry, confused and misled, these are the boys of Hope House, an institution for ‘delinquent’ young men in 1980s Kentucky.
Deeply honest and soulful, this is a novel about searching for belonging and lifting each other up; about coming of age into a society that’s already closed its doors; about lost boys who grapple with their pasts, dare to imagine different futures, and nurture the almost outrageous hope that they might just turn everything around.
On the Calculation of Volume: Book V
Solvej Balle
Tara Selter has become someone new. It becomes clear just how ridiculous it is: life in progressive time. Or was. Before we came to a halt. How foolishly one can spend a life in a time that moves forward.
The nonsense of the ceaseless grind. Tara has returned to Thomas, but she is no longer the person he remembers. She has now spent twelve years in the eighteenth of November, while Thomas has endlessly repeated his identical day.
He struggles to reconcile Tara as she is now with the Tara he loves. And so she rejoins her friends, with whom she finds companionship and understanding.
Murmuration
TJ Klune
Mike works his dream job at the local bookstore. At the local the staff know his order – especially Sean, the waiter who has a special smile just for Mike and, after years of anticipation, is ready to take the next step in their burgeoning romance.
But while everything might seem perfect, the edges of the town are beginning to fray. Odd things catch Mike’s attention, things no one else seems to notice or care about. There are no children or parents in Amorea and no one who’s left town for the far mountains has ever come back.
One night, Mike wakes up to a storm cloud of uncanny starlings blackening the sky. And soon enough, he begins to question whether his name is even Mike. As Mike loses hold on his identity, violent memories of another life interfere with everything good about Amorea, Mike will do whatever he can to keep Sean from the darkness that’s coming for him.
Thorns in the Hollow
Laura Purcell
Tabitha would do anything to remain at her ancestral home of Reynard’s Hollow. So, while marrying her cousin Vincent isn’t an inspiring proposition, things could be worse.
He doesn’t hold a candle to Kit, the gamekeeper’s son and her childhood friend, but nothing would ever come of that anyway; she’s the lady of the manor, after all, and Kit is a servant.
Tabitha’s world is thrown upside down when her cousin dies in a hunting accident. He was her best – and only – chance to remain at the Hollow – so what will happen to her now? Why do his injuries look like the result of a brutal attack, rather than a bad fall? Is there something out there – some sort of monster, still lurking in the woods?
Meanwhile, Kit is wrestling with demons of his own.
The Collateral Heart
Jeffery Deaver
A terrible arson in Manhattan burns an old building to the ground. Amelia Sachs – criminalist Lincoln Rhyme’s wife and crime scene investigator extraordinaire – manages to save a victim from a fiery death. And in doing so she makes an eerie discovery.
The arsonist has left a package of clues that might hint as to their motive and where they will strike next. Desdemona Vale is a sharp and unstoppable officer – balancing her fervent search for the killer of a young woman from her neighbourhood, with the arduous task of caring for her two young granddaughters.
The searches for their respective villains lead Rhyme, Sachs and Vale improbably to another member of the cast: James Harper, a famed historian and the host of one of the most popular history podcasts in the country, a man who may, or may not, be able to shed light on the perp’s motive and identity.
Prince of Rome
Conn Iggulden
AD 46. After years serving with the legion, Cormac – a slave turned soldier living under a stolen name – returns to Rome determined never to be powerless again.
With his closest allies beside him, Cormac sets out to win what Rome once denied him. A home and family of his own, a name no enemy can destroy and a seat among those who hold Rome’s future in their hands. But every rise creates an enemy.
For generations, Marcus Quinctius’s family has grown rich supplying Rome’s legions. He will not surrender that trade – or the wealth it brings – to an upstart.
As their rivalry spreads from Rome’s crowded streets to the vineyards, warehouses and ports that sustain the capital, loyalties will be tested and blood will be spilled. For the higher Cormac climbs, the more he stands to lose.
Annie Proulx Stories
Annie Proulx
In these stories, Annie Proulx delves into the lives of characters marked by loneliness, violence, desperation and the wrong kinds of love.
Across the bracing landscapes of the American West, New England and New Foundland in Canada, we meet rodeo riders and cowboys, ranch and rural workers and down and out drifters.
In her most acclaimed story, ‘Brokeback Mountain’, adapted into an award-winning film, a passionate affair between two cowboys survives everything but the world’s intolerance. In each tale, we witness the hard times and unlikely elation of those who feel tied to the land, or are desperate to escape it.
Spanning nearly 30 years and drawn from Proulx’s four collections, this book gathers her finest and best-loved stories together for the first time.
English 
Polish 
Lithuanian 
Romanian 
Portuguese 
Bengali