10 books you should read in November

In Box Office Poison, Daily Telegraph film critic Tim Robey turns an eye toward the industry’s biggest failures. We’re not talking about oft-cited flops that weren’t actually huge disasters, like Waterworld. Robey goes deep into film history, starting with 1916’s Intolerance and ending with 2019’s Cats. Along the way, Robey lays out a solid thesis about what a proper flop entails—and why they can be even more instructive than box-office sensations.

Sergio de la Pava’s latest novel, Every Arc Bends Its Radian, is a detective story. Set in Cali, Colombia, the plot follows Riv, a private detective from New York, as he searches for Angelica, a missing woman with ties to a dangerous criminal organization. Riv is on the run, too; he’s only in Colombia because he needs a break from his regular life in New York City. Riv’s journey quickly turns philosophical as he digs deeper into the strange underworld that Angelica is mixed up in, forcing him to confront larger questions about humanity. It sounds like pseudo-intellectual nonsense, but since his 2012 debut, A Naked Singularity, de la Pava has proven his ability to weave disparate ideas and genres together into something uniquely manic and reflective of the current state of the world.

Richard Price is a frequent Hollywood screenwriter, with credits on shows like The Wire and The Outsider and films such as The Color Of Money and American Gangster. He’s also a lifelong New Yorker, a history he taps into with his latest novel, Lazarus Man. After a tenement building collapses in Harlem in 2008, rescue workers find only six bodies in the rubble, leaving dozens of others unaccounted for. The interweaving narrative follows four people connected to the collapse as they rebuild their lives and try to make sense of what happened.

In her debut novel, Nayantara Roy takes her protagonist Lila, from New York, where she has a successful career in publishing, to Kolkata, India, where she’s just inherited her family’s estate. Lila’s been estranged from her mother for the past 10 years, so her arrival throws everything into chaos, especially since much of her extended family still lives in the house. The Magnificent Ruins is a meditation on family, legacy, and the things we can’t seem to leave behind, no matter how hard we try.

The Last Love Note author Emma Grey is back with another romantic tearjerker, this time with a thriller twist. In Pictures Of You, Evie Hudson loses her memory after a car crash that kills her husband. She can only remember her life until high school, so she has no recollection of her husband at all. With the help of an attractive photographer, Evie puts the pieces back together and revisits the major turning points in her life.

Shy Creatures was published in the U.K. back in August, but Clare Chambers’ latest novel is finally hitting American shelves this month. A period piece set in South London in 1964, the novel follows Helen, an art therapist at a psychiatric hospital, as she untangles the life story of a 37-year-old man named William Tapping. Police discovered William living in squalor with his elderly aunt, and neither of them have had contact with the outside world for decades. Helen connects with William through his talent for art and slowly begins to understand what happened to him.

It’s taken more than a year, but the English translation of Haruki Murakami’s The City And Its Uncertain Walls is finally here. The plot is firmly within Murakami’s magical realism wheelhouse: A boy, a girl, and a disappearance, which leads to the boy’s lifelong quest to find the girl in a mysterious walled city that’s part of another world. Or maybe that strange place isn’t real at all. In The City And Its Uncertain Walls, Murakami plays with the boundaries between imagination and reality as only a master craftsman can.

Entangled imprint Red Tower Books is going hard on Melissa Landers’ new romantasy series, which kicks off with The Half King. The first printing is 500,000 copies, the same amount as airport kiosk kingpin James Patterson’s new Alex Cross novel. In other words, it’s a lot, but the hype around this release has been steadily building through word of mouth. The novel follows Cerise, a Seer in the Allied Realm, as she tries to save a cursed king before time runs out.

Romance author Sophie Cousens is back with Is She Really Going Out With Him?, a playful, breezy read about a divorced writer who agrees to a social experiment for her job: seven dates with seven strangers, all set up by her children. The dates range from fiascoes to surprise connections. And, of course, she just might find true love along the way.

If you’re looking for a holiday season weepie, Niall Williams has you covered. With Time Of The Child, Williams revisits the setting of his most famous novel, This Is Happiness, this time telling a separate tale set in the winter of 1962 in the fictional Irish village of Faha. The town doctor, Jack Troy, and his daughter, Ronnie, are left to care for an abandoned infant as Christmas approaches. Williams even gets an endorsement from Hozier, whose perfunctory blurb reads simply, “A beautiful writer.”