Early November feels like the hinge of the publishing season, with the last of the big fall fiction hitting the shelves just before everyone’s thoughts turn to holiday gift books. Here are some great novels to look for this month:
The Liberators by E.J. Koh (Tin House, Nov. 7): Koh is a memoirist, poet, and translator publishing her first novel, a multigenerational tale about a Korean family that emigrates to California in 1983. Set against a backdrop of 20th-century Korean history, the book is “a mesmerizing, delicately crafted novel about survival in the wake of civil war and transpacific nationalism,” according to our starred review.
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead, Nov. 7): Yes, it’s officially been long enough that we’re now seeing novels set against a backdrop of the Covid pandemic. Like Nunez’s National Book Award winner, The Friend (2018), this one features a relationship triangle among two humans and a pet—in this case, a woman who’s locked down in the apartment of the friends of a friend, the miniature macaw she’s agreed to care for, and the bird-sitter who’d gone AWOL before she arrived. “Spare and understated and often quite funny, the experience is less like reading fiction than like eavesdropping on someone else’s brain,” says our starred review.
The New Naturals by Gabriel Bump (Algonquin, Nov. 14): Like Nunez’s protagonist, the couple at the center of Bump’s novel are academics who are, to some degree, taking shelter from the world. In this case, they’re a Black couple, Rio and Gibraltar, who set about creating a utopian commune under a restaurant in western Massachusetts after their infant daughter dies. “Bump’s study of race and marginalization is built more on brief character sketches than deep-grain realism,” says our review, “which makes for some gorgeous and lyrical writing.…An affecting, experimental tale of race and reinvention.”
Day by Michael Cunningham (Random House, Nov. 14): In his first book in nine years, Cunningham checks in on adult siblings Isabel and Robbie and the rest of their family over three consecutive April 5ths, in 2019, 2020, and 2021. So: another pandemic novel. “Writing with empathy, insight, keen observation, and elegant subtlety, Cunningham reveals something not only about the characters whose lives he limns in these pages, but also about the crises and traumas, awakenings and opportunities for growth the world writ large experienced during a particularly challenging era,” according to our starred review.
So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan (Grove, Nov. 14): Keegan is an Irish writer having a moment in the U.S.—after her 2021 novel, Small Things Like These, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Grove brought out an earlier book, Foster, that had never been published in the U.S. before, and now comes So Late in the Day, making three books in three years (and three starred reviews from Kirkus). The three stories in this collection span her career, and all explore relations between men and women. According to our review, “Keegan precisely observes the subtle dynamics between men and women, be they strangers or romantic partners, and how those dynamics can shift and curdle with little warning.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
