Books to Look Out For in November 2026: Part Two

This second batch of November titles opens with a novel that felt more like summer reading to me. Livia Franchini’s High Tide follows two timelines: one in the 1990s when Mary Godwin is thinking of dropping out of university, and one in the 2020s when the horror writer she’s become finds herself forced to remember her well-hidden past. When Mary meets Peter Shelley, they fall into an obsessive passion which will see them taking off for Italy when Peter’s art installation gets him into trouble with the law where they meet Peter’s friend Trelawney. A hedonistic summer ensues ending in violence and tragedy. Thirty years later, Mary, known only by her pen name by her many fans, is faced with a retrospective of Peter’s work which Trelawney is enthusiastically promoting. An enjoyable, clever reimagining of Mary Godwin’s marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley with some evocative descriptions of Italian art and architecture. Review shortly…

Anne Serre’s Virtue and Rosalind sees a writer embracing the unacceptable: happy to eliminate a second-rate, popular author; admiring Uncle Henri who walks off from a family picnic and never returns, opting for a future with a woman in a red skirt instead. Everything is grist to her literary mill, not least her relationships with other women who share her love of art and her habit of keeping a distance between herself and everything else. ‘International Booker shortlistee Anne Serre reaffirms herself a master of literary form and innovation. Reading her, we read a hundred books at once. At first we might not recognise ourselves in this dazzling hall of mirrors, but by the end of it, we know just who we are’ says the blurb ambitiously although it does sound intriguing.

Anne Rabe’s The Possibility of Happiness explores the repercussions from the fall of the Berlin Wall for ordinary citizens, something I’m perennially fascinated by. It follows Stine, four years old when her native country disappeared from the map, too young to have known it but growing up in a family that can’t quite find a place in the new Germany and refuses to answer questions about the past. ‘Told in fragments that blend fiction, poetry and a searing investigation of the past, The Possibility of Happiness finds Stine, now an author, reckoning with her family’s – and her country’s – complex history’ according to the blurb. Sounds right up my street.

Jonathan Coe’s Lessons in Harmony is set in 1907 in France where the aloof and dandyish Ravel is seen as a controversial figure. Late in the year, he begins to tutor Ralph Vaughan Williams, a rising star in British composition, married and a collector of British folksongs. ‘All they have in common is that in clear but indefinable ways, each of them seems an archetypal representative of his own country. One of them ‘typically French’, the other ‘so English’. And yet this will be the beginning of a deep friendship – one which will come to symbolise the new, tentative alliance between France and Britain in the run-up to the First World War’ says the blurb which sounds like an interesting departure from Coe’s state-of-the-nation novels.

November’s short story collection is the oddly titled Annie Proulx Stories which includes three new pieces together with a wide selection from four volumes spanning thirty years. Brokeback Mountain, perhaps Proulx’s most famous story, although I think of it as a novella, appears in the collection plus gems like Tits Up in a Ditch, What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick and People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water. I first read Proulx’s stories in her Close Range collection and loved her often grimly witty portrayals of cowboys, rodeo riders and drifters.

That’s it for November’s new fiction. As ever, a click on a title will take you to a more detailed synopsis should you want to know more, and if you’d like to catch up with part one it’s here. Paperbacks soon…