Best new books: November 2021

By Madeleine Feeny on 29/10/2021

As we hurtle towards the end of 2021, the last of the year’s major titles hit bookshops as they start to gear up for Christmas. This month also sees the announcement of the Booker Prize winner on 3 November and the opening of Zadie Smith’s first play, a contemporary reimagining of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue, set on the Kilburn High Road. Commissioned to celebrate Brent's year as Borough of Culture in 2020, The Wife of Willesden premieres at the Kiln Theatre – tickets are still available for the second half of November, and December. Meanwhile, here’s our pick of the month’s new fiction and non-fiction

The Every, by Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers’ prophetic dystopia The Circle imagined campus life at Silicon Valley’s biggest social media conglomerate. In its sharply observed sequel, The Circle has acquired ‘an ecommerce behemoth named after a South American jungle,’ creating the ultimate monopoly: The Every. Enter new hire Delaney, a tech-sceptic on a secret mission to topple the world’s richest company from the inside. As she adjusts to the skintight Lycra and earnest self-optimisation that are ubiquitous in her new workplace, she realises its Achilles’ heel is its undiscriminating hunger for ideas. But how far can Delaney’s inventiveness carry her before she gets busted, or ruins lives? Eggers’ satirical genius lies in reflecting our relationship with technology back at us, magnified: the relentless self-monitoring and peer evaluation; the veneration of data over judgement; the abdication of personal responsibility to AI. Funny, gripping and chillingly near the bone.

(Hamish Hamilton, 16 November)

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Growing Up: Sex in the Sixties, by Peter Doggett

The Swinging Sixties: a decade of sexual revolution propelled by the invention of the pill and an easing of rigid Victorian-style morality. A growing celebration of individuality, as the counterculture exploded and young people approached politics, music, fashion and relationships with a newfound freedom. Yet along with the liberalisation that would allow women and some gay men to embrace their sexuality without fear came a darker side. Social historian Peter Doggett investigates twelve little-known stories which encapsulate a conflict that endures to this day: between the desire to liberate the body from repression, and the way this liberation exposes the vulnerable to exploitation. Moving from Brigitte Bardot to Lolita, Christine Keeler to April Ashley, Doggett dismantles misogynistic clichés in this revelatory deep dive, which illuminates the legacy of a pivotal era.

(Bodley Head, 4 November)

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Peaces, by Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi is known for her playful reinventions of fable and folklore. Fantasy bleeds into reality in her elusive, whimsical fiction, such as the Somerset Maugham Award winner White is for Witching, and Gingerbread. Her new novel follows a young couple, Otto and Xavier Shin, who board a mysterious train, The Lucky Day, at their local station in Kent to celebrate their unofficial honeymoon. Accompanied by their mongoose, Árpád, they explore the train and discover a bazaar, a library, a sauna, a portrait gallery, a garden – and the train’s reclusive owner, Ava Kapoor, seemingly haunted by loss. But who masterminded this curious journey? And are they passengers or prisoners? Wes Anderson meets Jeanette Winterson in a mesmerising feat of imagination that explores the ways we see one another and the coexistence of past and present.

(Faber, 4 November)

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Youngman: Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, edited by Zach Ozma and Ellis Martin

Lou Sullivan (1951-91) was perhaps the first publicly gay transgender man. Though many medical professionals had never heard of a female-to-gay male, the writer, activist and trans historian never lied about his sexuality, published the guidebook Information for the FTM and established the first peer-support group for trans men. When he was diagnosed with HIV, he volunteered for clinical trials and took a perverse pride in saying he was proud to die as a gay man, although he’d been told he couldn’t live as one. He died leaving 8.4 cubic feet of archival material to the GLBT Historical Society he co-founded. Edited by archivist/filmmaker Ellis Martin and interdisciplinary artist Zach Ozma, the diaries Sullivan had always intended to publish – winner of the 2020 LAMBDA Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction – paint a sensual, celebratory portrait of trans self-discovery, desire and community.

(Vintage Classics, 4 November)

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Pure Flame: On Mothers and Daughters, by Michelle Orange

From the acclaimed author of This Is Running for Your Life: Essays comes a powerful and thought-provoking exploration of maternal legacy and the impact of feminism on the mother-daughter bond. In Orange’s teens, a gulf opened between her and her mother, a woman who ‘had lived out a neoclassical epic of self-determination: 1970s housewife turned MBA turned CEO’, and whose many alter egos included Janis Jerome: the pseudonym used in a case study sold to the Harvard Business Review about her midlife decision to leave her family to pursue her career. Blending memoir, cultural criticism and social history, Pure Flame asks what it means to be a daughter and traces the forces that transformed women’s lives in the last century.

(Harvill Secker, 4 November)

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The Fell, by Sarah Moss

November 2020: England is in lockdown and Kate, a single mother on furlough from her café job, is meant to be self-isolating, but she’s going stir-crazy. When her neighbour Alice – ‘extremely vulnerable’, with cancer – spies her disappearing out her garden onto the moor, Alice’s daughter urges her to report Kate to the police, but she refuses; Kate has been so kind, and could never afford the fine. But when Kate falls and injures herself, her clandestine breath of fresh air looks rather less harmless. In this slim, suspenseful novel, the Women’s Prize-shortlisted author of Ghost Wall captures the strange intensity and inertia of the last eighteen months, and the dilemmas with which we were faced: personal freedom versus public safety; the clash of loyalty, duty, compassion and fear. A tender, perceptive portrait of unprecedented times.

(Picador, 11 November)

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