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The first volume of former US President Barack Obama's new memoir is coming out in November. It is one of the most important books of the year. Meanwhile, do not miss new novels by Jo Nesbo, Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Lethem, or a new biography by the poet Adrienne Rich. Besides, there are many other books worth reading...
1. A Promised Land
Author: Barack Obama.
Publisher: Crown, 17 November
Although there is lack of book details, it is expected to be one of the most influential books this year. We know that this is the first of two volumes in the plan, covering the former President's campaign and his early years in the White House. Crown has printed three million copies.
2. The Arrest
Author: Jonathan Lethem.
Publisher: Ecco, 10 November
Life, which we used to know, is changing. It is a before and after alternating moment. Sandy is a former Hollywood scriptwriter, now she lives with her sister on a farm in Maine. After an unlikely cross-country trip (10 months’ travel in a nuclear-powered tunnelling machine), a figure from the past emerges, threatening their lives.
3. To Be a Man: Stories
Author: Nicole Krauss.
Publisher: Harper, Tuesday
Kraus, the author of novels like “The Great House” and “The History of Love”, returns with a collection of stories about intimacy, family, and power.
4. Collected Stories
Author: Shirley Hazzard.
Editor: Brigitta Olubas
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Tuesday
Though Hasad’s best known novels are “The Transit of Venus” and “The Great Fire”, her short works helped her become a literary star. The collection includes her first published story, “Harold”, which she wrote during her time at the United Nations and sent to
5. The Moths and The Mountains: The True Story of Love, War, and Everest
Author: Ed Caesar.
Publisher: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 17 November
In the 1930s, Englishman Maurice Wilson, a traumatized veteran of The first World War, decided to fly to Everest, crash-land on the slope and reach its summit, all utterly alone. Things did not go well, but Caesar put this man and his will in the context of history.
6. The Kingdom
Author: Jo Nesbo.
Translator: Robert Ferguson.
Publisher: Knopf, 10 November
The Master of Norwegian crime fiction -- our columnist once said, no one can “make my flesh creep like Nesbaud” -- depicts a family of two brothers bound together by a family secret.
7. The Nine Lives in Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State
Author: Declan Walsh.
Walsh is a long time international correspondent for The New York Times, reported from Pakistan and lived there for nearly a decade before being fired from government television in 2013. Over there, he painted a portrait of the country based on the lives of nine people, including this country’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
8. Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West
Author: Lauren Redniss
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Publisher: Random House, 11 November
For years, members of the San Carlos Apache tribe have fought to keep this copper-rich land from being mined. Redniss is a writer and artist who combines reports and illustrations to record the battles going on in southern Arizona, including oral history, anthropological records, etc.
9. The Orchard
Author: David Hopen.
Publisher: Ecco, 17 November
As the protagonist of this debut novel, teenage Ari grew up in an ultra-orthodox Brooklyn community, and studied alone for years. But his sudden move to an affluent Florida suburb, where “everyone has chagall”, made him reconsider his beliefs and values.
10. The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography
Author Hilary Holladay.
Publisher: Nan A. Talese, 17 November
This is a comprehensive biography of Rich. When Rich died in 2012, she was one of the most popular poets of her generation and a leading representative of feminism in the United States. Holladay spent many years writing the book and made Rich’s constant self-reinvention of a central theme of her work.
11. Strongman: Mussolini to the Present
Author: Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
Publisher: NORTON, November 10
The writer is an Italian history professor, and he connects U.S. President Donald Trump with a range of figures around the world, from Libya's Moammar Gadhafi to Russia's Vladimir Putin.
12. The Sun Collective
Author: Charles Baxter.
Publisher: Pantheon, 17 November
The parents were searching for their son who was an actor. They are worried that he had become homeless. This led them to an activist group in Minneapolis which was more dangerous than when it first emerged.
13. V2: A Novel of World War II
Author: Robert Harris.
Publisher: Knopf, 17 November
Mr Harris is the author of the bestselling “Munich” and “Fatherland”, and he is back to familiar territory. The key point of this story is the V2 which was launched in 1944 and was one of the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missiles.
14. Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret
Author: Catherine Coleman Flowers.
Publisher: New Press, 17 November
In poor communities across the United States, including Flowers’ home land of Alabama, too many Americans are lack of the basic dignity, in her words, “the right to flush and forget”, and they don’t have the ability to clean the sewage from their homes and live in squalor. The author is a 2020 MacArthur winner who delves into the racial and economic factors that lead people to live in unsanitary conditions.
15. We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and A Half Century of Silence
Author: Becky Cooper.
Publisher: Grand Central, 10 November
As an undergraduate at Harvard in 1969, Cooper became fascinated by the murder of an anthropology student Jane Britton. As Cooper digs up the truth, new DNA analysis eventually identifies a suspect, but the true thrill of the story is that the murder has remained a mystery for decades.
16. White Ivy
Author: Susie Yang.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Tuesday
As the narrator of the debut novel, Ivy spent her childhood in China with her grandmother before coming to the United States.
