10 books to add to your reading list in November

Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your November reading list.

Booklover’s Thanksgiving arrives early this year, with most of November’s notable releases out Nov. 7 (and one pushed forward to Halloween). That should make it easier to stock up on titles to hide behind after (or even during) long hours with friends and family. At least two novels bring perspective to the COVID pandemic, while another involves a surprising view of the Vietnam War. Nonfiction ranges even more broadly, from artificial intelligence to the war in Afghanistan and the pleasures of a quiet garden. Happy — and grateful — reading!

FICTION

Absolution

By Alice McDermott

FSG: 336 pages, $28

(Oct. 31)

Set during the earliest days of American involvement in Vietnam, McDermott’s ninth novel focuses on narrator Tricia, a Navy spouse, and her friendship with Charlene, an American businessman’s wife. After Charlene’s daughter Rainey gets a miniature ao dai for her Barbie doll from the family seamstress, Charlene cooks up a scheme that will ultimately push Tricia to her limit. A firmly feminist accounting of the era’s sins against women from both West and East, this could be McDermott’s best novel yet.

Again and Again

By Jonathan Evison

Dutton: 336 pages, $28

(Nov. 7)

Eugene Miles, who's 106, lives in an eldercare facility and spends a great deal of his time telling housekeeper Angel the stories of his past lives. Since Angel has romantic troubles of his own, Eugene’s long and complicated stories make him an unlikely male Scheherazade, trying to distract someone he cares about from his distress. Does it matter if he really lived as a thief named Euric in Moorish Spain, or as Oscar Wilde’s cat?

Read more: Cubicle crucible

Same Bed Different Dreams

By Ed Park

Random House: 544 pages, $30

(Nov. 7)

Alt-history novels abound; it’s high time Korea got its own. Park (“Personal Days”) posits that the real-life Korean Provisional Government (KPG), founded in exile in China, became a powerful underground group working toward a unified nation during and after the Korean War. When a technical writer finds an unpublished novel that might be a KPG document, the book breaks into three sections: the discovery of the manuscript, the novel itself and then the speculative ramblings of a Black Korean War veteran. The result is twisty and high-concept and impossible to put down.

The Vulnerables

By Sigrid Nunez

Riverhead: 256 pages, $28

(Nov. 7)

In her last novel, “The Friend,” Sigrid Nunez included a dog as an important character. “The Vulnerables” stars a macaw named Eureka. When a grown son of her friends abandons his birdsitting gig, the narrator, a writer who shares the author’s name, age and profession, takes over. And when the young man returns and the pandemic shuts things down, the trio must negotiate their new proximity.

Read more: Famous at last for her previous novel, "The Friend," Sigrid Nunez strikes again

Day

By Michael Cunningham

Random House: 288 pages, $28

(Nov. 14)

On April 5 in the years 2019, 2020 and 2021, we visit two siblings inhabiting a Brooklyn brownstone. Robbie lives in the attic of the building Isabel owns with her husband, Dan, and their two children. The members of the family age, relationships change and COVID looms over everything. But Cunningham, a wondrous novelist concerned as always with human connection, keeps the pandemic on a short leash in a book that has less to do with isolation than how life changes us all, whether we want it to or not.

NONFICTION

To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul

By Tracy K. Smith

Knopf: 288 pages, $27

(Nov. 7)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. Poet Laureate (“Life on Mars”) wrote her first memoir, “Ordinary Light,” about her mother’s cancer diagnosis, in 2015. This second nonfiction work focuses on her father’s side of the family as a means of exploring Black strength and history, constructing a new way of tracing and talking about race in our country. Whether she’s in her father’s home of Sunflower, Ala., or teaching at Harvard, Smith reminds all Americans that without Black history, none of us have any history at all.

The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir

By Jami Nakamura Lin

Mariner: 352 pages, $30

(Nov. 7)

Hyakki Yagyo, or the Night Parade of 1,000 Demons, is a Japanese myth that once helped people account for the various states we now understand as mental illness. Lin lived for many years with undiagnosed bipolar syndrome, and often felt as if she existed in places where no one else did. The stories from her childhood about ghosts and demons comforted her, as those figures also seemed to live between worlds. Lin’s braiding of personal experience and cultural touchstones make this memoir very special.

Read more: Review: What a 1980 Japanese novel about a single mom foresaw about pandemic loneliness

Cacophony of Bone: The Circle of a Year

By Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Milkweed: 312 pages, $26

(Nov. 14)

The Irish writer (“Thin Places”) and her partner moved to a landlocked railway cottage a year before the pandemic; within that year, she became pregnant after many years of trying, started a garden after years of never bothering and found a home after moving in each of her previous 35 years. Her chapters are lyrical and deliberately slow, the time allowed its dignified procession without literary tricks. “I can’t go back to who I was before that year,” the author writes, and readers who follow her also will be changed.

Whistles From the Graveyard: My Time Behind the Camera on War, Rage, and Restless Youth in Afghanistan

By Miles Lagoze

Atria/One Signal: 272 pages, $30

(Nov. 7)

When Lagoze joined the Marines, he signed on for the military occupational specialty of combat cameraman. Deployed to Afghanistan in 2011 at 18, he was meant to capture images the U.S. government could use, but he soon realized his photos were revealing the truth of war. Whether seeing the fear in combatants and civilians alike or observing how societal ills followed young servicemembers to the front, Lagoze startles in his prose just as he did in his 2019 documentary, “Combat Obscura.”

Read more: Why this AI pioneer is calling for 'human centered' computing

The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

By Fei-Fei Li

Flatiron Books: 336 pages, $30

(Nov. 7)

Li, a computer science professor at Stanford, is the founding director of that university’s Institute for Human-Centered AI and the creator of ImageNet, an innovation that paved the way for some forms of artificial intelligence. She and her family immigrated from China to face poverty and illness in the United States, but Li prevailed over hardships to triumph in her field. Now she wants to be sure that the rest of us understand both the challenges and the incredible possibilities of the technology she helped pioneer. (Li joins the L.A. Times Book Club on Nov. 14.)

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.