Books of the month for November

General Fiction: Susan Abulhawa – The Blue Between Sky and Water

It is 1947, and Beit Daras, a rural Palestinian village, is home to the Baraka family – oldest daughter Nazmiyeh, brother Mamdouh, beautiful, dreamy Mariam and their widowed mother. When Israeli forces descend, sending the village up in flames, the family must take the long road to Gaza, in a walk that will test them to their limits.

Sixty years later, in America, Mamdouh's granddaughter Nur falls in love with a doctor. Following him to his work in Gaza, she meets Alwan, who will help Nur discover the ties of kinship that transcend distance – and even death.

British Crime: L. C. Tyler – The Herring Seller's Apprentice

His latest novel is going nowhere, a mid-life crisis is looming and he’s burdened by the literary agent he probably deserves: Elsie Thirkettle, a diminutive but determined individual who claims to enjoy neither the company of writers nor literature of any sort. But however bad things look, they can always get worse, as Ethelred discovers when his ex-wife, Geraldine, vanishes close to his Sussex home. When the disappearance becomes a murder enquiry, the police quickly decide that Geraldine Tressider has been the victim of a local serial killer.

Tough Crime: Sam Hawken – The Night Charter

Meet Camaro Espinoza. She's spent her whole life protecting people: first at home, then in the army. Sometimes that means leaving bodies behind. She'll be the best ally you ever have – but you don't want to be on her bad side. Right now she's running a boat off the Miami shore, trying to keep a low profile. But then a man called Parker comes to her offering good money, and bad trouble. Camaro doesn't want to get involved, but Parker has a daughter who'll suffer if she refuses to help. When the job goes badly wrong, Camaro finds herself in the midst of double crosses, international intrigue and scattered bullets. She's determined to save the girl's life… but it may be at the cost of her own.

Fantasy: Genevieve Cogman – The Invisible Library (#1)

The first instalment of an adventure featuring stolen books, secret agents and forbidden societies - like 'Doctor Who' with librarian spies! Irene must be at the top of her game or she'll be off the case – permanently…

Irene is a professional spy for the mysterious Library, which harvests fiction from different realities. And along with her enigmatic assistant Kai, she's posted to an alternative London.Their mission – to retrieve a dangerous book. But when they arrive, it's already been stolen. London's underground factions seem prepared to fight to the very death to find her book.

Science Fiction: Nik Abnett – Savant

His mind can save the world, if she can save him from the human race…

The Shield is Earth's only defence. Rendering the planet invisible from space, it keeps humanity safe from alien invasion.

The Actives maintain the shield -no one is sure how -butwithout them, the Shield cannot function.When an Active called Tobefinds himself caught in a probability loop, the Shield is compromised. Soon, Tobe's malady spreads among the Active. Earth becomes vulnerable.Tobe s assistant, Metoo, is only interested in his wellbeing. Earth security s paramount concern is the preservation of the Shield. As Metoo strives to prevent Tobe s masters from undermining his fragile equilibrium, the global danger escalates.

The Shield must be maintained at all costs…

Paranormal/Urban Fantasy: Alex White – Every Mountain Made Low

Loxley Fiddleback can see the dead, but the problem is... the dead can see her.

Ghosts have always been cruel to Loxley Fiddleback – but none more thanthe spirit of her only friend, alive only hours earlier. Loxley isn t equipped to solve a murder: she lives near the bottom of a cutthroat, strip-mined metropolis known as The Hole, suffers from crippling anxiety and can't cope withstrangers. Worse still, she s haunted.

She inherited her ability to see spirits from the women of her family, but the dead see her, too. Ghosts are drawn to her, and their lightest touch leaves her with painful wounds.

Loxley swears to take blood for blood and find her friend s killer. In doing so, she uncovers a conspiracy that rises all the way to the top of The Hole. As her enemies grow wise to her existence, she becomes the quarry, hunted by a brutal enforcer named Hiram McClintock. In sore need of confederates, Loxley must descend into the strangest depths of the city in order to have the revenge she seeks and, ultimately, her own salvation.

Teen reading: Marcus Sedgwick – The Ghosts of Heaven

The spiral has existed as long as time has existed.

It's there when a girl walks through the forest, the moist green air clinging to her skin. There centuries later in a pleasant greendale, hiding the treacherous waters of Golden Beck that take Anna, who they call a witch. There on the other side of the world as a mad poet watches the waves and knows the horrors the hide, and far into the future as Keir Bowman realises his destiny.

Each takes their next step in life. None will ever go back to the same place. And so, their journeys begin…

Classic of the Month: Barbara Pym – Less than Angels

Formidable Miss Doggett fills her life by giving tea parties to young academics and acting as watchdog of the morals of North Oxford. Anthea, her great-niece, is in love with a dashing upper-class undergraduate with political ambitions. Of this, Miss Doggett thoroughly approves. Anthea's father, however, an Oxford don, is tired of his marriage and carrying on in the most unseemly fashion with his student Barbara Bird – they have been spotted together at the British Museum! Miss Doggett isn't aware, though, that under her very own roof the lodging curate has proposed to her paid companion Miss Morrow. She wouldn't approve of that at all.

Non-Fiction:  A. Scott Berg – Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

The talents Maxwell Perkins nurtured were known worldwide: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe among numerous others. But the man himself remained a mystery, a backstage presence who served these authors not only as editor but as critic, career manager, moneylender, psychoanalyst, confessor and friend.

This outstanding biography, a winner of the National Book Award, is the first to explore the fascinating life of this editor extraordinaire in both professional and personal domains. It tells not only of Perkins' stormy marriage and secret twenty-five-year romance with Elizabeth Lemmon, but also of his intensely intimate relationships with the leading literary lights of the twentieth century.