5 Marvelous New Books for November 2024
November marks the release of the long waited new novel from Haruki Murakami and a stunning debut novel from Tom Newlands. Enjoy 5 Marvelous New Books for November 2024!
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5 Marvelous New Books for November 2024
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami
The long-awaited new novel from Haruki Murakami, his first in six years, revisits a Town his readers will remember, a place where a Dream Reader reviews dreams and where our shadows become untethered from our selves. A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for these strange post-pandemic times, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.
A novel about the porous boundary between the real and shadow worlds. After losing his beloved as a teenager, the narrator finds his way to the Town, a mysterious place where he finds work as a Dream Reader in the library. Back in the real world as an adult he tries to recapture his time in the Town by taking a job as a librarian in a remote location in Fukushima province, where he takes over the job from a ghost.
When a boy, M, who visits the library every day, vanishes, the boundaries between spatial and temporal realities, and between individuals, seems to have been breached. A novel about the barriers, imaginary and real, that we put up between and within ourselves.
Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands
Fife, in the blazing hot summer of 1994. Cora Mowat’s mates don’t understand her, but then Cora Mowat doesn’t understand herself. She’s stuck on a seaside council estate full of dafties, old folk and seagulls, with a thousand dreams and a restless brain that won’t behave. She’s dying to escape but unsure of what the future holds – if it holds anything at all for a girl like her.
When her Mam’s new boyfriend moves in, tensions rise in their tiny house. Gunner means well, but he’s dodgy – a shaven-headed shoplifter with more than a few secrets stashed under the bed. As their attempts to forge a makeshift family unravel, Cora rails against her small-town existence in search of love, acceptance and a path to something good. But sometimes you can’t move forward until you find your way back . . .
In this extraordinary debut, drawn from life but written with riotous imagination, Tom Newlands explores what it means to come of age in a forgotten corner of Scotland and dream of a life that feels out of reach. Vibrant, lyrical and fiercely funny, Only Here, Only Now is a story about poverty, identity and family that shines with hope and resilience.
City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim
A once-famous ballet dancer faces a devastating choice – to return to the cutthroat world of Russian ballet that nearly broke her, or to walk away forever – in this incandescent novel of love and redemption
Prima ballerina Natalia Leonova was once celebrated across the world, her signature bravura in demand on stages from St Petersburg to Paris and New York. But at the top of her career, a terrible, mysterious accident forces her to retire.
Injured and alone, Natalia is haunted by her relationships with two gifted dancers, Dmitri and Alexander, who were responsible for her soaring highs, her darkest hours and, ultimately, her downfall. But when Dmitri resurfaces with a tantalising offer for Natalia, she must decide whether she can face her past for a chance to dance again – and to return to the great love of her life.
Painting a vivid portrait of a world in which ruthless ambition, desire and sublime artistry collide, City of Night Birds unveils the making of a dancer with both profound intimacy and breathtaking scope.
The Magnificent Ruins by Nayantara Roy
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Lila De is on the verge of a career breakthrough when she gets a call from her mother in Kolkata, informing her that she’s inherited her family’s sprawling estate-so she returns there after a decade of estrangement. Lila’s grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins still live on different floors of the house, and all of them resent her sudden inheritance. To make matters more complicated, her first boyfriend seeks her out when she arrives, and her star author-and occasional lover- is suddenly determined to make things serious.
As Lila come to terms with both past and present, suppressed family secrets emerge, culminating in a shocking act of violence. Lila has no choice but to finally address her family’s inherited custom of keeping everything under the surface.
An Earthquake is A Shaking of the Surface of the Earth by Anna Moschovakis
After a seismic event leaves the world shattered, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk on ground that is in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate Tala becomes an existential pursuit, leading back in time and out into a desolate, dust-covered city, where the narrator is targeted by charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives.
Torn between a gnawing desire to reckon with the forces that have made her and an immediate need to find the stability to survive, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, resistance, and the limits of personal transformation in an alienated, alienating world.
If you enjoyed 5 Marvelous New Books for November 2024 check out our Book of the Month October 2024 Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda
