Quizlit’s Book of the Month November 2026 is Astronaut! by Oana Aristide. Part thriller, part fable, Astronaut! is darkly funny, touching and wholly original.
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Book of the Month November 2026
Astronaut! by Oana Aristide
Romania, 1989: a grey place of mysterious queues, ubiquitous informers and daily news flashes about a man-eating bear that is terrorising the country.
Amidst the daily drudge of work, rationing and careful conversation with neighbours, two lives unexpectedly collide when an idealistic police detective, Constantin, is tasked with solving a string of grisly murders, and a rebellious school child, Lia, is unwittingly drawn into her elderly neighbour’s seditious plot.
Dryly satirical, incredibly tense and deeply moving, ASTRONAUT! is both a detective novel and a coming-of-age tale, one with a perennially relevant message: the lies we accept today become the truths of tomorrow.
“Imagine a dystopia set neither in the future nor in fantasy; that’s the 1989 Romania 7-year-old Lia inhabits, its adults living in fear of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, its infrastructure strained by deprivation. . . . When Lia sets out to buy her mother a birthday gift, she sets in motion a series of weirdly probable yet totally weird events.”
― Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
“Aristide evokes in this splendid novel the heightened fear and tension of 1989 Romania near the end of Nicolae Ceau?escu’s totalitarian reign.”
― Sophia Stewart, Millions
“Oana Aristide’s Astronaut! is the kind of novel that knows exactly what it’s doing without making a show of it. . . . The result is a book that feels uncannily lived rather than arranged, alert to both the comedy and the humiliation of ordinary life under distortion.”
― Jonathan Gardner, Brooklyn Rail
“Favorite book of the year so far, hands down.”
― Sarah Brown of Zenith Bookstore, Minnesota Public Radio
“Buzzy . . . darkly funny.”
― Erica Ezeifedi, Book Riot
“Oana Aristide’s new novel is an entertaining fable of serial murder, killer bears, and revolution.”
― Cory Oldweiler, Los Angeles Review of Books
“[A] splendid novel. . . . A stirring ode to the goodness that persists despite humanity’s cruelty.”
― Publishers Weekly
Also by Oana Aristide
A road trip beneath clear blue skies and a blazing sun: a reclusive artist is forced to abandon his home and follow two young sisters across a post-pandemic Europe in search of a safe place. Is this the end of the world?
Meanwhile two computer scientists have been educating their baby in a remote location. Their baby is called Talos, and he is an advanced AI program. Every week they feed him data, starting from the beginning of written history, era by era, and ask him to predict what will happen next to the human race. At the same time they’re involved in an increasingly fraught philosophical debate about why human life is sacred and why the purpose for which he was built – to predict threats to human life to help us avoid them – is a worthwhile and ethical pursuit.
These two strands come together in a way that is always suspenseful, surprising and intellectually provocative: this is an extraordinarily prescient and vital work of fiction – an apocalyptic road novel to frighten and thrill.
If you enjoyed Book of the Month November 2026, check out 5 New Non Fiction Books Nov 2026