Best New Books To Read in November 2025

In his first work of fiction since the 2022 attack, Rushdie delivers five inventive, deeply felt stories that confront mortality with wit, rage, and imagination. From a ghost’s revenge in Cambridge to a prodigy’s meltdown in Mumbai, each story explores what it means to face the end—of a life, a legacy, a story. Kirkus calls it “a brilliant series of intimations of mortality… [that] celebrate life, language, and love in the face of death.”

In her first memoir, the author made famous by her extraordinarily crafted dystopian stories, turns her gaze inward. Book of Lives traces her unconventional childhood in the Canadian wilderness, her formative years spent abroad, and the intellectual and political battles that shaped novels like The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood is now 85, a two-time Booker Prize winner and cultural icon whose work has shaped how entire generations think about power and gender.

Decades after his beloved classic and Oscar-winning film, Irving revisits St. Cloud’s with the story of Esther Nacht, a Jewish orphan navigating faith, loss, and identity across continents and generations.

Set during Britain’s 1962 deep freeze, this portrait of rural life follows two neighboring families as their quiet routines fracture under snow and silence. Winner of this year’s Walter Scott Prize and just longlisted for the Booker, The Land in Winter is “beautifully atmospheric,” say the Booker judges. “Andrew Miller brings suspense and mystery to this seemingly inconsequential chapter in British history.”

In Lagos, a young woman struggles to break free from a family curse and the belief that she carries the soul of her dead cousin. Both hilarious and unsettling, Braithwaite’s novel explores the weight of superstition and the fight for self-determination in a world eager to define her. Real Simple calls it “a delicious page-turner with characters who burst off the page, and a lesson in fighting for the life you want.”

In this expansive conversation between veteran journalist Sam Smith, author of The Jordan Rules, and Hall of Fame coach Phil Jackson, the story of the NBA unfolds through 75 of its most iconic players—from Russell and Chamberlain to Jordan, Bryant, and Curry. Blending firsthand insight and decades of reporting, Masters of the Game charts how the league’s stars shaped not just basketball but American culture itself.

From the award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, this novel follows a queer Black man living in Tokyo whose mother shows up unannounced after ten years apart. Over shared meals and difficult conversations, the two slowly face what pushed them apart—and whether they can find their way back to each other.

In eleven new stories, Williams turns her unsparing eye to a world marked by cruelty, confusion, and fleeting moments of grace. Twin sisters seek penance for their family’s industrial fortune, a grown man drifts through memories of boarding-school innocence, and a “pelican child” lives with the irritable Baba Yaga in a hut on chicken legs. Kirkus, in a starred review, called the collection “superb, and yet more evidence that Williams should be next in line for the Nobel Prize in Literature.”

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer of Water by the Spoonful and screenwriter of In the Heights, this novel follows a young mother who leaves home for ten days that stretch into ten years. Told as a letter to the daughter she left behind, it’s a soulful and unexpectedly funny story of escape, rage, and self-reckoning.

Punk rock's beloved poet laureate and National Book Award winner is back with a sparkling new memoir which takes us through her teenage years. Smith details the inspiration she took from artists like Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan as she begins to merge poetry and music into the form that she has become celebrated for.