November Reading List

Looking for books to reach your end of year Goodreads reading challenge? Here are some books which come with rave reviews and you will certainly enjoy reading. Irrespective of any month you choose to read them, these books are classics you will enjoy reading in every season and which will be a great addition to your reading lists.

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

The 2020 Booker Prize winner, Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young lonely boy set in 1980s run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put men out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes is his guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good to brighten up her grey life. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, as she drains away the family's savings. Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance her, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between binges and sobriety. A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, it is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. It is about poverty, abuse and a real exercise in empathy. You can tell that Agnes is trying her best and you're rooting for her, but at the same time you also recognize that she is a terrible mother to Shuggie, who is in an incredibly unhealthy, unsafe, unreliable environment, even though she doesn't want to. It's a lesson in how two things can be true at the same time. Shuggie meanwhile struggles to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her--even her beloved Shuggie.  

Check it here

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Set in southern Appalachia mountains, this is the story of a boy, born to a teen single mother in a trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. He braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite reading, but he provided its inspiration. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.

Check it here

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Open Water is a modern love story, soundtracked by  contemporary references to R&B and Hip Hop. It is an exploration of the city, masculinity, police brutality, the black male body and its role and perception in society. It's about the anxieties at the start of a new relationship, when you're feeling yourself starting to give yourself over to somebody, but you're scared of being vulnerable. Two young people meet at a South East London pub. Both Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists -- he a photographer, she a dancer -- trying to make their mark in a city that in turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence. At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it.

Check it here

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

Set in modern Britain we follow two sets of families. The Pasha family consists of twins Aneeka and Parvaiz and their older sister Isma, who has raised them in the years since the death of their mother; their jihadi father, whom the twins never knew, is also dead. Parvaiz attempts to follow in his father's footsteps by joining ISIS. He soon decides he has made a serious mistake and his twin sister attempts to help him return to Britain, in part through her romantic relationship with Eamonn Lone, son of British Home Secretary Karamat Lone, who has built his political career on his rejection of his own Muslim background.  The concerns of the novel include the identity and security of Muslims in Britain. It speaks of the troubles of Muslims as they struggle to maintain a unique cultural identity while defending their ''Britishness'' and loyalty to the state against political and social activists who wish to alienate them.

Check it here

The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré

Set in Nigeria, it's about Adunni a fourteen-year-old girl who knows what she wants: an education. She recognizes that education is what can unlock a brighter future for her and that is her biggest goal. As the only daughter of a broke father, she is a valuable commodity. Removed from school and sold as a third wife to an old man, Adunni's life amounts to this: four goats, two bags of rice, some chickens and a new TV. When unspeakable tragedy swiftly strikes in her new home, she is secretly sold as a domestic servant to a household in the wealthy enclaves of Lagos, where no one will talk about the strange disappearance of her predecessor, Rebecca. As a yielding daughter, a subservient wife, and a powerless servant, Adunni is repeatedly told that she is nothing. But Adunni won't be silenced. She is determined to find her voice - in a whisper, in song, in broken English - until she can speak for herself, for the girls like Rebecca who came before, and for all the girls who will follow. This coming of age novel is about the way education can mobilize people. It is about a courageous girl determined to make more from her life than she has been given. 

Check it here

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

wWe follow three cultures, three families, three generations in modern Britain. At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.

Check it here

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

The novel portrays the lives of four classmates from a small Massachusetts college, who move to New York and who are best friends growing up together. It's about love and friendship. We watch them grow up and navigate life, face the peaks and troughs. They fall in and out of each other's lives. They're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.

Check it here

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

This book is a haunting slow book about a character who is in an unknown and unknowable place. Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known. The novel's hundreds of halls and vestibules, triggers a gradual loss of memory and identity in newcomers. The story is told through the research notes of the eponymous narrator, who reconstructs the story of his own arrival as he explores this world. Susanna Clarke illustrates how blissful ignorance does not and cannot last forever. 

Check it here

Happy reading.

XOXO