Great books are coming out this month from authors at all stages of their careers. Let’s start with playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes’ debut novel, The White Hot (One World/Random House, November 11), a blast of brilliant prose in the form of a letter from a mother to the daughter she deserted years ago. April Soto isn’t looking for forgiveness, but she wants to explain why she ran away from the anger that seemed to control both of their lives. “April is brutally honest, divulging family secrets and breaking a cycle of shame,” according to our starred review. “It’s a profound journey of the soul.”
If Hudes’ novel focuses intently on one woman’s voice, Brian Schaefer’s debut, Town & Country (Atria, November 4), takes in an entire gentrifying Hudson Valley town, focusing on a congressional race between a longtime local bar owner and a newcomer from New York City. Of course, the author avoids drawing clean lines between local residents—the bar owner’s wife is a real estate agent who campaigned against gay marriage but sells houses to the queer men flocking to town, while their son is newly out himself. “Schaefer does a masterful job delineating these and a large set of supporting characters,” says our starred review. “A thoroughly engaging and intelligent debut, brimming with insight and a sense of place.”
Jesse Q. Sutanto has written everything from YA novels and cozy mysteries to the darkly comic Dial A for Aunties trilogy. Her latest, Next Time Will BeOur Turn (Berkley, November 11), takes place in a near-future Jakarta, Indonesia, where teenage Izzy Chen doesn’t want to tell her status-conscious family that she’s gay. Then her grandmother, Magnolia, tells Izzy the story of her own college years in Los Angeles, when she fell in love with a girl named Ellery. “A queer Chinese Indonesian tear-jerker: a winning combination,” according to our review.
Ann Packer’s fiction has been brilliantly examining complicated relationships since the early 1990s; her new novel, Some Bright Nowhere (Harper/HarperCollins, November 11), introduces Claire and Eliot, a long-married couple whose world is shattered when Claire stops treatment for her terminal cancer—and then tells Eliot she wants two of her friends, not him, to take care of her through her final months. “Packer’s unsparing gaze would be hard to take if her characters weren’t so believably, messily, hurtfully human,” according to our starred review.
Lastly, there’s Disinheritance: The Rediscovered Stories (Counterpoint, November 25), a career-spanning collection of short fiction from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, perhaps best remembered for her screenplays for Merchant Ivory movies, including A Room With a View. Born in Germany to a Jewish family, she fled to Britain in 1939 and then moved to New Delhi in 1951 after marrying an Indian architect; she later lived in New York from 1975 until her death in 2013. All these influences can be seen in her work, which our starred review calls “brilliant, unsparing examinations of the human condition in all its variety.” I’ve been a fan of her novels for many years and am thrilled to have a volume of stories to buy as a gift for newcomers to her writing.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
