Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your November reading list. Booklover’s Thanksgiving arrives early this year, with most of November’s notable releases out Nov. 7 . That should make it easier to stock up on titles to hide behind after long hours with friends and family. At least two novels bring perspective to the COVID pandemic, while another involves a surprising view of the Vietnam War.
But Cunningham, a wondrous novelist concerned as always with human connection, keeps the pandemic on a short leash in a book that has less to do with isolation than how life changes us all, whether we want it to or not. To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul By Tracy K. Smith Knopf: 288 pages, $27 The Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. Poet Laureate wrote her first memoir, “Ordinary Light,” about her mother’s cancer diagnosis, in 2015.