Books on Our Radar This November
Welcome to Books on Our Radar, your go-to guide for unearthing the most exciting reads this November. Whether you’re a seasoned bookworm with a fellow book-buying addiction or someone looking to step outside your literary comfort zone, this month’s list is packed with fresh releases as well as some up and coming hidden gems to inspire your next read.
From heartfelt debuts to gripping mysteries and thought-provoking explorations of love, identity, and family, this month's selection offers a vibrant mix of genres and voices. Whether you're drawn to sweeping narratives that span continents, intimate tales of human connection, or sharp dissections of masculinity and relationships, there’s a story here to spark your curiosity.
This month, journey through the electrifying world of music in Deep Cuts, uncover hidden truths in the familial drama of The Homemade God, and immerse yourself in the eerie allure of The Silence Factory. For readers craving nonfiction, Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined and Please Find Attached offer fresh perspectives on the human experience. And if you’re looking for tender, unforgettable love stories, both May All Your Skies Be Blue and Love in Exile will leave you deeply moved.
No matter your literary tastes, these titles are sure to inspire, challenge, and stay with you long after the last page.
Deep Cuts
Released 13/03/2025
The first time Joe plays Percy one of his songs in his college room in 2000, she instantly realises three things:
One, she is watching a star in the making.
Two, she can shape his music into something extraordinary.
Three, she will always be on the sidelines.
She swallows her jealousy and throws herself into collaboration, transforming Joe’s songs into indie hits with her blistering critiques.
But there’s an undercurrent to the music they’re making – something undeniably electric, hurtling toward love. And then, almost inevitably, towards heartbreak.
As Joe steps into the spotlight, can Percy bear to watch on in silence?
And can he exist there without her?
Deep Cuts is an irresistible novel about passion and obsession, love and longing and, above all, our need to be heard. It's perfect for readers who loved Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, One Day, Daisy Jones and the Six or High Fidelity.
The Homemade God
Released 17/04/2025
There is a heatwave across Europe.
Goose and his three sisters gather at the family's house by Lake Orta in Piedmont, Italy. Their father, a famous artist, has recently remarried a much younger woman and decamped to Italy to finish his masterpiece. Now he is dead and there is no sign of a painting.
Alhough the siblings have always been close, as they search for answers over that summer, the things they learn - about themselves, their father and their new stepmother - will drive them apart before they can come to any kind of understanding of what their father's legacy truly is.
Extraordinarily compelling, at heart this is a novel about sibling relationships and those hairline cracks that can appear within a family: what what happens when they splinter, and what it would take to mend them.
The Silence Factory
Out Now
Henry dreams of silence.
A world without the clattering of carriages through cobbled streets, the distant cries of drunken brawls, the relentless ticking of the clock.
Then he meets a fascinating, mysterious gentleman who sells just that. Precious silk that can drown out the clamour of the world – and everything Henry is so desperate to escape.
Summoned to Sir Edward’s secluded factory to try to cure his young daughter’s deafness, Henry is soon drawn deeper and deeper into the origins of this otherworldly gift: a gift that has travelled from ancient Mediterranean glades to English libraries.
Ignoring repeated warnings from the girl's secretive governess, he allows himself to fall under the spell of Sir Edward and his silk… but when he learns its true cost, will it be too late to turn back?
Love in Exile
Released 06/02/2025
Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture.
Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled.
In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.
Before We Hit the Ground
Released 27/02/2025
‘Love was a tightrope between freedom and control. He didn’t know how others seemed to walk it with ease’
This is the challenge Elom and his family face in the years before his unexpected death.
Caught between his well-meaning yet misapprehending family, his boisterous friends, and his self-assured partner Ben, Elom struggles to fit in. All he ever wants is to feel understood – but what does it mean to live authentically when the only thing changing faster than the world around you is the world within?
Moving between Accra, Glasgow and London, Selali Fiamanya’s extraordinary debut asks what it means to love and be loved in return. Before We Hit the Ground is an intimate portrait of a family, and one man’s struggle to find his place.
Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined
Out Now
What is masculinity? Dominating the world around us, from Trump's twitter outbursts to deadly gun violence, from male suicide rates to incels on Reddit and 4chan, masculinity is perceived to be 'toxic', 'fragile' and 'in crisis'.
In Mask Off, JJ Bola exposes masculinity as a performance that men are socially conditioned into. Using examples of non-Western cultural traditions, music and sport, he shines light on historical narratives around manhood, debunking popular myths along the way. He explores how LGBTQ men, men of colour, and male refugees experience masculinity in diverse ways, revealing its fluidity, how it's strengthened and weakened by different political contexts, such as the patriarchy or the far-right, and perceived differently by those around them.
At the heart of love and sex, the political stage, competitive sports, gang culture, and mental health issues, lies masculinity: Mask Off is an urgent call to unravel masculinity and redefine it.
May All Your Skies Be Blue
Released 13/02/2025
From the author of the beloved debut Boys Don’t Cry – an unforgettable story of love, loss, regret and the indelible marks one person can make on your life.
He’s leaning in. I’m leaning in. ‘The future is ours to make, Shauns,’ he says, lips almost touching.
Summer, 1991.
Dean: sun-stung and sticky with cool ice-pop juice, walks to the middle of The Green to get a good gawk at the new salon. And at the owner’s kid. Hands deep in his pockets, his jet-black mop of hair hides the tension in his face and shoulders at the thought of going back home.
Shauna: stands well hid behind her ma – her eyes dark and haunted like the rest of her. The salon is theirs, a fresh start. The smell of her ma’s Body Shop perfume clings to her jumper – Shauna can’t be anywhere else other than here.
Instantly inseparable, their friendship blooms. But as time passes and tell-tale blushes and school fights develop into something deeper, conflicting responsibilities threaten to pull Shauna and Dean apart.
When all seems lost, will they find each other under the same blue sky?
The Colour of Our Sky
Out Now
A sweeping, emotional journey of two childhood friends in Mumbai, India, whose lives converge only to change forever one fateful night
India, 1986: Mukta, a ten-year-old village girl from the lower caste Yellama cult has come of age and must fulfill her destiny of becoming a temple prostitute, as her mother and grandmother did before her. In an attempt to escape her fate, Mukta is sent to be a house girl for an upper-middle class family in Mumbai. There she discovers a friend in the daughter of the family, high spirited eight-year-old Tara, who helps her recover from the wounds of her past. Tara introduces Mukta to an entirely different world—one of ice cream, reading, and a friendship that soon becomes a sisterhood.
But one night in 1993, Mukta is kidnapped from Tara’s family home and disappears. Shortly thereafter, Tara and her father move to America. A new life in Los Angeles awaits them but Tara never recovers from the loss of her best friend, or stops wondering if she was somehow responsible for Mukta’s abduction.
Eleven years later, Tara, now an adult, returns to India determined to find Mukta. As her search takes her into the brutal underground world of human trafficking, Tara begins to uncover long-buried secrets in her own family that might explain what happened to Mukta—and why she came to live with Tara’s family in the first place.
Moving from a traditional Indian village to the bustling modern metropolis of Mumbai, to Los Angeles and back again, this is a heartbreaking and beautiful portrait of an unlikely friendship—a story of love, betrayal, and, ultimately, redemption.
Please Find Attached
Released 16/01/2025
Attachment theory is everywhere, but is everything you've heard about it right? Laura Mucha explains it all. Learn how to better understand yourself and your relationships, and how to improve them - Fearne Cotton
Do you over-analyse relationships? Or do you avoid thinking about them altogether? How do you think your childhood impacts you and your relationships?
In Please Find Attached seven people talk candidly about their upbringings, loves and losses. Delving deep into their lives, Laura Mucha explains everything you need to know about attachment theory, the most well-researched relationship science, and how it can make sense of our lives.
Please Find Attached explores why you think, feel and behave the way you do with loved ones, and helps you have better relationships as a result.
