November 2025 Books

What’s new and good to read? Dan Coombes has a look at what’s on offer from publishers in November and chooses The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie, Bluff by Francine Toon and Queen Esther by John Irving.

The Eleventh Hour – Salman Rushdie

The end-of-the-year flurry of big books from big authors probably doesn’t get much bigger than something new from possibly one of the most acclaimed, successful, bestselling, popular and acclaimed writers of the last fifty years. Whether you’re a frighteningly organised Christmas gift shopper for or just want something incredible to escape with in the winter months, this is a guaranteed fine choice for literature lovers – he really is one of the most gifted and evocative writers ever.

This collection of five stories is pretty much the definition of poignant, looking at the twilight of life and how we approach it with more haunting eloquence and quiet beauty than you can fit into a big box designed specifically to store very large quantities of beauty and eloquence.

Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight’s Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire.

In an English university college, an undead academic asks a lonely student to avenge his former tormentor. These five dazzling works of fiction move between the three countries that Salman Rushdie has called home – India, England and America – and explore what it means to approach the eleventh hour of life.

Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? How can we bid farewell to the places that we have made home? The Eleventh Hour ponders life and death, legacy and identity with the penetrating insight and boundless imagination that have made Salman Rushdie one of the most celebrated writers.

Images: The Eleventh Hour front cover,  Author Salman Rushdie

Bluff – Francine Toon

This is only Francine Toon’s second book but her first (Pine, which she won the Bloody Scotland horror award for) was fantastic, wonderfully written and deeply atmospheric, and this new tale even more so.

Plus if there’s a better setting for a bit of lovely, disquieting gothic fiction than the remote Scottish Highlands I can’t think of one.

There’s a mounting sense of dread, small-town claustrophobia, a mysterious disappearance and a sense of dark, secretive histories and strange revelations bubbling just under the surface.

She expertly balances realism and well-rounded characters with all the spookiness and unease and…well, no spoilers, but even if October’s been and gone it’s still exactly the right season for this kind of thing, and I’d be quite surprised if anything as well done or more chilling pops up before the end of the year.

Desperate to flee the town of St Rule, Joanie has long been looking forward to her big escape. But on the night of her school graduation this dream slips through her hands.

Devastated, Joanie falls into the orbit of an enigmatic couple – Erin and David – who offer her a new kind of escape. Charismatic, older and intellectual, they make Joanie feel alive and important in a way she didn’t know was possible.

Cameron, 2023. When Cameron arrives back in St Rule for Christmas a question burns in his mind: what ever happened to Joanie? It’s been a decade since he saw his former friend, and in truth he hadn’t given it much thought – busily building a life.

But as he starts to look for answers, it becomes clear that someone wants to keep this secret buried at all costs.

How far should he go to pursue the truth? Set amongst the ancient cobblestone of a Scottish coastal town steeped in history, Francine Toon blends the tension of a mystery with the chill of a modern gothic. This is a story where every shadow holds a secret, and every revelation brings Cameron and Joanie closer to a truth that could shatter their worlds.

Images: Bluff front cover,  Author Francine Toon

Queen Esther – John Irving

With the Big Christmas Release floodgates opening, it’s now statistically impossible to browse in a bookshop without seeing a famous author being described as a literary heavyweight, powerhouse, legend or wizard – and it can be tricky to avoid these and other cliches (I must be double figures already with those last two reviews alone) when describing a soaring eagle of the written word.

Still, it’s always good to see legendary alchemists of the printed page bringing out something new with the nights drawing in and all sensible people tucked up somewhere comfy and tastefully lit with a good book by 7:30.

So here’s another one – John Irving, author of A Prayer For Owen Meaney, The World According To Garp and most definitely an elemental force of storytelling – returns to the world of another of his most famous bestsellers, The Cider House Rules.

All nonsense about emboldened warriors of the novel riding their mighty steed of pencraft across the plains of literary engagement aside, Queen Esther is getting rave reviews already and is a sprawling, meandering (in a good way) multi-generational epic spanning decades and looking at the life of the orphaned Esther, the family who take her in and the challenges, struggles and prejudices they face as their stories evolve and intertwine and spawn entirely new ones across the best part of a century.

After forty years, John Irving returns to the world of his bestselling classic novel and Academy Award-winning The Cider House Rules, revisiting the orphanage in St. Cloud’s, Maine, where Dr Wilbur Larch takes in Esther, a Viennese-born Jew whose life is shaped by anti-Semitism. Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905.Her father dies on board a ship from Bremerhaven to Portland, Maine, and anti-Semites murder her mother in Portland.

In the orphanage at St. Cloud’s, it’s clear to Dr Larch, the physician and director of the orphanage, that the abandoned child not only knows she’s Jewish, but she’s familiar with the biblical Queen Esther she was named for.

Dr Larch knows it won’t be easy to find a Jewish family to adopt Esther; he doubts he’ll find any family to adopt her.

When Esther is fourteen, soon to become a ward of the state, Dr. Larch meets the Winslows, a philanthropic family with a history of providing for unadopted orphans.The Winslows aren’t Jewish, but they detest anti-Semitism and similar prejudice.

Esther’s gratitude to the Winslows is unending. As she retraces her steps to her birth city, Esther keeps loving and protecting the Winslows – even in Vienna. The final chapter of this historical novel is set in Jerusalem in 1981, when Esther is seventy-six.

Images: Queen Esther front cover, Author John Irving

Dan Coombes has been a bookseller for fifteen years, working at Bookcase on Chiswick High Road.

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