Featured November Releases

Did one of the book covers on our homepage catch your eye? They are all new titles being released in November 2020, and all are well-reviewed and anticipated. Read below for a description of each, and click the linked title if you'd like to request a copy or get your name on the wait list. And don't forget to watch for more featured releases next month!

Featured Fiction Titles for November:

Spellbreaker by Charlie N. Holmberg
Orphaned Elsie learned early that there were two kinds of wizards: those who pay for the power to cast spells and those, like her, born with the ability to break them. But as an unlicensed magic user, her gift is a crime. Commissioned by an underground group, Elsie uses her spellbreaking to help the common man. She always did love the tale of Robin Hood. Elite magic user Bacchus is one spell away from his mastership when he catches Elsie breaking an enchantment. To protect her secret, Elsie strikes a bargain. She’ll help Bacchus fix unruly spells around his estate if he doesn’t turn her in. Working together, Elsie’s trust in—and fondness for—the handsome stranger grows. So does her trepidation about the rise in the murders of wizards and the theft of the spellbooks their bodies leave behind. 

The Orchard by David Hopen
Ari’s life has been governed by strict rules. In ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn, his days are dedicated to study and religious rituals, and adolescence feels lonely. So when his family announces they are moving to a Miami suburb, Ari seizes his chance for reinvention. Enrolling in an opulent Jewish academy, he is stunned by his peers’ wealth, ambition, and shameless pursuit of life’s pleasures. When the academy’s golden boy, Noah, takes Ari under his wing, Ari finds himself in the school’s most exclusive group. These friends are magnetic and defiant—especially Evan, the brooding genius of the bunch, still living in the shadow of his mother’s death. Influenced by their charismatic rabbi, the group begins testing their religion in unconventional ways. Soon Ari and his friends are pushing moral boundaries and careening toward a perilous future—one in which the traditions of their faith are repurposed to mysterious, tragic ends. 

The Kingdom by Jo Nesbo
Roy has never left the mountain town he grew up in, unlike his brother Carl who couldn't wait to get out. Just like everyone else in town, Roy believed Carl was gone for good. But Carl has big plans for his hometown. And when he returns with a mysterious new wife and a business opportunity that seems too good to be true, tensions begin to surface and unexplained deaths come under new scrutiny. Soon powerful players set their sights on taking the brothers down by exposing their role in the town's sordid history. But Roy and Carl are survivors, and no strangers to violence. Roy has always protected his younger brother. As the body count rises, though, Roy's loyalty to family is tested. And then Roy finds himself inextricably drawn to Carl's wife, Shannon, an attraction that will have devastating consequences.

Featured Nonfiction Titles for November: 

We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper
1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, a 23-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe's Vice President, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge apartment. Forty years later, Becky Cooper, a curious undergrad, hears whispers of the story. At first the body was nameless and the story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumor proves false, the story that Cooper will follow for ten years is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a 'cowboy culture' among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims. 

Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis by Jeffrey H. Jackson
This is the first book to tell the history of an anti-Nazi campaign undertaken by two French women, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, who drew on their skills as avant-garde artists to write and distribute “paper bullets”— insults against Hitler, calls to rebel, and subversive fiction designed to demoralize Nazi troops. Devising their own PSYOPS campaign, they slipped their notes into soldier’s pockets or tucked them inside newsstand magazines. Hunted by the secret field police, Lucy and Suzanne were caught in 1944, when the Germans imprisoned them and sentenced them to death. They survived, but even in jail they continued to fight by spreading a message of hope. Better remembered by their artist names, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, the couple’s actions were even more courageous because they were lesbian partners known for cross-dressing and creating gender-bending work that the Nazis called “degenerate art.” In addition, Lucy was half Jewish, and they had communist affiliations in Paris, where they attended political rallies and socialized with artists like Gertrude Stein. 

This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing: A Memoir by Jacqueline Winspear
After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her story tackles the difficult, poignant, and fascinating family accounts of her paternal grandfather’s shellshock; her mother’s evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father’s torturous assignment to an explosives team during WWII; her parents’ years living with Romany Gypsies; and Winspear’s own childhood picking hops and fruit on farms in rural Kent, capturing her ties to the land and her dream of being a writer at its very inception.