The air is crisp, the blankets are calling, and there is no better time to trade your pumpkin spice latte for a piping hot plot twist. This month is serving up a feast of fresh fiction—full of stories to sweep you off your feet, keep you up past your bedtime, and make your TBR pile taller than ever. So grab your cosiest sweater and your favourite reading nook to dive into November’s most anticipated new reads!
Telenovela
By Gonzalo C. Garcia
9781913111717 | Galley Beggar Press | PB | £10.99 | 27th November 2025
Set in Santiago towards the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship, Telenovela explores the secret lives of a family swept up in this dark period of Chile’s history. There is Lucho: bullied by fellow soldiers for his love of poetry, thwarted in his ambitions to become a writer, unhappy at work. He seems like a loving father. He seems plain loveable, in fact. And maybe he is. But as Telenovela unfolds, other things come to light about Lucho that are less easy to indulge — or forgive. There is Ramona, Lucho’s wife: tormented by anxiety, overwhelmed by self-loathing and body image problems. As a drama student, Ramona once hoped to become a Telenovela star; she secretly daydreams that she might still get her big break. Guileless, gentle, Ramona seems like an innocent. But is she? Then there is Pablo, their son: dreamy, gentle, eager to make friends, to form his own band and write some worthwhile songs. Desperate to be cool… And increasingly, just desperate. Gonzalo C. Garcia makes us feel for these characters and want to understand them — but, as the novel unfolds, come to the frightening realisation of what it really means to have such understanding. And so it is that deeply human and deeply personal stories of mislaid ambition, failure and intergenerational trauma take on national — and universal significance.
My Ex-Girlfriend’s Wedding
By Sophie Crawford
9780857309341 | Verve Books | PB | £10.99 | 20th November 2025
Hope has nothing going for her. She’s in a job she hates, she’s been forced to quit her band after losing the ability to play guitar and, to make matters worse, her ex — the love of her life, Julia — is now getting married to her best friend’s ex (messy, right?). But there’s one silver lining: Hope has been invited to play at their wedding… and she’s going to get Julia back. However, the road to true love is never easy, and Hope’s journey is blocked by tarot readers, hen parties, visions from the past and, worst of all, Ruby. With their big eyes and extremely kissable mouth, Ruby is new to London’s convoluted queer scene and a much-needed breath of fresh air for Hope. Will Hope win back the woman she loves, or does the universe have something else in store?
Hyphenated Lives
By T. K. Sebastian
9781068495816 | Afsana Press | PB | £14.99 | 12th November 2025
A striking young man in his late twenties, Toros lives with his mother Meriam and younger sister Silva in south-west Turkey. It is the spring of 1956, and other than the haunting memories of autumn, there has been little to evoke the pains of their past lives. None, in fact, until one fateful call forces Toros to confront the looming shadows of his childhood. Assured of his magnificent triumph over his cruel father, he embarks on the most defining journey of his life, oblivious to the twists and turns that are about to unfold.
My Clavicle and Other Massive Misalignments
By Marta Sanz
Translated by Katie King
9781836750017 | Akoya Publishing | PB | £12.99 | 6th November 2025
‘I’m going to tell you what happened to me and what didn’t happen to me. The possibility that nothing happened to me is what’s giving me the shakes.’
Marta believes she is dying. With the onset of menopause, the changes to her body are stirring up new anxieties. Every time she feels a pain in her chest, a numbness in her arm, or a tension in her clavicle, she assumes she has cancer, or some other diagnosis she has yet to learn of. During a flight, she starts to experience a pain underneath her rib. Unsure whether the pain signals the ominous approach of death or a simple bout of flatulence, Marta descends into an examination of pain’s impact upon her life. Is her body failing her or is she failing her body? From one of Spain’s most widely read and acclaimed authors, My Clavicle And Other Massive Misalignments is a provocative and vulnerable semi-autobiographical novel rendering a memorable portrait of pain, health anxiety and menopause.
The Leather Boys
By Gillian Freeman
9781917792011 | Dead Ink | PB | £10.99 | 20th November 2025
Outsider Classics is Dead Ink’s resurrection ground for the strange, the silenced, and the outcasts. This series exhumes lost literary voices that were ahead of their time to restore them to the cult status they always deserved. From forgotten masterpieces to once-censored provocations, each title is a reaction against the canon curated for readers who want to stray into the margins and away from the mainstream. Dick and Reggie are ‘leather boys’, working-class London teens with an affinity for leather jackets and motorcycles who become friends through their involvement in a gang. For Dick, the money he gets from the gang’s thefts helps to support his ailing grandmother; for Reggie, membership in the gang provides relief from an unhappy home life and a loveless marriage. When Reggie decides to leave his unfaithful wife and move in with Dick, the two soon discover their feelings for each other are much stronger than mere friendship. As they make plans for their future together, will they find the happiness they seek, or is their love doomed to end in tragedy? The first novel to offer an authentic portrayal of love between ordinary, working-class young men, Gillian Freeman’s The Leather Boys is a groundbreaking classic of gay fiction that remains moving and compelling today. Freeman’s novel and its 1964 film adaptation played a vital part in liberalizing British attitudes towards homosexuality.
Terry Dactyl
By Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
9781917008150 | Cipher Press | PB | £12.99 | 13th November 2025
Terry Dactyl has lived many lives. Raised by boisterous lesbian mothers in Seattle, she comes of age as a trans girl in the 1980s in a world of dancing queens and late-night house parties just as the AIDS crisis ravages their world. After moving to New York City, Terry finds a new family among gender-bending club kids bonded by pageantry and drugs, fiercely loyal and unapologetic. She lands a job at a Soho gallery, where, after partying all night, she spends her days bringing club culture to the elite art world. Twenty years later, in a panic during the COVID-19 lockdown, Terry returns to a Seattle stifled by gentrification and pandemic isolation until resistance erupts following the murder of George Floyd, and her search for community ignites once again. In propulsive, intoxicating prose, Terry Dactyl traces an extraordinary journey from adolescence to adulthood, delivering a vital portrait of queer identity in all its peril and possibility.
Take Six: Six Catalan Women Writers
By Peter Bush
9781915568793 | Dedalus | PB | £11.99 | 6th November 2025
Take Six: Six Catalan Women Writers is a celebration of six remarkable Catalan women writers: Víctor Catala, Rosa Maria Arquimbau, Merce Rodoreda, Carme Riera, Imma Monso and Teresa Solana. The stories span almost hundred and twenty years, starting with Víctor Catala (the nom de plume of Caterina Albert) whose stories set in Barcelona, the Catalan countryside and fishing villages over half a century create a fictional universe in which hundreds of characters contest the unhappy destinies history has dealt them. Arquimbau and Rodoreda, active feminists and champions of Catalan, capture the heady atmosphere in Barcelona prior to the fascist insurrection on 1936 and the horror of war and exile in Nazi occupied France. The three living writers focus on the ironies of the transition from dictatorship to democracy with wit and compassion as women in their society struggle against a legacy of machismo and entrenched patriarchal attitudes. Many Catalan women novelists have been translated into English over the last twenty years and this anthology is witness to a vigorous tradition of short story writing that can be light-hearted and frivolous, tragic and noir, in a variety of styles that will delight and captivate readers.
Imagine Breaking Everything
By Lina Munar Guevara
Translated by Ellen Jones
9781916806122 | Peirene Press | PB | £12.99 | 10th November 2025
It’s a rainy weekend in Bogota, and Melissa is about to graduate from high school. If, that is, she can scrape together the money to pay for the printer she broke. Melissa used to break a lot of things, but after five years of living with her aunt Anahi, she has become much better at controlling her anger. Then, out of the blue and for the first time in six months, Melissa’s mother calls her and invites her to spend the weekend together in their old neighbourhood. Melissa is excited to spend time with her mum, but nervous about returning to the scene of her troubled early adolescence. Will she make it to Monday morning without jeopardising her future — or being swallowed up by her past?
Never King, The (Vicious Lost Boys 1)
By Nikki St. Crowe
9781638934370 | Zando | PB | £16.99 | 4th November 2025
The first book in the bestselling BookTok viral Vicious Lost Boys series, a Peter Pan-inspired enemies-to-lovers spicy romantasy where the villain gets the girl. The stories were all wrong-Hook was never the villain. For two centuries, all of the Darling women have disappeared on their eighteenth birthday. Sometimes they’re gone for only a day, some for as long as a week or a month. But they always return broken. Now, on the afternoon of my eighteenth birthday, my mother runs around the house, making sure all the windows are barred and the doors locked. But it’s pointless. Because when night falls, he comes for me. And this time, the Never King and the Lost Boys aren’t willing to let me go. NOTE: The Never King is a reimagining of Peter Pan and Wendy. Characters have been aged-up for this darker, grittier version. If you like your enemies-to-lovers dark romance with hot, ruthless, morally grey love interests, you’ll enjoy The Never King and the Vicious Lost Boys series. Expect hate kissing, fighting, bickering, and ‘touch her and I’ll unalive you’ vibes. Book one ends on a cliffhanger.
Letters From An Imaginary Country
By Theodora Goss
Translated by Jo Walton
9781616964405 | Tachyon Publications | PB | £16.99 | 11th November 2025
Roam through the captivating stories of World Fantasy, Locus, and Mythopoeic Award winner Theodora Goss (the Athena Club trilogy). This themed collection of imaginary places, with three new stories, recalls Susanna Clarke’s alternate Europe and the surreal metafictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Deeply influenced by the author’s Hungarian childhood during the regime of the Soviet Union, each of these stories engages with storytelling and identity, including her own. The infamous girl monsters of nineteenth-century fiction gather in London and form their own club. In the imaginary country of Thule. Characters from folklore band together to fight a dictator. An intrepid girl reporter finds the hidden land of Oz — and joins its invasion of our world. The author writes the autobiography of her alternative life and a science fiction love letter to Budapest. The White Witch conquers England with snow and silence.
The Sky of Sacrifice
By Rosalia Aguilar Solace
9781911231462 | Text Publishing Company | HB | £20 | 18th November 2025
When secrets cause sacrifice, friendships will be tested. Suttaru has been defeated, and the forces of evil have retreated. As the Great Library of Tomorrow prepares for a momentous celebration, Nu embraces both newfound love and her role as the Sage of Truth. However, when fresh nightmares prove to be the harbingers of a dark fate, romance must take a back seat to her responsibilities. When a savage act sends shock waves through the Great Library, the return of an old friend brings to light a hidden relic from the Book of Wisdom’s past. To stop the enemy, the Sages must pursue multiple paths. For Nu and Robin, this means traveling the realms in search of a mysterious figure from the past. Meanwhile, Veer and his companions brave a realm of darkness and despair, where even the strongest can become undone.
Carnaval Fever
By Yuliana Ortiz Ruano
Translated by Madeleine Arenivar
9781917126199 | Tilted Axis Press | PB | £14.99 | 11th November 2025
Sheltered within her grandmother’s fiercely protective household, Ainhoa blossoms under the guidance of her constellation of aunts — women who become her teachers, guardians, and spiritual anchors. Through Ainhoa’s keen observant eyes, readers experience how music and dance — particularly during the explosive energy of Carnaval — don’t merely entertain but form the very heartbeat of existence, a pulsing testament to Afro-Ecuadorian identity and resistance. Yet beneath this tapestry of warmth and celebration, Carnaval Fever fearlessly confronts the shadows: crushing economic hardship, the heartbreak of migration, and the ever-present threat of male violence hovering at the community’s edges. At its luminous core, however, this novel stands as a defiant celebration of women’s resilience, collective power, and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood that sustain communities through generations.
The Week of Colors
By Elena Garro
Translated by Megan McDowell
9781949641899 | Two Lines Press | PB | £15.99 | 11th November 2025
Short stories from the ‘cursed mother of magical realism’ (El Mundo), now in English for the first time. A woman flits between two realities centuries apart, as scenes from the violent conquest of Mexico bleed their way into her comfortable contemporary life. Two little girls visit the home of a sorcerer who tortures women named after the days of the week. Girls become dogs, a laborer hides human bones in bricks he’ll use to build a new development, and an old woman appears at an acquaintance’s door one night with a knife and a bone-chilling confession. With The Week of Colors, Elena Garro laid the groundwork for the literary movements that would shape the landscape of Latin American fiction and beyond. Here you’ll find the early roots of magical realism, feminist horror, and anticolonial speculative fiction. In The Week of Colors, Garro highlights the violence in our history, our homes, and our hearts, in vivid color.
The Cracks We Bear
By Catalina Infante
Translated by Michelle Mirabella
9781642861594 | World Editions | PB | £14.99 | 4th November 2025
Instead of joy, she feels fear, and then anger at her own late mother for her absence. The Cracks We Bear opens as a story about new motherhood. Soon, however, it reveals itself to be an exploration of memory and trauma as Laura starts to recall her childhood in Chile. Born in exile to staunchly communist parents, she returns to Chile with her mother after the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In the fledgling democracy she grows up in, topics of capitalism and communism are ever present. Laura’s reflections, born from personal experience, are interwoven with raw and honest memories of her family life. Borrowing elements from the Bildungsroman, and pulling from the Latin American short story tradition, Catalina Infante recounts Laura’s past in vignettes. Piece by piece, the short chapters come together like a reconstructed vase, bearing its cracks.
