What to read in November – our 5 top choices

Our pick

1. Time of the Child – Niall Williams

Bloomsbury Publishing – RRP: £16.99

Advent 1962. We return to Williams’s Irish parish of Faha, where diligent Ronnie keeps the show on the road for her widower GP father, Dr Jack Troy.

He worries it’s no life for his eldest daughter, blaming himself for her solitary state. Then the boy Jude Quinlan, son of a feckless farmer, brings a foundling girl to the door (a Christmas gift like no other), and the Troys have a secret to keep from the nosy and judgmental elements of the community.

Like aspiring author Ronnie, now smitten with baby ‘Noelle’, Williams sees in Faha ‘the full of humanity in its ordinary clothes’, and renders personalities for us in tender, luminous prose. Not so much writing as alchemy.

2. The Land in Winter – Andrew Miller

Hachette UK – RRP £20

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We stay in the same harsh winter of 1962–63, but now we’re in frigid, snowbound England where Eric Parry, another rural GP, has a guilty secret.

His wife, Irene, has no idea, as an unlikely friendship grows between her and her neighbour Rita, a sweet, dippy, funny farmer’s wife and former club hostess.

Like Niall Williams, Miller works magic, bringing to life not just human relations, but the Sixties too, before they began to swing.

3. Ice Town – Will Dean

Hachette UK – RRP £20

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They laugh at temperatures of -20°C in the Swedish ski town of Esseberg, but when a deaf teenager goes missing, with a murderer on the loose and no way out but a mountain tunnel, it’s no laughing matter.

Another case for Dean’s resourceful, hearing-impaired ace journalist Tuva Moodyson. Nordic noir from a Midlands-born Brit who now calls an elk forest home. Best enjoyed with a steaming mug of glögg.

4. The Enigma Girl – Henry Porter

Quercus Books – RRP £16.99

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Super-intrepid (or should that be insanely reckless?) agent Slim Parsons goes undercover for MI5 to infiltrate a news website that’s leaking state secrets, and soon she’s risking her life to save victims of slavery.

Porter draws on his journalistic experience in this riveting, deeply researched novel about the heirs to the Bletchley Park codebreakers (thank you, Poland!), corruption, the role of AI, and state overreach.

5. The Company of Owls – Polly Atkin

Elliott & Thompson – RRP £16.99

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In the aloneness of the dark of night, this poet author (who lives with a painful genetic disorder) finds solace in hearing her tawny owl neighbour around her home in Grasmere, Cumbria.

An elegiac meditation laced with gems of owl lore – they pair for life but spend time apart, love to sunbathe, have a wide vocal repertoire, and are not, in truth, so very wise (maybe that’s why they’re said to gather in ‘parliaments’).