Six November Books: From Louise Kennedy to a Lost Don DeLillo

Six books arrive in November, and one of them carries a secret kept for four decades. Don DeLillo wrote the ribald hockey novel Amazons under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell and did not publicly acknowledge it until 2020. He approved its republication only earlier this year. His entire preface is a business card bearing the statement: "I don't want to talk about it."

That curio anchors a varied list. A roundup originally published ahead of Election Day framed these titles as a reprieve from punditry, polling and horserace imagery. The books themselves range from star-crossed romance to sex-fueled farce, from high-stakes struggle to hard-won redemption.

What does Louise Kennedy's second novel deliver?

Stations is the Northern Irish author's sophomore effort. Her debut, Trespasses, established the pattern: young love destroyed by forces beyond the lovers' control. Speaking with All Things Considered in 2022, Kennedy described taking up writing in earnest after nearly three decades as a chef. "I just felt better somehow, which is kind of weird," she said, calling the shift "strangely liberating."

The new book again foregrounds the devastating fallout of an inauspicious young love. This time the couple struggles not under religious difference but under the long shadows of their family pasts.

Who else returns with a big family novel?

Mary Beth Keane publishes Whale Harbor, her latest since Ask Again, Yes (2019). Reviewing that earlier book on Fresh Air, critic Maureen Corrigan compared Keane to Ann Patchett: "Both have the magical ability to seem to be telling 'only' a closely-observed domestic tale that transforms into something else deep and, yes, universal."

Corrigan called Ask Again, Yes a "modestly magnificent novel." The same ability, in the critic's assessment, drives Whale Harbor. The tale of an Irish father and his many sons weaves a sweeping narrative encompassing years, seas and continents.

What poison launched a global quest?

Matt O'Hara, a history professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, steps outside academic territory with The Flying Death: Poison, Plunder, and the Quest for a Miracle Medicine in the Amazon. The book remains rooted in archival study yet often reads like a swashbuckling adventure story.

Its subject is curare, a poison so notoriously lethal it was known as "flying death," deployed in blowdarts by some Amazon tribes. The herbal mixture was also thought to have medicinal properties. The pursuit of those properties began in the 1930s, spanned continents, incited rivalries and opened new avenues in pharmacology and moneymaking alike. It also indelibly impacted the tribes whose role has been all but forgotten.

How does Daisy Johnson follow a Booker milestone?

Johnson's debut novel, Everything Under, made her the youngest Booker Prize finalist ever when it reached the shortlist in 2018, at 27 years old. The British writer has since outgrown wunderkind status, with another novel and a short story collection under her belt.

Long Wave fits her growing catalog: elusive images, spare prose, a foreboding atmosphere redolent of myth and mystery. At its center are women whose family bonds they carry like broken glass, all aglitter with love and menace.

Why is Tahmima Anam's setting so bleak?

Uprising takes place on a river island in Bangladesh. Women there have been tricked, drugged, beaten and trapped in prostitution they did not choose. They answer to a cruel madam. Men arrive nightly by boat. The waters of a region brutalized by climate change rise inexorably. Leaving the island is all but unthinkable, not only for the women but for their children fathered by customers.

The story is told largely from the children's perspective. It is bleak, but not hopeless: the arrival of a new girl has set something in motion.

What is the strangest entry on the list?

Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League is both the strangest and the oldest title of the month. Its ribald mixture of ice hockey and sexy times first hit bookshelves more than four decades before Heated Rivalry ushered in the current Era of Hockey Romance.

The strangeness lies in the name on the spine. Cleo Birdwell does not exist. DeLillo, the revered American novelist, wrote the book and kept silent about it for decades. It developed a cult status even as copies became harder and harder to find. The republication DeLillo approved earlier this year, apparently with reluctance, now returns the sprightly comedy to print. Readers can judge for themselves why its author still declines to discuss it.