Research crunches side reading, so October was a poor month. A bit of travel in November invites a flood of fiction:
- Stewart O’Nan’s Songs for the Missing
- Ward Just is a much-praised novelist virtually unknown in Australia – I’ll try his latest, this year’s Exiles in the Garden
- I hope the latest Ian Rankin – The Complaints, featuring a potential new series character - is better than his last rushed effort
- The Song Is You, a music-infused novel by an author I’ve never sampled
- The brilliant Denis Johnson’s attempt at noir, Nobody Move
- I Am Not Sidney Poitier, a comedy by a prolific, much praised American novelist, Percival Everett, new to me
- The Iron Heart by stylish local crime/thriller writer Marshall Browne
- Iain Banks’s near-future sci-fi thriller Transition
- James Ellroy’s hyperkinetic, mammoth trilogy closer, Blood’s a Rover
- Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, my only nonfiction for the month