Several good books, out now and coming soon

This is what I’m currently reading, a book written with the rare journalistic finesse of indepth research that’s riveting storytelling. It kept calling out to my reading table. I could no longer ignore it.

Haley Cohen Gilliland’s new book, A Flower Traveled in My Blood, became a national bestseller this past summer. It is narrative journalism about the courageous, determined grandmothers who stood up to Argentina’s fierce military junta. This was a horrible time, during the 1970s and early 1980s, when Argentines lived in fear of the government’s campaign to crush its political opposition. It involved “disappearing” dissidents, many taken off the streets and from their homes. Pregnant women were kidnapped and “disappeared”; their babies, born in captivity, were secretly given to other families. Known as the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the grandmothers publicly sought justice for their forever-vanished daughters and daughters-in-law, and they boldly searched for their stolen grandchildren.

Salman Rushdie’s new fiction takes a late-in-life spin. This not only from a master author approaching the mortal horizon, but also one who survived a gravely serious attack. (Salman Rushdie was horrifically stabbed multiple times before giving a public presentation in 2022.). I imagine and hope this to be exceptional. In one of the five stories, the ghost of a Cambridge don enlists the help of a lonely student to enact revenge upon the tormentor of his lifetime. In another, a young writer finds himself in a web of deceit and lies as he tries to figure out whether his mentor killed himself or faked his own death. The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories will be released November 4. Further from the book’s description:  

Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? Do we spend our ‘eleventh hour’ in serenity or in rage? And how do we achieve fulfillment with our lives if we don’t know the end of our own stories?

I’ve had my eye on this novella since it came out in the U.K. earlier this year. A mixed review in the Times Literary Supplement put me off at first. Then, Seascraper was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. Along the way, it’s received a heap of praise from readers. Now to be released here in the States (next week), the story focuses on twenty-year-old Thomas Flett, who daily scrapes early morning coastal shores for shrimp in Longferry, Northern England, with his horse-drawn cart. He lives with his mother and pines for a girl he’s too shy to ask out. “At heart,” we’re told, “he is a folk musician, but this remains a private dream.” The arrival of an American filmmaker brings change and possibility into Thomas’s limited world, as the man considers the Longferry location for a new project. The Booker Prize committee describes Seascraper as “haunting and timeless.”

I loved Sally Smith’s A Case of Mice and Murder: The Trials of Gabriel Ward, her first in an engaging British crime series. Now, A Case of Life and Limb is ready for the holidays, continuing the story of the brilliant Sir Gabriel. He’s a Kings Counsel living and working in the Inner Temple, a cloistered London institution for barristers and judges. It’s 1901, Christmas Eve, when Temple Treasurer Sir William Waring receives a severed hand in the mail. More packages arrive, and Sir Gabriel, our Temple sleuth, comes to realize Sir William is not the target, but the Temple itself. Sir Gabriel is a solitary intellectual with particular routines. He’s astute, socially uncomfortable outside his world of books and the law, but not easily intimidated. I’m a sucker for the quirky-loner-genius type, another reason I’m eager to read this next book. Also, there’s nothing better than an author who so cleverly peels the onion of reveals it’s a mystery until the very end, as Smith did with her debut. This #2 comes out November 18.

Released this Halloween week are ghost stories from Biblioasis, one of my favorite publishing houses. They produce this series every year (lucky us!), reviving a Victorian tradition. The stories are appropriate for Halloween, but they are meant for the Yuletide.

During the Victorian era many magazines printed ghost stories specifically for the Christmas season. These ‘winter tales’ didn’t necessarily explore Christmas themes. Rather, they were offered as an eerie pleasure to be enjoyed on Christmas Eve with the family, adding a supernatural shiver to the seasonal chill.

The stories are published in a set of three 4×6 books, cleverly illustrated by the cartoonist Seth. (You can purchase them individually.) My best-loved this year is Lady Ferry by Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909). The first person narrator looks back to the time she stayed with relatives at their country house while her parents traveled. An old woman who lives at the house wanders the gardens at night. Although Marcia is warned to leave “madam” alone, the two meet and become friends. What’s odd is the reserved old woman appears to have been alive for what seems like forever. She casually talks about Marie Antoinette, before she became Queen of France, as if they’d been childhood acquaintances. The story is more thoughtful than creepy, but still tells a ghostly tale. The other two books in the 2025 series are about a school haunted by a former teacher (The Mistress in Black) and demon forces at work when a sacred tree is chopped down (Lucky’s Grove). You can browse the entire series here.

If you’ve made it this far, you get to see the front endpapers inside A Flower Traveled in My Blood. I couldn’t bring myself to end without including it, the grandmothers protesting. (Image credit: Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo Institutional Archive — 15-16b-001)