1 week Ago By Michael Kozlowski
Whether you’re a fiction, nonfiction, mystery, or more fan, check out our top book picks for November 2024. There’s something for every reader in our hand-picked favourites. There are plenty of new autobiographies that are out.
Such as Sonny Boy by Al Pacino and everything you need to know about Van Halen. A sweeping, Pakistani romantic fantasy reimagining of The Count of Monte Cristo, where one girl seeks revenge against those who betrayed her—including the boy she used to love. Three hundred and sixty-four days.
Framed for a crime she didn’t commit, Dania counts down her days in prison until she can exact revenge on Mazin, the boy responsible for her downfall, the boy she once loved—and still can’t forget. When she discovers a fellow prisoner may have the key to exacting that vengeance–a stolen djinn treasure–they execute a daring escape together and search for the hidden treasure. Armed with dark magic and a new identity, Dania plans to bring down those who betrayed her and her family, even though Mazin stands in her way.
But seeking revenge becomes a complicated game of cat and mouse, especially when an undeniable fire still burns between them, and the power to destroy her enemies has a price. As Dania falls deeper into her web of traps and lies, she risks losing her humanity to her fight for vengeance–and her heart to the only boy she’s ever loved. In this one-of-a-kind mystery with heart and humour, a hilariously grumpy pony must save the only human he’s ever loved after discovering she stands accused of a murder he knows she didn’t commit.
Pony has been passed from owner to owner for longer than he can remember. Fed up, he busts out and goes on a cross-country mission to reunite with Penny, the little girl from whom he was separated and hasn’t seen in years. Penny, now an adult, is living an ordinary life when she gets a knock on her door and finds herself in handcuffs, accused of murder and whisked back to the place she grew up.
Her only comfort when the past comes back to haunt her is the memory of her precious, rebellious pony. Hearing of Penny’s fate, Pony knows that Penny is no murderer. So, as clever and devious as he is, the pony must use his hard-won knowledge of human weakness and cruelty to try to clear Penny’s name and find the natural killer.
This acutely observant, feel-good mystery reveals the humanity of animals and the beastliness of humans in a rollicking escapade of epic proportions. Quiet Funke is happy in Nigeria. She loves her art teacher, mother, professor, father, and even her annoying little brother (most of the time).
But when tragedy strikes, she’s sent to England, a place she knows only from her mother’s stories. To her dismay, she finds the much-lauded estate worn, the food tasteless, the weather grey. Worse still, her mother’s family are cold and distant.
With one exception: her cousin Liv. Free-spirited Liv has always wanted to break free of her joyless family. She becomes fiercely protective of her little cousin, and her warmth and kindness give Funke a place to heal.
The two girls grow into adulthood and become the closest of friends. But their mothers’ choices haunt Funke and Liv, and their friendship is torn apart when a second tragedy occurs. Against the long shadow of their shared family history, each woman will struggle to chart a path forward, separated by country, misunderstanding, and ambition.
Moving between Somerset and Lagos over two decades, This Motherless Land is a sweeping examination of identity, culture, race, and love that asks how we find belonging and whether a family’s generational wrongs can be righted The world is more astonishing, miraculous, and wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this brilliant and passionately persuasive book, Katherine Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world’s most awe-inspiring animals currently facing extinction. Consider the seahorse: couples mate for life and meet each morning for a dance, pirouetting and changing colours before going their separate ways to dance the next day again.
The American wood frog survives winter by allowing itself to freeze solid, its heartbeat slowing until it stops altogether. Come spring, the heart kick-starts itself spontaneously back to life. As for the lemur, it lives in matriarchal troops led by an alpha female (it’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive).
Whenever they are cold or frightened, they group in what’s known as a lemur ball, paws and tails intertwined, to form a furry mass as big as a bicycle wheel. However, these extraordinary animals are endangered or have an endangered subspecies. This urgent, inspiring book of essays dedicated to 23 unusual and underappreciated creatures is a clarion call to look at the world around us with new eyes—to see the magic of the animals we live among, their unknown histories and capabilities, and, above all, how lucky we are to tread the same ground as such vanishing treasures.
Beautifully illustrated and full of inimitable wit and intellect, Vanishing Treasures is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck, to reckon with the beauty of the world, its fragility, and its strangeness. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Bob Woodward tells the revelatory, behind-the-scenes story of three wars—Ukraine, the Middle East and the struggle for the American Presidency. War is an intimate and sweeping account of one of the most tumultuous periods in presidential politics and American history.
We see President Joe Biden and his top advisers in tense conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. We also see Donald Trump conducting a shadow presidency and seeking to regain political power. With unrivalled, inside-the-room reporting, Woodward shows President Biden’s approach to managing the war in Ukraine, the most significant land war in Europe since World War II, and his tortured path to contain the bloody Middle East conflict between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas.
Woodward reveals the extraordinary complexity and consequence of wartime back-channel diplomacy and decision-making to deter the use of nuclear weapons and a rapid slide into World War III. The raw cage-fight of politics accelerates as Americans prepare to vote in 2024. It starts with President Biden and Trump and ends with Vice President Kamala Harris’s unexpected elevation as the Democratic nominee for president.
War objectively examines the vice president as she tries to embrace the Biden legacy and policies while beginning to chart her path as a presidential candidate. From one of the most iconic actors in the history of film, an astonishingly revelatory account of a creative life in full Al Pacino exploded onto the scene like a supernova to the broader world. He landed his first leading role in The Panic in Needle Park in 1971, and by 1975, he had starred in four movies—The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon—that were not just successes but landmarks in the history of film.
Those performances became legendary and changed his life forever. Not since Marlon Brando and James Dean in the late 1950s had an actor landed in the culture with such force. But Pacino was in his mid-thirties by then and had already lived several lives.
A fixture of avant-garde theatre in New York, he had led a bohemian existence, working odd jobs to support his craft. He was raised by a fiercely loving but mentally unwell mother and her parents after his father left them when he was young, but in a real sense, he was raised by the streets of the South Bronx and by the troop of buccaneering young friends he ran with, whose spirits never left him. After a teacher recognized his acting promise and pushed him toward New York’s fabled High School of Performing Arts, the die was cast.
In good times and bad, in poverty and wealth and poverty again, through pain and joy, acting was his lifeline, community, and tribe. Sonny Boy is the memoir of a man who has nothing left to fear and nothing left to hide. All the significant roles, the essential collaborations, and the critical relationships are given their full due, as is the vexed marriage between creativity and commerce at the highest levels.
However, the book’s golden thread is the spirit of love and purpose. Love can fail you, and you can be defeated in your ambitions—the same lights that shine brightly can also dim. But Al Pacino was lucky enough to fall deeply in love with a craft before he had the foggiest idea of any of its earthly rewards, and he never fell out of love.
That has made all the difference. Told by acclaimed New Yorker writer Ariel Levy Brothers, it is the love letter of seventy-year-old drummer Alex Van Halen to his younger brother, Edward (Maybe “Ed,” but never “Eddie”), written while still mourning his untimely death. In his rough yet sweet voice, Alex recounts the brothers’ childhood, first in the Netherlands and then in working-class Pasadena, California, with an itinerant musician father and a very proper Indonesian-born mother—the kind of mom who admonished her boys to “always wear a suit” no matter how famous they became—a woman who was both proud and practical, calm about taking a doggie bag from a star-studded dinner.
He also shares tales of musical politics, infighting, and plenty of bad-boy behaviour. But mostly, his story is about brotherhood, music, and enduring love. “I was with him from day one,” Alex writes.
“We shared the experience of coming to this country and figuring out how to fit in. We shared a record player, an 800-square-foot house, a mom and dad, and a work ethic. Later, we shared the back of a tour bus, alcoholism, the experience of becoming successful, of becoming fathers and uncles, and of spending more hours in the studio than I’ve spent doing anything else in this life.
We shared a deep understanding that most people can only hope to achieve in a lifetime.” There has never been an accurate account of them or the band, and Alex wants to set the record straight on Edward’s life and death. Brothers includes never-before-seen photos from the author’s private archives.
East Harlem, 2008. In an instant, a five-story tenement collapses into a fuming hill of rubble, pancaking the cars parked in front and coating the street with a thick layer of ash. The surrounding neighbourhood becomes chaotic as the city’s rescue services and media outlets respond.
At day’s end, six bodies are recovered, but many of the other tenants are missing. In Lazarus Man, Richard Price, one of the greatest chroniclers of life in urban America, creates intertwining portraits of a group of compelling and singular characters whose lives are permanently impacted by the disaster. Anthony Carter—whose miraculous survival, after being buried for days beneath tons of brick and stone, transforms him into a man with a message and a passionate sense of mission.
Felix Pearl is a young transplant to the city whose photography and film work that day provoke a sharp sense of personal destiny in this previously unformed soul. Royal Davis—the owner of a failing Harlem funeral home, whose desperate trolling of the scene for potential “customers” triggers a quest to find another path in life. Mary Roe—a veteran city detective driven partly by her family’s brutal history- becomes obsessed with finding Christopher Diaz, one of the missing buildings.
Price, the bestselling author of Lush Life and, most recently, The Whites, has created a bravura portrait of a community on the edge of disintegration. Rich with memorable characters and high drama, Lazarus Man is a riveting work of suspense and social vision by one of our foremost writers. 1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • Born to an American myth and raised in the wilds of Graceland, Lisa Marie Presley tells her whole story for the first time in this raw, riveting, one-of-a-kind memoir faithfully completed by her daughter, Riley Keough.
In 2022, Lisa Marie Presley asked her daughter to help finally finish her long-gestating memoir. A month later, Lisa Marie was dead, and the world would never know her story in her own words, never know the passionate, joyful, caring, and complicated woman that Riley loved and now grieved. Riley got the tapes that her mother had recorded for the book, lay in her bed, and listened as Lisa Marie told story after story about smashing golf carts together in the yards of Graceland, about the unconditional love she felt from her father, about being upstairs, just the two of them.
She was about to get dragged screaming out of the bathroom as she ran toward his body on the floor. About living in Los Angeles with her mother, getting sent to school after school, always being kicked out, and always in trouble. She talked about her lifelong relationship with Danny Keough, her marriage to Michael Jackson, and their commonalities.
About motherhood. About deep addiction. About ever-present grief.
Riley knew she had to fulfill her mother’s wish to reveal these incandescent and painful memories to the world. To make her mother known. This extraordinary book is written in the voices of Lisa Marie and Riley.
It is the story of a mother and daughter communicating—from this world to the one beyond—as they try to heal each other. Profoundly moving and deeply revealing, From Here to the Great Unknown is a book like no other—the last words of the only child of an American icon. Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years.
Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada..
