This lovers-on-the-lam tale by Vancouver-based Kalteis is based on the true story of naïve, Depression-era outlaws Bennie Dickson and his teenage wife Stella Mae. The newlyweds briefly become public enemies after honeymoon heists in South Dakota. It’s told with enough brio to garner a starred review from Publishers Weekly, who dub it “a delightful treat for historical crime fiction enthusiasts.” (Nov. 2)

A young healer named Kalki, born with blue skin in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, is prophesied to be the new human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. Over the next decade, his family fractures, and his sheltered life in the ashram is contrasted with a trip into the kaleidoscopic music scene of New York. Sindu, a Tamil-American novelist, has crafted a luminous, queer, coming-of-age story about living up to the expectations of family and community, coming to terms with sexual identity and working through the trauma caused by faith. (Nov. 2)

This gripping psychological thriller, which counts U.S. crime writers Steph Cha and Megan Abbott among its fans, explores female rage inside a secret group of grieving, vigilante mothers, and raises questions about morality, privilege and justice. The moms come together on the dark web to plot revenge against the men they consider responsible for their loss, and to hold them to account. (Nov. 2)

This darkly funny social satire begins with an airborne viral pandemic, when an unhappy Russian-American couple and their neurodivergent daughter Natasha welcome a group of friends to spend lockdown in the bungalows of their cozy upstate New York compound. The setup and dramatis personae suggest The Seagull, and as the months wear on, Russian-born, U.S. author Shteyngart (Super Sad True Love Story) goes full Chekhov-on-the-Hudson. The residents silently measure their failures and accomplishments against one another through a tangle of jealousy, lust, love affairs and career ambitions, riffing on the immigrant experience and lampooning the culture of tech, Hollywood, and bourgeois, rural hipsters. (Nov. 2)

This story centres on star-crossed Cypriot lovers – a Greek Christian and a Turkish Muslim – as tensions mount in postcolonial Cyprus. There are three narratives: that of the 1970s lovers, their 16-year-old daughter, who is living in London and connecting to her cultural heritage for the first time, and the historical exposition imparted to the reader through a talking fig tree (yes, really). It’s compelling look at damaged lives, grief and displacement. (Nov. 2)

Fans of richly imagined character studies are in for a treat. Ten tales of love, loss and grief populate this first collection of stories from the acclaimed U.S. novelist of the drolly witty Writers & Lovers and Euphoria. From families on vacation to misanthropic booksellers to reunited college roommates, it is rife with perfectly calibrated insights – the one about the grandfather at his granddaughter’s hospital bedside is a standout. (Nov. 9)

For his first contemporary novel in more than a decade, Follett wonders if a war no one wanted could accidentally happen again. As it hopscotches from China to North Africa, this thriller imagines what could lead to the Third World War, and brings storylines together in a speculative world of diplomacy, intelligence agencies and political alliances, where the first female American president is a moderate Republican and the sinister machinations are all too plausible. (Nov. 9)

The pandemic, racial unrest and protests that erupt in Minneapolis-Saint Paul following the murder of George Floyd are central to this thoughtful new novel from the author of The Night Watchman, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. When an indie bookshop is haunted by a long-time customer after she dies, Tookie, an Ojibway ex-con who discovered a love of reading in prison, must tackle, in turn, the ghost, the pandemic and the Floyd protests. Adding meta to the current events, it’s set in Birchbark Books, the Minneapolis bookstore owned by the author, and Erdrich has also written herself into the book as a minor character. If you pick up just one pandemic-set novel this year, this is the one. (Nov. 9)

A deadly plague-like virus called AG3 is the backdrop to this sensual novel, set in the studio of a celebrated 59-year-old sculptor during a global lockdown, but with a fragmented structure of memories and experiences that span 50 years. Hall, an English writer previously shortlisted for the Booker Prize, examines passion, female ambition, desire and the impulse to create. From the feverish ode to a lost lover and torrid sexual encounter with another, it’s graphically erotic (move over, Sally Rooney) – less Love in the Time of Cholera than Sex in the Era of COVID. (Nov. 9)

Canadian screenwriter St. George kicks of a new series with this light and saucy cozy about a popular relationship advice author who moves back to her resort hometown on Lake Huron. Agony aunt Gina Malone is known as “The Ex-Whisperer” and her own ex is always popping up. As the empty nester is turning 50 and renovating her lakefront cabin, she finds she has to outsmart two new stalkers pursuing her because of the advice she gave women in her column. Expect as much sarcasm as local colour. (Nov. 9)

This gorgeous novel begins simply but dramatically on a Tuscan terrace in 1944, as a gay art historian in her sixties recounts her life story to a young Cockney soldier as bombs falling around them, but the evening will mark them for the rest of their lives. Steadily, and mostly through dialogue between characters (and also a parrot), it expands in scope, and by the end it’s not only a love letter to Florence, it has covered nearly a century of European history. It’s a novel that invokes E.M. Forster both literally and in style, and embodies the adjective “sweeping.” (Nov. 15)

An ingeniously crafted puzzle of a novel is told as a series of interviews with the staff of a posh hotel who, for years and unbeknownst to one another, have been working as sleeper agents. All were involved in a botched assassination attempt, and the novel is a binder of the briefs that attempt to piece together how and why the operation – organized by a geopolitical agency – failed. Think: Daisy Jones and the Six meets Only Murders in the Building. (Nov. 30)

A pandemic is on the horizon in spring 2020 as Sotheby’s auctioneer Diana and Finn, a surgical resident, are about to leave on a big, non-refundable vacation to the Galapagos Islands and he’s called back to work in his New York hospital. Diana goes it alone, but she arrives just as the island goes into lockdown. She is stranded with no luggage, let alone a hotel room or reliable cell signal, and has to depend on locals to get by. Picoult contrasts vivid descriptions of the natural world with the experiences of critical care and frontline workers. Though the couple’s situations diverge, both explore the human condition, and the kindness and compassion of strangers. (Nov. 30)