Best books out in November, featuring Margaret Atwood's memoir and The Mushroom Tapes

Welcome to the ABC Arts wrap of the best books out in November, as we hurtle towards the end of the year.

Our literary critics have read high and low to bring you their well-considered suggestions for what to read next.

On the list are The Mushroom Tapes — the much-anticipated analysis of the Erin Patterson triple-murder case by literary heavyweights Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein — and the long-awaited memoir of one of the world's most acclaimed authors, 86-year-old Margaret Atwood.

And for something different, dive into an evocative exploration of the court of Versailles by another octogenarian, 85-year-old Carmel Bird who, at last count, has been nominated for the Miles Franklin Literary Award three times.

Happy reading!

• Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood
• The Transformations by Andrew Pippos
• Exclusive! Dispatches from the Paris End by Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz
• A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna
• Helm by Sarah Hall
• Crimson Velvet Heart by Carmel Bird
• Heap Earth Upon It by Chloe Michelle Howarth
• The Mushroom Tapes by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein

Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood

Chatto & Windus

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood spent decades resisting the call of autobiography — although she admits that readers have accused her of writing it anyway, even in her 1985 dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. 

They were wrong, she says, with her well-seasoned asperity.

And yet, she continues, they were also right, in that every piece of writing also records an inner journey, reflecting the life lived.

But now, at the age of 86, she has finally written a memoir "of sorts".

It certainly follows many of the conventions of life writing: discussing her family, Canada and its history, schooling and the emergence of ideas. 

Her reading history, even the Little Golden Book The Lively Little Rabbit, is recalled in unnerving ways: "Dressing up. Deception. Revenge. Celebration. My kind of book." The voice of the writer transforms everything.

And on it goes. She is, first, a poet — and this is part of the revelation of the memoir, demonstrating how poetry cracked open ideas for her, allowing her to pursue them decades later in prose. 

We see her dedication to work, research and ideas; her friendships and lovers; her first marriage and even the moment she "wandered into the woods with a dashing wolf" for an affair.

There is also a tender and critical description of her life with her partner Graeme, whose eventual shift into dementia and then death is a loss beautifully and heartbreakingly described.

This is as powerful a memoir as you'd expect from a writer like Margaret Atwood who — after reading this book — you might even have the courage to think of as Peggy.

— Kate Evans

The Transformations by Andrew Pippos

Picador

The Transformations opens in the Sydney newsroom of print newspaper The National. It's 2014, just as the digital disruption of the media landscape is beginning to bite.

From our vantage point in 2025, we know the heyday of print journalism is over. It's a decline author Andrew Pippos foreshadows in two contrasting images early in the novel: the framed front pages proudly adorning the newsroom's walls, marking "half the past century's great transformations", and the piles of decaying newspapers emitting "the smell of decomposing ink and solvents" that litter the desks.

On this particular Friday, work pauses in the newsroom for not one but two staff send-offs, events that have become alarmingly frequent in an increasingly precarious industry.

George Desoulis is a sub-editor at The National. Until now, George, in his mid-30s, has carefully constructed a solitary but not unhappy life. He lives in a book-filled one-bedroom apartment on a busy street and keeps the unsociable hours of his profession, waking at noon and working until 11pm.

He grew up in Goulburn where his Greek father and Welsh mother ran a café. He attended a Catholic high school where he was abused by a teacher, a secret he has never been able to tell anyone but a therapist. He's self-aware enough to realise his tendency for isolation and detachment is a protective mechanism triggered by the abuse, but that doesn't make it any easier to allow people in.

But then two women arrive in George's life to upend his carefully calibrated emotional equilibrium. A late-night encounter with a colleague, Cassandra, a talented journalist, sparks a love affair. Cass is married with two children but she and her husband, Nico, a recovering alcoholic, are experimenting with ethical non-monogamy.

Then Elektra, George's teenage daughter, moves with her mother from Melbourne to Sydney. Although George has never played the conventional role of father in Elektra's life, it's clear that at 15, his daughter — queer, bookish, philosophical— is closer in character to him than her mother Madeleine.

The Transformations considers change in many forms and contexts, from the personal to the professional. Pippos — a former sub-editor at The Australian — effortlessly recreates the rhythms of the print newsroom. His depiction of George's interiority is similarly assured, drawing the reader into an emotional arc that culminates in a profoundly moving conclusion.

— Nicola Heath

Exclusive! Dispatches from the Paris End by Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz

Giramondo

Bringing together three years of writing from The Paris End, this is the must-read of the summer. The Paris End was born from the promise of finally being able to meet people again following Melbourne's endless lockdowns, when three writers gathered and decided to create a news service with a mission: "A society magazine for the precariat."

The spirit of The Paris End is that of Melbourne. You can really see, feel and hear the city as you read it, "a cosmopolitan purgatory where one could find a Gucci, a Prada, a Balenciaga and cocktail bars, but also bubble tea vendors, corporate lackeys sucking on vapes, food delivery drivers, revolutionaries, street preachers and grifting DJs."

Each piece in the collection embodies The Paris End's philosophy of paying (amused, tender, sceptical) attention. Sally Olds pays homage to her Sapphic brethren, the "male lesbian", while reflecting on the relationship between capital and value at a time when "claiming queerness does not even require a politics or a lifestyle". There is a laugh-out-loud funny look at the Melbourne Art Fair and a deep dive into whether social enterprise alternatives to housing can be as good as they seem. 

Oscar Schwartz writes beautifully about the neoliberal hustle and Melbourne's stimulant patriotism ("Who really cares if it's a few micrograms of amphetamine or three coffees?"). 

Cam Hurst looks at the links between subcultural affiliations, self-expression, progressive politics and looking hot with friends — and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Exclusive! is generous and consistently surprising. Gossipy, funny, engaged and with a real nous for capturing scenes and people and the beauty and bullshit, the tone throughout every piece is spot-on, perfectly calibrated and full of charm. It is a book to be read in Milan, Tokyo, London, Melbourne. It's so hip it hurts.

Aggressively, heartbreakingly good, Exclusive! is a chronicle of our weird times for all the weirdos out there building them. Forget Rosalia, forget the designs of Paris Fashion Week: Exclusive! is this year's must-have collection.

— Declan Fry

A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna

Duckworth

Tara, the protagonist of A Splintering — Dur e Aziz Amna's sophomore novel, following her 2023 debut, American Fever — grew up in Mazinagar, a small rural village in Pakistan and she will do anything to make sure her story doesn't end there. 

Tara's ambitions are thwarted time and time again by class and gender injustices, and she reflects: ''My story begins with a sense that many of us have, that life is unfair, and that there is no socially sanctioned way of remedying that unfairness."

This is a sharp feminist tale of determination and survival. Tara becomes a wife and a mother, and she is forced, like so many other women, to serve and yield to the men around her in order to survive. 

For her, "proximity to wealth was the best thing I could hope for" but to gain the riches she so desires, Tara must behave in ways she never imagined.

Throughout, Tara is plagued by her brother, her childhood bully, who prospers as she struggles. But as she comes closer to achieving her dreams, her character is corrupted and she begins to mirror the very person she views with such malice and disdain.

The political and social history of Pakistan through the 1980s to 2000s serves as a backdrop, where the ripple effects of every act of political violence or natural disaster extend throughout the community. So often we see the impacts on powerful men, but Amna shows, crucially, what life is like for women of all classes.

As Tara's ambition begins to erode her relationships with her family, her husband and her children, she is left to wonder who all this was for. A Splintering is a raw and brutal story of a woman seeking security against all odds.

— Rosie Ofori Ward

Helm by Sarah Hall

Faber

Let's talk about the weather, shall we? This was once the very shape of small talk and avoidance, benign cliché and politeness … and while in Australia we know it for the slap of heat, the howl of cyclones, the shock of flash floods, there remains a sense that a soft British rain might still fall into conversation somewhere.

Not for English writer Sarah Hall.

Helm is the name of a wind that has roared and tossed its way through northern England for millenia, and in this imaginative and playful novel Hall has given the wind a voice. She has also granted it opponents, allies, investigators and worshippers. Supplicants. Crucially, she has also given the wind itself a history. It's anchored in place and time and language, as it picks up objects and words and descriptions and hurls them around.

The first character we meet is a Neanderthal woman, NaNay, living a precarious life in her community, daring to examine the wind. Somehow, she makes this entire cosmology believable. 

But we don't stay with her; instead we jump forward to the late medieval period, when a priest-wizard figure named Michael Lang, a witchfinder and demon hunter, is trailing a boy he has somehow "acquired" in the crusades; and then on again to the period of the railways and the rise of natural philosophers and meteorologists, into the 19th and 20th centuries and right up to the present, with a woman who tracks the ups and downs and ins and outs of this wind.

The novel cycles through these characters and periods, dramas and stories, with taut asides into superstitions and histories and mythologies of this wind, forays into hot air balloons and utterly beguiling uses of language. 

This is no generic Britain: it's precise, anchored to place, uses the regional language and patois of Cumbria to take us there. And in the process? It becomes a story that resonates on the other side of the world, and shakes the windows with a very strong breath indeed.

— Kate Evans

Crimson Velvet Heart by Carmel Bird

Transit Lounge

It's 1685 in the city of Turin, and the 16-year-old Duchess of Turin is in labour. All wish for the baby to be a boy, a male heir for the Duke of Savoy, known as the "Gatekeeper" owing to the strategic importance of his territory, straddling the modern-day border of France, Italy and Switzerland.

Alas, the baby is a girl, named Marie-Adélaïde. While the duke cancels the fireworks and calls off the celebrations, all is not lost. This baby girl is useful in other ways — as a bargaining chip in the marriage market. 

She is duly betrothed to the French king Louis XIV's grandson, the Duke de Bourgogne, and shipped off to France at age 11, where she enchants the aging monarch.

In Crimson Velvet Heart, Carmel Bird brings to life the court of Versailles, in all its decadence and lavish grandeur. The opulence is hard to compute, exemplified by the famed Hall of Mirrors, with its 17 windows and 375 mirrors, and illuminated by crystal chandeliers refracting the light of 3,000 candles.

But beneath the sumptuousness there is a rot, much like the blackened, decaying teeth that cause Marie-Adélaïde so much pain.

The accessory du jour is a bag of sweet-smelling herbs or a spice-filled pomander to disguise the stench of unwashed bodies and piles of human waste found under bushes in the expansive gardens and even behind furniture in the palace ballrooms.

For all its splendour, the court is full of malicious gossip; poisonings are rife. Religious intolerance is high, and Louis's merciless persecution of the Huguenots results in the bloody deaths of thousands of innocent people.

The Sun King pursues other wars, too, which he pays for by melting down the palace's solid silver furniture. Bird evokes a grisly scene at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, describing "the shrill screams of the horses, the shrieks, moans, groans, curses and whimpers of men dying in agony in bloody, muddy heaps".

Meanwhile, the king, his young favourite and the rest of the court carry on feasting and frolicking despite the shocking loss of life among the French forces.

As the story's thread weaves back and forth through time — told in fragments by Marie-Adélaïde's fictitious friend, Clotilde, now known as Sister Claire — Bird assembles an arresting tableau of a princess who, for all her privilege, was little more than a pawn in the political machinations of the more powerful.

— Nicola Heath

Heap Earth Upon It by Chloe Michelle Howarth

Verve Books

Heap Earth Upon It is a gothic story of queer longing, obsession and deep sibling rivalry, set within the suffocating atmosphere of rural Ireland.

The O'Leary siblings — Tom, Jack, Anna and Peggy — arrive in the fishing town of Ballycrea shrouded in mystery. The oppressive whispers of the village begin immediately with everyone wondering why exactly they have come and what they are running from.

As the story jumps between the perspectives of each sibling, the reader slowly discovers more about their relationships with each other, their former life in Killmarra and why they are lying to everyone.

Themes of grief and betrayal build as we delve into their memories, filled with rich imagery. The orphaned siblings mourn not just their parents, but also the woman who tore the family apart, Jack's former fiancée, Lillian.

Chloe Michelle Howarth's first novel Sunburn — a rich and powerful epic of teenage queer romance — has become a sleeper hit. While this story is not a natural sequel in terms of style or setting, that same Sapphic desire is present and, again, it's done so well.

Anna, the oldest sister, is still grasping onto her memories of Lillian, the woman she shouldn't have loved, reflecting "I am a homing bird. For a while, she was my home". But with Lillian gone, Anna finds a new object of desire: Betty Nevan, a farmer's wife from town who takes pity on the family. As the book moves towards its climax, we see how far Anna will go to have her love.

Despite the 1965 setting, the eerie atmosphere and fog-covered town feels more reminiscent of the misty scenes of older gothic classics like Wuthering Heights or Rebecca. Howarth has created a gorgeous yet tense tale of buried secrets.

— Rosie Ofori Ward

The Mushroom Tapes by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein

Text Publishing

From the legal offices of Garner, Hooper & Krasnostein comes the brief of the year: find out what drove Erin Patterson to murder her relatives.

It's a real treat to see these three writers in conversation. Reflecting on what some have called the trial of the century, they bring to the case their own particular personalities and perspectives.

Told mostly via dialogue between the three authors, along with contextualising introductory passages, the book's discussions sometimes transform into an almost novelistic third-person narration ("Sarah and Chloe leave Helen at the Nightcap and drive back to Melbourne. Chloe wonders why she finds Erin more disturbed than Sarah and Helen seem to."). 

There is certainly a meta-aspect to it all: Patterson's apparent lies and fantasist abilities aren't wholly dissimilar to those of writers.

What emerges from the case are larger questions: do we take women seriously? What happens to frustrations that cannot be resolved (frustrations about one's unused intellectual energies, one's family, one's life)? 

Chloe delves into the entanglements of the case, sometimes literally ('We are surrounded by fungi. We're breathing it in. It's in our bodies.") Chloe asks Helen "could you have killed one of your ex-husbands?" 

Maybe, Helen says; she did once throw a pot of beetroot soup against the wall ("it was wonderfully gratifying"), leaving a bloodstain-like mark.

I savoured the voices and personalities of each author: Garner, typically down to earth; Krasnostein, cerebral and cool. I especially loved Chloe Hooper. She really shines here with her incisive, unexpected and often very funny observations. ("I had a conversation … with my partner about how even in good relationships there are moments where love brushes very close to hate. And he agreed. Rather too readily, I thought.")

This is a monster of a true-crime book — and, odd as it might seem, also a bloody good time.

— Declan Fry

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