November has flown by in the blink of an eye, and suddenly we have reached the final stretch of 2025. As the weather has turned cooler and the nights are long, the editors at Where Ideas Grow have shared their November reads across a range of genres. Looking for your next read? We’ve got romance, historical fiction, action, fantasy and gothic horror in the mix. Have you read any of these?
BECCA
Book: If He Had Been With Me by Laura Nowlin
Genre: Romance
Page Count: 400
Favourite Quote: “Perhaps he would ask me what books mean to me. I would tell him that it means living another life.”
Rating: ★★★☆☆
I hadn’t read a young adult contemporary romance novel in a long time. Not many of my friends had read this before me but I had heard good reviews online, after all it did become a ‘BookTok’ viral sensation and a New York Times Best Seller. I had heard that it had a heartbreaking ending and was intrigued to see if this lived up to the hype.
One thing I really loved about this book, and the main reason I finished it in a matter of days, was the narrator. Autumn’s character was so delicately created in a way to move you with her story. Her character felt gentle and embodied a sense of youth you almost feel guilty about, knowing full well that it cannot last forever and she will inevitably have to change.
Her relationship with Phineas was challenging and endearing to read. It was almost obvious that they loved each other from the start, despite her other romantic relationship with Jamie taking up the majority of the novel. But the way they yearned for each other from afar was so frustrating. Their communication felt like a barrier created by themselves, which as a reader was only harder to endure. You want them to end up together, you can sense it in the pages but the reviews were right, and as quoted in the book “things aren’t always the way they are supposed to be.”
It was almost predictable, but nonetheless devastating. And thanks to the beautiful characterisation of both Autumn and Finny, the tragedy of the ending was enhanced. The youth you see Autumn embody suddenly fades away and the inevitable change occurs making this book bittersweet in so many ways.
LAURA
Book: How To Stop Time by Matt Haig
Genre: Historical Fiction
Page Count: 343
Favourite Quote: “There was something very un-Shakespearean about Shakespeare.”
Rating: ★★★★☆
This is my second visit to ‘How To Stop Time’, and it never fails to grip me. It sneaks up on you with a deceptively simple premise – a man ages very, very slowly – and then quietly unpacks philosophical questions you hadn’t stopped to consider before. Matt Haig’s style of writing and his arrangement of a book is something I find endlessly engaging – especially as a lover of short chapters. Through a mixture of poetry and prose, we follow Tom Hazard, a man suffering from Anageria – a rare condition which causes those affected to age at a 1:15 rate compared to the average person. At 431 years old, Tom appears no older than thirty and is a history teacher educating teenagers on his first-hand experiences. We hop back and forth through time, spending long chapters of time in the early 1600s with Tom and his first love, Rose.
What Haig does particularly well is blending high concepts with deeply human experiences. Tom has played the lute for Shakespeare and mixed cocktails with F. Scott Fitzgerald, but these figures are not the grand, impressively prestigious literary figures we know them as – they’re intrinsically flawed and even unlikeable. Haig uses these encounters not as literary tourism, but as an exploration of what it means to live across centuries and long to form attachments that can never be anything but fleeting.
If there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that the novel occasionally simplifies historical or emotional beats, ironing out complexity in favour of flow. But honestly, that’s part of the charm – it’s page-turning and philosophical in equal measure. It’s not a book you pick up expecting Hilary Mantel levels of historical density, so it’s no disappointment when it isn’t there. ‘How To Stop Time’ forces you to reconsider your own relationship with time with warmth, thoughtfulness, and just enough melancholy to sit with you for a quiet moment on the last page.
LUCIANA
Book: The Lighthouse Witches by C. J. Cooke
Genre: Fantasy/Gothic Horror
Page Count: 350
Rating: ★★★★★
When single mother Liv is commissioned to paint a mural in a 100-year-old lighthouse on a remote Scottish island, it’s an opportunity to start over with her three daughters – Luna, Sapphire, and Clover. When two of her daughters go missing, she’s frantic. She learns that the cave beneath the lighthouse was once a prison for women accused of witchcraft. The locals warn her about wildlings, supernatural beings who mimic human children, created by witches for revenge. Liv is told wildlings are dangerous and must be killed.
Twenty-two years later, Luna has been searching for her missing sisters and mother. When she receives a call about her youngest sister, Clover, she’s initially ecstatic. Clover is the sister she remembers – except she’s still seven years old, the age she was when she vanished. Luna is worried Clover is a wildling. Luna has few memories of her time on the island, but she’ll have to return to find the truth of what happened to her family. But she doesn’t realize just how much the truth will change her. (Goodreads).
This book got me out of a reading slump super quickly. It was an immediate page-turner, where stakes were raised high in an eerie and chilling way. I love books about witches, and after seeing CJ Cooke at a book presentation in Waterstones, my friend lent me this book and I am so happy she did.
The book hovers through three timelines in a seamless way, the 17th century witch trials in Scotland told through the eyes of a boy; 1998 seen through the perspective of Liv, a mother of three girls who moves them to a remote and strange island in Scotland; and 2021 told by Luna, the remaining daughter who did not disappear twenty three years ago.
It contains historical fiction, strangeness, and paranormal elements, all which leave you mind-blown at the end. A great spooky season read that I recommend! Beware, it will probably give you the creeps if you read it late at night.
ETHAN
Book: Chainsaw Man vol. 19 by Tatsuki Fujimoto
Genre: Action/Shōnen
Favourite Quote: “Sorry, bud. This is downright cruel of me, isn’t it? No way around it, though. It’s to save the world, after all!”
Rating: ★★★★☆
This volume of Chainsaw Man continues on from the rescue of Denji that Asa and the gang pulled off right from the clutches of Public Safety. However, Denji is still despondent from the loss of his adopted sister, Nayuta. So, Asa and the gang decide to take him to a sushi restaurant (eventually after an incredible Chainsaw Man interaction, if you know you know). Here they are ambushed by public safety after they managed to draw out the “Chainsaw Man with the power to erase Devil names from existence itself”
This volume was a stellar continuation of the story, starting with slower more comedic beats with twinges of just how depressing a life Denji has had sprinkled in. Followed with another event added onto that depressing list towards the end of the volume, ramping up the action with the return of a Chainsaw Man we haven’t seen since the end of part 1 of the story.
Fujimoto’s artwork remains at its highest level, showing his skill with subtle facial expressions conveying such depth, as well his ability to imply such intense motion during the action scenes, while keeping the art legible.
My only major critique of this volume comes in the form of pacing. Each chapter individually holds up very well but with how volume releases work with manga there isn’t much thought put into what chapters go together well, so the entirety can feel sort of all over the place when put together. This does happen here, we spend the majority of the book in a slower place, that ramps up rapidly right at the end, and while a good sort of cliffhanger, it still leaves me unfulfilled until the next volume releases.
AIMEE
Book: Alchemised by SenLinYu
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Page Count: 1,040
Favourite Quote: “Love isn’t always as pretty or pure as people think… if he’s a monster, then I’m his creator.”
Rating: ★★★★☆
As an editor and a writer working across fantasy, dystopia, and politically charged narratives, I approached SenLinYu’s ‘Alchemised’ with an unusual degree of anticipation. It’s a novel that arrives with considerable history behind it, yet it stands wholly on its own, stricter, sharper, and far more deliberate than its origins might suggest.
What impressed me at first was the discipline of the prose. SenLinYu writes as though she understands trauma not as spectacle but as architecture. Each paragraph is sculpted with restraint, refusing melodrama in favour of precise emotional pressure. As an editor, I can see the scaffolding: tight scene construction, tonal consistency, and a refusal to indulge in narrative excess. This is a dark fantasy that has been carved down to its most essential bones.
As a dystopian writer, I found the world-building quietly devastating. Rather than presenting an expansive map of kingdoms, SenLinYu gives us systems, guilds, necromantic hierarchies, political machinery, that feel alarmingly familiar. The magic is not whimsical; it is bureaucratic, weaponised, and procedural. Power here behaves like a state apparatus: cold, administrative, and endlessly self-justifying. Helena’s amnesia becomes a political tool, a means of erasing both resistance and identity itself.
Politically, the novel is unsparing. It examines captivity, coercion, and the corrosion of agency without offering false catharsis. Helena’s struggle is not framed as heroic rebellion but as the radically human act of surviving a structure designed to consume her. The moral ambiguity is not a flourish, it’s the central thesis. In this world, even memory becomes contested terrain.
‘Alchemised’ is both brutal and meticulous, a novel that understands the cost of power on the human body and mind. As a writer, I admire its courage; as an editor, its precision; and as a political thinker, its clarity. It is one of the rare fantasies that interrogates power as relentlessly as it envisions it.
RAISA
Book: Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
Genre: YA Fantasy
Page Count: 491
Favourite Quote: “The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true.”
Rating: ★★★★☆
A gritty criminal underworld where a group of six teenagers have been hired for an impossible job: to break into the impenetrable Ice Court to steal a scientist, who has created a drug with devastating consequences.
The way I was hooked onto this story… I was captivated and fully immersed in the settings and characters. Multiple revolving POVs and heartbreakingly layered backstories and memories kept me engaged and desperate to know more.
Without revealing too much, expect themes of found family and trauma, betrayal and forgiveness, and deep currents of guilt and grief. Throughout this experience, I’ve felt a mix of pity, empathy, pain, frustration, and hope.
Leigh Bardugo has given each character a rich emotional history; trauma, guilt, loyalty, and longing. Even in a fantastical world, their internal conflicts and decisions feel grounded and believable.
The internal struggles that surround each character and their relationships raises the emotional stakes and are intertwined with their personal growth.
Beneath a hard and cold exterior driven by greed and vengeance, there is a child consumed and afraid. Beneath painful memories, there is a strength to be harnessed and compassion. There is a lot to be learned about their struggles with intimacy and trauma, love and ideology, insecurity and acceptance.