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Good day, and welcome to the first Rich Books Edit. Once a month, on the first Thursday, we will send you the best of what Rich Books Magazine has published. This month: Dame Judi Dench's memoir, the Booker Prize winner announced on Monday, a Pulitzer-winning war novel told in a single sentence, and the sixteen spring books left waiting by Catapult's closure. First, the authors and books in this month's spotlights.
This Month's Spotlights
This Month's DigestAt 91, with macular degeneration that means she can no longer read, Dame Judi Dench has made her most personal book yet by talking it through with her friend and writing partner, the theatre director Brendan O'Hea. Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? came out in the UK on 22nd October and in the US on 3rd November. The title comes from the bag she leaves outside rehearsal rooms in case she wants to flee, and the doubt behind it never left her. Our review follows her from a childhood in York, through the pranks she played on stage and backstage, to her thirty-year marriage to Michael Williams. Six novels are left from the 163 the judges read this year, and the winner of the Booker Prize 2026 is named on Monday at Old Billingsgate in London. The Booker Prize Foundation livestreams the announcement on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok from 9.45pm GMT. The Disappearers by Marlon James leads the betting, ahead of Douglas Stuart's John of John and Rebecca Perry's May We Feed the King. Our piece has where to watch, the Southbank Centre readings with all six authors the night before and the latest odds. Our guide to the six novels, in Also This Month below, says who each one suits. Daniel Kraus sends five American soldiers into No Man's Land during the last great offensive of the First World War to end a wounded comrade's suffering, and what they find in the barbed wire is a fallen angel. The novel runs 304 pages without a full stop, and it won this year's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Kraus told the Associated Press that dropping punctuation suited a war that seemed to have no end. Our review explains why the form stops feeling like a trick after the first pages. It is part of our series on each of this year's Pulitzer book winners, which also covers history, biography, memoir and poetry. Catapult Book Group, the independent publisher behind Catapult, Counterpoint, Soft Skull and Hawthorne Books, stopped operating on 30th October, nine days after its union confirmed the company was being sold. Sixteen new books due between January and April now wait on a buyer nobody has named. We list all sixteen month by month, explain what an asset sale usually means for books already under contract, and set out what to do if you preordered one.
Also This Month
That is all for this month. See you on Thursday 3 December.
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