New History Books for November 2026

We cast our eyes over a selection of new history books that will be released over the month ahead.

American Presidential Campaigns, 1789–2024: 60 Campaigns That Shaped US Politics by Iain Dale

Biteback, 3 November 2026

So much of our political culture nowadays is shaped by the US election cycle. And now that the midterm results are in, the talk will soon inevitably shift towards the next milestone: the 2028 presidential election.

For lovers of politics, eager to prepare themselves, few books will be more useful than this one by Iain Dale. American Presidential Campaigns is the latest in a series that Dale began back in 2020 with the release of The Prime Ministers – a chronologically arranged set of case studies from Robert Walpole in 1721 to Boris Johnson. That book was such a success that Dale followed it with others about US presidents and UK general elections. Each of these ran to a formula, with experts writing each of the case studies and with Dale acting as editor of the whole.

Now, inevitably, Dale reaches this lively subject. American presidential campaigns have long been rowdy, cut-throat and tense. As well as the familiar ones – JFK vs Nixon, Gore vs Bush, Clinton vs Bush – this compendium delves right back to the beginning, when 'Honest George' Washington was elected unopposed in 1788–9. This was, as Dale's book demonstrates, a gentle start to a dramatic story.

The Village in Britain: And Why Place Matters by Simon Jenkins

Viking, 5 November 2026

Like the Spanish 'pueblo', the British village is a state of mind as well as a place. It is the parish church and the pub, the post office and the cricket pitch, the manor house and the outlying farms. Those are, at least, some of the images the word 'village' conjures in one's mind.

In this spirited book, Simon Jenkins makes the case for the British village as a key element in human happiness. This is something, he argues, that it is easy to forget. During the past two centuries untold millions have been drawn away from villages to urban environments – the great cities or towns. There loneliness often awaits. Now, Jenkins contends, in our post-credit crunch, post-Covid world, it is time to remember just what a village offers.

This might be a pub as a place to congregate, a church that is free from the threat of demolition or a community shop that gives locals a sense of belonging and purpose. There has been much discussion of David Goodhart's concept of 'somewheres vs anywheres' in recent times. In this book Jenkins comes out for the former. And that 'somewhere', he argues, should be a village.

The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke

Granta, 5 November 2026

In Marx's famous theory about the evolution of human society he argued that the first of all stages was 'primitive communism' – a noble, egalitarian phase when all that was done was done for the greater good. A similar view can be taken of the early days of the Internet, which created all sorts of virtuous new platforms that promised to transform the world for the better. Now that time seems distant and somewhat naive. But it has left behind at least one surviving relic: Wikipedia.

Richard Cooke, an Australian journalist, has produced this stirring study of a site that we all know and (rather like the British village) constantly take for granted. He concedes that Wikipedia is not flawless. But for all of its biases, slips and distortions, it is at least a human production. And with more than seven million articles in the English language edition alone, it is a tremendous achievement too.

But as AI colonises the web, Wikipedia is left looking increasingly like a curiosity. Might it be, as Cooke contends, the very 'last encyclopedia that humans will ever write'? This is a poignant thought, as is another of his reflections. Wikipedia, Cooke asserts, is 'a refugee of the internet as it should have been'. A thought-provoking read.

Adder Stone by Clare Clark

Wilton Square Books, 5 November 2026

We're now well into the months of long, dark evenings when there are few better pleasures than sitting down with an immersive novel. As such, we have two works of historical fiction for you this month. The first of them is Clare Clark's Adder Stone.

Clark's narrative is spun out of a beguiling episode in 1960s social history – the construction of the Llyn Celyn reservoir in Wales. The building of this aroused great fury because it required the flooding of an inhabited valley and, therefore, the forced eviction of a community. The situation was aggravated further because the reservoir was of no benefit to the local population. Instead it was needed to provide the people of Liverpool, in England, with an additional water source.

There are shared themes here with Simon Jenkins's book (above) – the importance of place, the terror of progress. Adding to this is a seam of latent nationalism that Clark explores in an evocative story that opens with the Jones family in 1963. They, it transpires, will react to the reservoir in very different ways.

In Rome's Long Shadow: How the Classical Tradition Shaped the Modern World by Jamie Gianoutsos

Allen Lane, 5 November 2026

As I write the headline of the day is that the Democratic Party has won control of the US Senate. Anyone plugged into the news cycle will be aware of this, but fewer will grasp the Roman history behind this modern story. The US Senate was, after all, explicitly modelled on the Roman one of those fabled days of the Republic. And, as Jamie Gianoutsos, Professor of History at Mount St. Mary’s University, explains in this stylish study, we have inherited much more from the Romans than that.

It was from the Romans that we gained our modern understanding of issues like power, leadership and corruption. Why, for instance, did so many societies descend into tyranny? What was liberty? How should independence be preserved by a political system?

In the years of revolution in the seventeenth and, particularly, the eighteenth centuries, many looked to the Romans as they pondered these questions. Toussaint Louverture, for one, was inspired by Spartacus. George Washington found his own instruction in the story of Cincinnatus. Earlier, across the Atlantic, those involved in the English Civil War found meaning in the story of Julius Caesar.

As our politics grow increasingly erratic, books like this appeal all the more. In Rome's Long Shadow is a fortifying, refreshing read.

The Voices of the Dead by Nicola Upson

Faber, 5 November 2026

The second of our novels, The Voices of the Dead, has some similarities with Clare Clark's Adder Stone (above). Once again it riffs on a twentieth-century historical story with its plot unfurling in rural Wales. Like Clark's, too, it is an immersive read for these long autumnal nights.

Many readers will already be familiar with Nicola Upson's long-running series of Josephine Tey mysteries. This one opens with Josephine – as she is always called – in Covent Garden during the late spring of 1941 at the end of the Blitz. At a time of great destruction one of the concerns of the government was preserving the nation's cultural treasures and, as such, many of the gems of the National Gallery were transported to an underground location at a slate mine in north Wales.

Out of this intriguing context, Upson weaves a characteristically engrossing tale. For as the paintings are lowered into the mine, something quite different comes out – 'the voices of the dead'.

Border Land: Frontiers of Early England by Ryan Lavelle

Yale University Press, 10 November 2026

A different tone to the popular histories and novels on this list is struck by Ryan Lavelle in his scholarly Border Land. Lavelle is Professor in Early Medieval History at the University of Winchester and he has published widely on the Anglo-Saxon period of English history over the past two decades.

Here, in Border Land, he offers readers the chance to join him on a circuit of England's borders in the early, often elusive years of its history. Lavelle playfully embeds this idea of the circuit ('the early medieval mind went clockwise', he points out) into the structure of his book. And so the reader is borne carefully along, from 'Augustine's Oak' in western England, to Cornwall, to Offa's Dyke and the northern limits, which, Lavelle argues, stretched far beyond Hadrian's Wall to Edinburgh.

In Border Land Lavelle beats the boundaries of our great country at the moment of its birth. His pursuit of 'frontiers' is underpinned by a great sense of erudition.

Blood on the Thames: Murder, Money and the Making of the Modern Detective by Thomas Morris

Harvill, 12 November 2026

A month before the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, a shocking crime took place beside the River Thames in London. It involved a man of chequered character called Richard Patch who lured a wealthy shipbroker, Isaac Blight, into a carefully laid trap. As Blight drowsed in his parlour in Rotherhithe, Patch crept inside and aimed a pistol at him. This was the decisive moment. Once Blight was dead, Patch sought to inherit his business and all its assets.

Such is the plot of Thomas Morris's gripping dive into the gritty streets of Georgian London. It's a magnetic setting and the story of Patch's atrocious scheme animates it well. Blight's murder can be drawn together with other sensations of that time – George Parker's death in Oddingley, the Ratcliffe Highway Murders – and, like all the best books of this genre, it looks beyond the crime itself, to the social history of the time. This, as Morris nimbly shows, was a potent mix: grand visions and shady enterprises, amateur detectives and desperate men.

A History of Britain in 21 Paintings by Alice Loxton

Viking, 12 November 2026

Alice Loxton must be considered one of Britain's most productive historians. Since 2023's Uproar! – a study of the witty Georgian caricaturists – she has completed two further pop-histories, as well as her hundreds of Instagram and TikTok shorts that show her popping up at manor houses, old churches, museums and the like, on an almost daily basis. Phew.

And here Loxton comes again with A History of Britain in 21 Paintings. The aim here, of course, is to capture something of the essence of the country through a series of meaningful artworks. Among her selections are a portrait of Jesus Christ carried by St Augustine in 597, the enigmatic 'Rainbow Portrait' that depicted Queen Elizabeth I in later life and, rather differently, one of Lowry's unmistakable views of the Lancashire mill towns. With Christmas dead ahead, this is bound to be piled high in the shops. It's an inviting gateway into our national story.

Killing the Pope: John Paul II and the Last Battle of the Cold War by Serhii Plokhy

Allen Lane, 19 November 2026

Forty-five years ago, in a world that still received its news from TV bulletins, the story broke that Pope John Paul II had been shot. The assassination attempt took place on a sunny spring day, 13 May 1981, in St Peter's Square. As Serhii Plokhy explains at the outset of this gripping reconstruction of the crime, it soon became clear that the shooter was a 23-year-old Turkish man called Mehmet Ali Agca. But, beyond this, nothing was certain.

All these years on many puzzles remain. Why was Agca driven to such a violent act? Who was it that had sent him to the Vatican City? What papers survive that can reveal the truth about the story today? Plokhy, who won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2018 for Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, is perfectly placed to answer such questions having been one of the first scholars to study the Bulgarian State Security files on a prime suspect called Sergei Antonov.

In Killing the Pope, Plokhy reconstructs the attempted assassination then re-evaluates the primary sources that connect to it. 'It is high time', he argues, 'to separate the wheat from the chaff in this story of the last but still unfinished battle of the Cold War'.