The phrase "a recent novel" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when referring to a novel that has been published not long ago.
Example: "I just finished reading a recent novel by my favorite author, and it was fantastic."
Alternatives: "a new book" or "a lately published novel."
The Arizona of the near future, in a recent novel.
The title is almost certainly the longest for a recent novel.
When he name-checked the Adidas GSG9 boot in a recent novel, one interviewer assumed it was made up.
Equally obsessive, although far less accessible, is a recent novel called THE SIEGE OF WONDER, by Mark S. Geston (Doubleday, $5.95).
A recent novel by dude-lit king Chuck Palahniuk imagined a dystopian future in which "a billion husbands" are replaced by a wildly effective vibrator.
A recent novel by Can Eryumlu, Teardrops of Chios, looks back to Ottoman massacres against Greeks on the Aegean island of Chios in the 1820s.
In an recent novel move General Electric, in association with Quirky, a crowd-sourced social product development platform, announced with some fanfare a program to give inventors access to its huge patent portfolio.
A chilling recent novel, The Last Israelis by Noah Beck, imagines a scenario in which Iran has launched a nuclear attack on Israel.
Similarly unexpected is a more recent novel, Some Kind of Fairy Tale (2013), in which a teenage girl, lost to the family 20 years earlier, returns one Christmas Day with the claim that she was taken by the fairies.
In a more recent novel, I feel the YA romantic lead would NEVER pressure the female main character to have sex unless he was a villain.
And that's another insidious aspect of mobile telephony: its retrospective ability to make even a relatively recent novel look quaint.
