107 new eBooks and audiobooks coming out November 7 - 20, 2023

By Kobo • November 07, 2023New eBooks and Audiobooks

The most anticipated books coming out November 7 – 20, 2023

Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing was a ginormous hit in the genre of romantic epic fantasy (until recently dominated by Blood and Ash series author Jennifer L. Armentrout), instantly igniting a white hot desire for a sequel. With the arrival of Iron Flame (which we won’t be summarizing for you here since “romantic epic fantasy” is as much as you should know going in) the wait for a third installment begins.

We wouldn’t dare to spoil even a word of the long-awaited memoir from Barbra Streisand, My Name is Barbra, so we’ll say only this: the eBook has photos that are available only there, so go ahead and click that link.

Stephanie Land, author of the book that the Netflix series Maid was based on, returns with Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education. This book picks up where the earlier book left off, with the author enrolled in college and trying to get food on the table while completing coursework and coming under the scrutiny of professors and fellow students with no sense of life under the poverty line—and gives readers a look into just how hard it is to get by while trying to better yourself.

It’s tough to be a billionaire these days. Where once the 0.01% were free to enjoy their unspendable fortunes in peace, these days even the most apparently well-meaning come under the scrutiny of journalists skipping past their press releases to dig up financial records and evidence of a variety of interests beyond the old adage of “doing well while doing good.” Case in point, Washington journalist Tim Schwab’s The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire peels back the glowing prospecti of Gates’ philanthropic endeavours to reveal that Gates’ apparent transformation from arrogant 90s monopolist to open-hearted patron to the developing world was mostly a re-branding exercise. Schwab shows that Gates is as convinced as ever that he’s the smartest guy in every room, but with his tremendous financial leverage his inflated self-image has exerted a distorting effect on a wide swath of public policies, drawing support for his ideas—at best unproven, while many have been conclusively disproven—for how to fix the world’s problems. Meanwhile other approaches are starved of attention and resources, in many cases harming the very people Gates claims to be helping.

At the time of this writing, just after the first anniversary of his takeover of X (fka. Twitter), Elon Musk was still a billionaire. In Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History by Ben Mezrich, author of such nonfiction page-turners as Bringing Down the House and The Accidental Billionaires (the basis of the movie “The Social Network”), tells the inside story of how Musk handled the buying and eventual running of the ad-supported social network favoured by news outlets and journalists. Notably, Mezrich’s book was long past final edits when the company’s valuation at half of its purchase price from a year ago became public knowledge, which seems not to undermine the thesis embedded in the title of this book.

Possibly related, also out this week: A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith.

Iconoclastic visual artist Kent Monkman partners with writer and media artist Gisèle Gordon on the genre-defying book The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 1 - A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island. With the irreverence of his paintings, this book is the narrative of one of Monkman's recurring characters, the shapeshifting being beyond time known as Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, on the cosmological history of Turtle Island, the land known to settlers as North America. It's a blend of history, fiction, memoir, and anything else that tickles the fancy of Monkman and Gordon as they breathe life into Miss Chief's singular voice. This first volume (in what we expect with admitted naiveté to be at least a two-volume series) spans the creation of the universe to the confederation of Canada—which implies that any subsequent volume(s?) will be something completely different.

Tuesdays With Morrie author Mitch Albom, Michael Cunningham, the award-winning author of the novel The Hours, and the Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels would at first glance appear to have little in common. But let us offer this: the careers of each took off in the late 90s, and they all have new books out now. Cunningham’s Day checks in with a family on April 5 over 3 consecutive years, leading into and through the COVID-19 pandemic as pre-existing tensions are ratcheted tighter, new cracks emerge, and loss leaves a lot unresolved. Albom’s novel The Little Liar is about a boy whose reputation for truth-telling is exploited by Nazis invading his home in Salonika, Greece, persuading the boy that his family can be saved if he persuades his fellow Jewish townspeople to board trains to new homes and jobs elsewhere—leading him to tell only lies after he realizes what he’s done. And Anne Michaels’ Held is a brief, textured narrative the starts on the battlefield of WWI after a violent explosion, and moves through the memories (can one remember the future?) of the injured soldier named John.

Finally, we have three poetry collections to tell you about this week: from TikTok phenom Whitney Hanson comes Harmony, actor Megan Fox is the author of Pretty Boys are Poisonous, and Canadian octogenarian poet and novelist Joy Kogawa, who many readers would know from her novel Obasan, releases a career-spanning collection, From the Lost and Found Department: New and Selected Poems.

More books coming out this week