39 new eBooks and audiobooks coming out August 24 - 30

We must wonder how, while working on a political thriller with none other than Hilary Clinton, Louise Penny found the time to write a new Inspector Gamache mystery that speaks to hot button themes of post-Covid society, disinformation, and “cancel culture”. In The Madness of Crowds, the 17th entry in the series, the vacationing Armand Gamache receives an unusual assignment for a homicide detective: to interrupt his winter holiday to provide security at a nearby university for a visiting professor of statistics who’s on campus to give a lecture. When Inspector Gamache tries to get out of the assignment, citing the professor’s reprehensible socio-political agenda (she argues that eugenics-like policies during Covid might have eased the burden on the healthcare system), he’s made out to be an enemy of academic freedom. What follows is a descent into social delusion as alternative facts outrun reality, morality flexes in the direction of power, and society around Gamache’s family cracks into warring factions. And all of this before someone’s murdered. With every book we want to say she’s at the top of her game -- and then she climbs higher. [Watch the author speaking on compassion, grace, and much more before a live audience at the Kobo office in 2014.]

Mike Duncan is a popular podcaster who’s guided audiences through the history of Rome as well as nearly a dozen different revolutions. He wrote the book The Storm Before the Storm, in which he gave readers a view of the beginning of the decline of the Roman republic. Clever listeners to his episodes on revolutions might have guessed that he’d eventually write a book about someone involved in several: the Marquis de Lafayette. In Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution, Duncan takes us through Lafayette’s extraordinary life, during which he spent half a century fighting in revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Of course the audiobook is narrated by the veteran podcaster himself.

Acclaimed poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers makes her fiction debut with The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois’s most widely known contribution to American philosophy is the concept of the “Double Consciousness,” in which Black Americans must be able to perceive themselves at all times through the eyes of others who are watching with a mix of scorn and pity, while at the same time existing and perceiving as any other individual would. And in this novel that bears Du Bois’s name we follow the journey of Ailey Pearl Garfield, a young Black woman named after the legendary 20th century choreographer Alvin Ailey, and her great grandmother Pearl, a descendant of enslaved people. Ailey carries a heavy burden of expectation that adds more layers of consciousness on her shoulders, and she decides that to make sense of who she is she needs to dig into her past. And as we follow Ailey’s journey we come to understand the complexity of her heritage, and the balance of suffering and resilience it bears. It’s a long book, written with the style and lyricism you’d expect from such an accomplished poet as Jeffers, and it’s worth taking time with in these waning days of summer.

More books coming out August 24 - 30

💭 Big Ideas

• God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn
• The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain by Alan Gordon
• The Ten Equations That Rule the World: And How You Can Use Them Too by David Sumpter
• Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Dr. Anna Lembke
• Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
• Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl

🗣 True Stories

• Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution by Mike Duncan
• Life in the City of Dirty Water: A Memoir of Healing by Clayton Thomas-Muller
• Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berlin Wall by Helena Merriman
• The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer by Christopher Clarey
• Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir by Kat Chow
• Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir by George Elliott Clarke
• The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming by Steven L. Kent

💘 Romance

• Bombshell by Sarah MacLean
• Forever Thrown by Kathleen Brooks
• Saving Danger by Katie Reus
• Stronger Than You Know by Lori Foster
• All In With Him by Lauren Blakely
• Unsung Requiem by C. L. Stone
• Foolish Hearts by Synithia Williams

🗡️ Crime, Action, and Mystery

• The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny
• The Last Soviet by J. Robert Kennedy
• Lost Angels by Stacy Green
• Deadly Cypher by Kate Parker
• Hidden by Fern Michaels
• No Grater Crime by Maddie Day

🖊️ Literary Fiction

• Fight Night by Miriam Toews
• The Spectacular by Zoe Whittall
• The Women of Troy by Pat Barker
• The Snow Line by Tessa McWatt
• The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
• Probably Ruby by Lisa Bird-Wilson
• The Most Precious Substance on Earth by Shashi Bhat

✨ Fantasy and Speculative Fiction

• Big Ship, Lots of Trouble by John Wilker
• Light Chaser by Peter F. Hamilton
• Feral Creatures by Kira Jane Buxton
• The Pariah by Anthony Ryan
• The Bone Scroll: Elemental Legacy #5 by Elizabeth Hunter
• A Heart Divided by Jin Yong