40 new eBooks and audiobooks coming out November 16 - 22, 2021

By Kobo • November 16, 2021New Releases

Highlights from this week’s newest eBooks and audiobooks

September 30, 2021 was Canada’s first Day of Truth and Reconciliation, a day when Canadians are called upon to reflect on the violent history of the residential school system as a means of reconciling with the past. And while it’s vital to confront history directly and truthfully, there remains the question of what to do now. In Rez Rules: My Indictment of Canada's and America's Systemic Racism Against Indigenous Peoples, Clarence Louie, Chief of the Osoyoos Indian Band in the Okanagan Valley, lays out a framework that focuses on economic independence for Indigenous peoples, especially those living on reserves (or “on the Rez” as Chief Louie puts it). The author is not a mere policy wonk: rather, this is a book born of a passion for history and community that grew out of a mix of formal education, first-hand experience in Osoyoos, and a lot of trial and error. Readers interested in a nuts and bolts view of the politics and systems that run through Rez life get Chief Louie’s very personal perspective here.

It's an open secret that rock star biographies are largely ghostwritten by writers working from interview tapes. At most, readers will see a “with so-and-so" credit below the star’s name, indicating who actually conducted the interviews and worked on the manuscript that became the book you’re reading. That’s what makes Miracle and Wonder by Paul Simon different: for starters, it’s a co-authored work crediting Simon alongside Malcolm Gladwell, author of many non-fiction bestsellers. Gladwell is also the founder of Pushkin, a podcasting company that also produces audiobooks [we recently spoke to journalist Michael Specter about working with Pushkin for his biography of Dr. Anthony Fauci]. Miracle and Wonder is unique among rock star autobiographies in that we’re not only hearing the subject speaking in his own voice, but he’s speaking in response to questions posed in conversation by Gladwell or the host of the Broken Record podcast, Bruce Headlam. And what elevates this to being more than just a whole season of Broken Record focused on Paul Simon is the material that stitches the conversations together, which includes biographical details that help listeners track the timeline of Simon’s career, and short reflections from a variety of Simon’s most accomplished fans, including jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, opera singer Renee Fleming, and country musician Roseanne Cash, among others.

Dave Eggers' 2013 novel The Circle told the story of Mae Holland, a young woman hired by The Circle, “the world’s most powerful internet company,” whose mission is to link users’ every identity across every online manifestation into a single universal and transparent entity. The novel is propelled by the growing sense of peril that Mae feels as she starts uncovering dark truths behind The Circle’s increasingly firm hold on the nature of identity and truth itself. In his new novel The Every, Eggers returns to the world of The Circle, in which the behemoth of identity merges with a leviathan of commerce to create a new company known as The Every. Here again, readers enter the story through a new hire into the megacorporation, Delaney Wells, whose aim is to take the company down from within. The trouble is, for all the apparent social ills of The Every, the company is deeply beloved by its users. As the pandemic drove demand for ecommerce and moved even more of our social lives online, The Every is an apt framing for the post-pandemic world we’re emerging into and the choices we make to shape it.

More books coming out November 16 - 22, 2021

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