48 new eBooks and audiobooks coming out February 7 – 13, 2023

By Kobo • February 07, 2023New eBooks and Audiobooks

New eBooks and audiobooks out this week

Victory City, Salman Rushdie’s 13^th novel, is a story of supernatural beings walking among mortals and altering the course of history. Pampa Kampana is a nine-year-old girl whose shock over the death of her mother brings about a kind of possession by a goddess who speaks through the girl—and allows her to live for centuries. And during that time she oversees and profoundly influences a place called Bisnaga, known as “victory city,” as it rises to greatness. This is Rushdie in top form, unspooling an epic tale with his trademark irreverence and wit, juxtaposed against scenes of terror and beauty.

If you’ve ever wondered how complex things get done—or undone, or flatly defeated—then How Big Things Get Done by Oxford economic geographer Bent Flyvbjerg and journalist Dan Gardner may unlock some mysteries for you. The pair address projects of all kinds, from home renovations plagued by a stream of new (and costly) problems, to the miraculously swift journey of the iPod from napkin sketch to product launch. And they look at the boondoggles that anyone who lives in a big city can point to, the “big new thing” that never delivered what it was supposed to and cost an order of magnitude more than it was supposed to. They identify the factors that drive a project to success from the start as well as the forces that pull projects off course into oblivion. In his academic work studying large scale projects, Flyvbjerg developed something he calls “The Iron Law of Megaprojects,” (“over time, over budget, under benefits”), observing time and again that projects that get approved are the ones that are most appealing in presentation, which seldom correlates to having a realistic budget or a sound plan for execution. For his part, Gardner’s track record on explainer-type books is sterling, with the 2009 ever-relevant bestseller Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear to his credit. Anyone who’s ever been involved in a big enterprise software project or just tried to spruce up their laundry room will find relatable flashes of insight here.

Both B.F.F.: A Memoir of Friendship Lost and Found and The Friendship Breakup tell a kind of love story that’s too seldom explored in art: the love shared, and often lost, between friends. B.F.F. is writer Christie Tate’s examination of her own sense of disconnection in non-romantic relationships. She writes about one relationship that she especially values, the friendship of Meredith, who speaks plainly to Christie and challenges her to examine herself in ways that her many well-documented hours in group therapy (she’s the author of the bestselling memoir Group) never quite drilled into. The result is a deeper and more lasting bond and an understanding of what binds true friends. Billed as a “mom-com,” The Friendship Breakup is about Fallon Monroe, whose bestie Beatrice starts to ghost her and gives her cause to wonder what she did wrong—and if she can win back Beatrice and all the friends she’s taken with her. At the same time, Fallon tries to make new friends through an app, which goes about as well as you might expect. We hope this isn’t the last novel about friendship with a “rom-com”-type tone (though we think “mom-com” could be improved upon) and that the time has come to engage through fiction with this near-universal and sorely under-examined type of relationship.

More books coming out February 7 – 13, 2023