56 new books coming out September 10 – 16, 2024

By Kobo • September 10, 2024New eBooks and Audiobooks

The best books coming out this week

Since his book Sapiens was translated into English in 2015, historian Yuval Noah Harari has been a household name among readers who like big books stuffed with big ideas. In his latest book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, Harari tackles the transmission of information itself. While charting the strides in human achievement brought about by the ability to record and share information, he notes when and how different information technologies caused harm, such as under various authoritarian movements as well as the passive-aggression of different forms of bureaucracy. And as the subtitle indicates, Harari’s driving concern in exploring this topic is to bring context into the urgent decisions we’re making today regarding the aggregation and deployment of colossal bodies of information operating as artificial intelligence.

Publishers will debate when the “best” time to publish a book might be, with some leaning towards this time of year when awards are being given and gifts soon to be bought, while others prefer the open field of early spring in a bid to make it onto a summer “must-read” list. But all agree, the worst time to publish a book in recent memory was March 2020—that’s when TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea arrived. But rather than being washed out by the tide of pandemic concerns and viral social media trends, Klune’s feel-good contemporary fantasy found readers who needed exactly what it was all about, and who in turn sang its praises to others, eventually building the book a word-of-mouth phenomenon that’s still going strong. Which absolutely does not mean it’s even a moment too soon for the sequel, Somewhere Beyond the Sea. We rejoin Arthur Parnassus, headmaster and imminently adoptive father to half a dozen dangerously magical children, as he is called to address some dark periods in his past. The conflict between who Arthur was then and is now, and how others describe him and those like him, threatens to shatter this chosen family and the hearts of readers who’ve grown to love them.

The novels of Heather O’Neill bear little in common other than their depth of imagination. In The Capital of Dreams O’Neill introduces us to a magical country somewhere in Europe where art reigns and among artists the writer Clara Bottom reigns supreme. Her daughter Sofia will do anything to win her mother’s love. A sudden invasion by a neighbouring enemy nation provides the opportunity for Sofia to be a hero to her people, but most importantly to her mother. But Sofia’s mission goes awry and the teenager is left to fend for herself in a war-torn landscape as she struggles to do what she set out to do even if she never sees her mother again. A novel of war from O’Neill is certainly unexpected—which is exactly what her most ardent fans want most from her.