58 new eBooks and audiobooks coming out May 17 - 30, 2022

By Kobo • May 17, 2022New eBooks and Audiobooks

The best eBooks and audiobooks coming out this week and next

Fantasy novelist Guy Gavriel Kay is unique in his genre for the weight he’s put on standalone novels throughout the course of his career. His newest, All the Seas of the World, takes place on the high seas around the time of the Renaissance—but in a world where history as we know it has been given a slightly fantastical twist.

Also notable for her many standalone works in a genre that thrives on series is romance juggernaut Nora Roberts, whose new book Nightwork is a work of romantic suspense in which a petty crook turned master thief falls for a woman only to ghost her when he becomes a target of former associates. Will he survive? Will they find a way to be together?

Former pastor Brian D. McLaren has become known as a writer on the subject of religious doubt, and in his new book, Do I Stay Christian? he opens up on his thinking about whether to persist through doubt and disagreement with church leaders, or turn away from religion entirely. It’s a thoughtful contemplation of a variety of factors in the context of what it means to live a humane, Christian life. Even non-believers may find food for thought here.

Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces is a collection of personal essays by the breakout journalist and podcaster. He speaks about his passion for pro wrestling, immigrating from Sudan at the age of 12, and a variety of other topics handled in a thoughtful, funny, and highly pop culture-literate manner.

Speaking of immigrant stories by charming Canadians, We Were Dreamers is Shang-Chi star Simu Liu’s memoir of growing up raised by different sets of grown-ups, not all of whom had the capacity for nurturing that young Simu needed. It culminates in him failing at a career he pursued out of parental expectation, and then having to take stock as a young adult and decide what he’s going to do with his life. That’s when he decides he might as well give acting a try…

In Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow a woman turning 40 is transported back in time to occupy the body of her 16-year-old self again and must confront the decisions she’d make differently now that she can do it all over again—this time with the wisdom of knowing how things turned out her first time through.

Weaponized is the latest sci-fi novel from Neal Asher, in which a soldier looking for meaning in her life after war heads to a planet where she founds a colony and discovers a new sense of purpose. Then the raptors appear. And the ancient alien ruins. And the resident biophysicist starts to obsess over his one-man plan for survival…

Patriarchy Blues is writer Frederick Joseph’s meditation on how men, especially men of colour, inform their view of the world through a lens of toxic masculinity, a concept the author finds troublingly elusive. Joseph includes essays, poems, and epigraphs in this eclectic intellectual exploration of a concept that needs more reflection.

How to be a Climate Optimist by Chris Turner is a rallying cry for humanity in the face of the climate crisis. Yes, things are bad, but Turner focuses attention on where real progress has been happening and where there’s reasonable hope for solutions that might even improve quality of life for many.

Natalie Jenner’s The Jane Austen Society was a smash bestseller in 2020, and she’s followed it with Bloomsbury Girls, in which another group of young women drawn together in a world of books, this time at publisher and bookseller Bloomsbury Books in 1950. As you’d expect from the setting, there are cameos from 20^th century literary icons including Samuel Beckett and publisher Ellen Doubleday. A beach read for die-hard bookworms and publishing history buffs.