58 new eBooks and audiobooks coming out October 24 – November 6, 2023

By Kobo • October 24, 2023New eBooks and Audiobooks

Here are some of the most anticipated books coming out October 24 – November 6, 2023

It’s been 25 years since Britney Spears’ debut single, “… Baby One More Time” made her a household name. That’s more than several lifetimes for a pop star, and Britney has lived every one of hers in the public eye, but only gained the agency to tell her story two years ago, with the end of a conservatorship that had placed her career and finances in the hands of her father Jamie Spears. The Woman in Me is her side of that story, from being stripped of her autonomy in 2008 after a public struggle with mental health, to the social media movement to #FreeBritney, and finally to her successful defeat in court of the conservatorship that was originally meant to last only a matter of weeks but ended up lasting over 13 years.

Just a few weeks ago, a suspect was arrested for the 1996 shooting death of rapper Tupac Shakur. In Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography, Staci Robinson, one of the rapper’s high school contemporaries and now an author and screenwriter, delivers an exhaustive story of Shakur’s upbringing and rise to the top of the West Coast 90s rap scene. Written in consultation with the Shakur estate, it includes a lot of visual material—photos, handwritten notes, etc.—that shed new light on the life and legacy of this enduring icon.

As an elite runner, Caster Semenya grew up learning how to push hard to achieve her goals. But when her body itself came under scrutiny after she won the 2009 Berlin World Championships, she became the centre of a debate that rages to this day about gender and competitiveness in sports—usually with the intention of excluding gender non-conforming people from women’s sports. The Race to Be Myself is her memoir of how it felt to be put in this position, fighting in court for the right to compete while enduring a range of public and private humiliations.

There’s a social media meme now about how often men think about the Roman Empire. But it’s safe to say there are few (of any gender) who think about it as often and with as much erudition and creativity as scholar Mary Beard. In Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient World she introduces to thirty rulers of Rome through the lens of the historical record, almost as ninth graders accompanying them on (a highly inappropriate) “bring your kids to work day,” overhearing their jokes, tagging along to their meetings (work-related and not), and listening in on the daily business of imperial bureaucracy. The result is a portrait of Roman monarchs over three centuries as mortal men in a position of singular power and responsibility.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli has a gift for explaining profoundly complicated, mind-straining concepts in brief, beautiful prose, which he’s put on full display in books including Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. In White Holes, he zeroes in on, counterintuitively, black holes—taking readers on a journey through these time/space-distorting phenomena and positing that the core there may be a white hole coming into existence. This is a book both about time and space, but also the mind of a scientist at work, as Rovelli offers glimpses into his own research, knowing first-hand the vulnerability of forming and testing hypotheses at the edge of human knowledge.

Did you ever wonder about Julia Worthing, the love interest of Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984? Novelist and literary critic Sandra Newman often did, so she wrote a novel about her. Julia follows the unexplored alleyways of Orwell’s landmark novel to get to know life in Oceania not as a rebel in hiding like Winston, but as a popular, outwardly compliant, and essentially nihilistic young woman like Julia.

Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend is her first novel since 2017’s award-winning Sing, Unburied, Sing. Ward’s husband Brandon Miller died in January 2020, an early US victim of COVID-19, and in her grief she feared that her ability to write fiction may have died with him—though she was three chapters into a new book. She eventually found her way back into the work she’s so gifted at, and this story about Annis, an enslaved young woman who nevertheless sustains a rich inner life, communing with spirits and seizing moments of joy in a profession of her humanity and in resistance to the diabolical business of chattel slavery. As with any of her books, plot points tell little—the magic is in the reading of her gorgeous prose.

Tim O’Brien’s America Fantastica is an explicitly post-COVID novel, coming over 20 years after the Vietnam veteran-turned award-winning author’s last work of fiction, July, July. It’s a road story, following Boyd Halverson, whose CV includes “journalist,” “disinformation-peddling troll,” “retail store manager,” with “bank robber” and “kidnapper” added as this darkly-comic tale gets underway. He’s making a cross-country trip, with a bank teller hostage, to settle a score with the man who ruined his life; along the way O’Brien introduces us to a rich cast of characters giving life to modern American archetypes driven by a desire to deceive.

More books coming out this week