59 new eBooks and audiobooks coming out May 2 – 8, 2023

By Kobo • May 02, 2023New eBooks and Audiobooks

It’s been a while since we heard from a few of these authors, and we’re so glad to have them back

Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone was an international literary sensation when it was released in 2009. The Stanford-tenured, ethnically Indian, Ethiopian-born Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine whose medical experience has taken him all over the United States did not fit the profile of the typical debut novelist. Maybe that’s got something to do with why it’s taken until now to get another novel from him. The Covenant of Water is set in the southern Indian state of Kerala (coincidentally the setting for The God of Small Things, another novel by a writer who kept a rapt readership waiting years for a second work of fiction) and spans three generations who each suffer the loss of a family member to drowning. At the centre of the book is Big Ammachi, the matriarch who was married off to a 40-year-old man when she was just 12, and through whose eyes we witness an India that changes in unimaginable ways. This being a long book is somehow comforting, given how long we may have to wait for another gift of fiction from Verghese.

Justin Cronin’s speculative Passage trilogy was a big hit when the eponymous first installment came out in 2010, spinning with literary skill a tale of post-apocalyptical predators, evoking Stephen King’s Dark Tower and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The final book, The City of Mirrors, came out in 2016, and a short-lived TV adaptation, also called “The Passage” came and went in 2019. At last, Cronin is back with The Ferryman, a chillingly dystopian novel about a an island paradise called Prospera which provides long fulfilling lives to its residents—until their electronically-measured health is deemed sufficiently low that they must take a trip by ferry to a place called the Nursery. There they find renewal and are prepared to make a fresh start at life. But then a ferryman, technically an employee of the Department of Social Contracts, starts to question the nature of his job, and when his own measured health seems suspect, the underpinnings of Prospera itself. It’s a provocative and timely concept, speculating darkly on how an aging generation could be cared for—and what ethical concessions that might demand from those providing care.

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has been explaining difficult concepts to interested readers for decades. Most know him from his books Physics of the Impossible and Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension, so he’s well-suited to his latest mind-bending topic, quantum computing. In Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything Kaku posits that we may be in the waning days of the microchip-based era of computing, as a new generation of computing machines based on principles of quantum physics stand to tackle familiar problems in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago. In this book he takes readers through the fundamentals of how quantum computing differs from the vacuum tube/transistor/microchip-based machines that have been in use since the 1950s (including the modern one on which you’re reading this) and how scaling down computing switches to the atomic level can achieve levels of performance as astonishing to us today as our smartphones would have been to NASA engineers working on the Apollo program.

More books coming out May 2 – 8, 2023