62 new eBooks and audiobooks coming out September 12 - 18, 2023

By Kobo • September 12, 2023New eBooks and Audiobooks

Here are some of the most anticipated books coming out September 12 - 18, 2023

Jennifer L. Armentrout’s Blood and Ash series is a favourite among fans of fantasy-romance: A Soul of Ash and Blood, the 5^th installment, was published earlier this summer—and the next is already expected to land next year. Despite this prolific output (or perhaps because of the reported 8 hours per day the author spends writing, switching between typing and writing longhand) her new series Awakening kicks off with Fall of Ruin and Wrath. Nine cities, isolated from one another since the gods spared them while laying waste to the rest of the world, are governed by malevolent royals who “feed on mortal pleasure.” A young woman serving as a baron’s courtesan crosses paths with a prince and sparks fly in every direction. It’s certain sparks will lead to flames—and the only question is how many books will this story burn through?

French author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, causing a spike in interest among English readers for her many short works, many blending fiction and memoir in a way that only French novelists can. When the award was announced, Ernaux’ latest book at the time was The Young Man, about a passionate love affair the author had in her 50s with a man less than half her age. That book is now available in an English translation by Alison L. Strayer, whose work on Ernaux’ The Years dazzled English readers around the world.

In the coming days, speculation about who’ll be named the 2023 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature will reach a boiling point—and then on October 5, the Swedish Academy will announce the winner. Julius Taranto’s debut novel is not about that prize. Rather, How I Won A Nobel Prize is a comic campus novel with a couple Helen and Hew, at its heart. Helen, a physicist working in potentially world-changing semiconductor research, follows her disgraced adviser to work at a university founded by a libertarian billionaire actively recruiting academics cast out of the world’s most prestigious schools. Located on an island just off Connecticut, with a tower tall enough to look down on Yale (including a telescope built for this purpose), it’s an institution that prides itself on contrariness and provocation, right down to the names of campus shops and restaurants. Offended at every turn, Hew joins the island’s protest movement and engages in street brawls with a Proud Boys-like group of the institution’s supporters; meanwhile Helen throws herself into her work, trying to keep above the politics of the place while working at the sub-atomic level, and falling into an affair with a controversial novelist.

When Walter Isaacson started interviewing Elon Musk over two years ago for the biography he was writing about the polarizing billionaire, Musk hadn’t yet attempted to buy Twitter (which he’s owned since 2022 and renamed “X”) and the publicly available count of known Musk offspring was in single-digits. Which is to say, Musk presented a unique challenge to even a biographer as accomplished as Isaacson, whose bestselling books Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Einstein: His Life and His Universe, and Leonardo da Vinci told the stories of lives lived to completion; and Isaacson finished working on Steve Jobs during the Apple founder’s final months. But Musk, still in his early 50s, is involved in running about half a dozen companies and it’s not at all clear how history will remember him—as the pioneer of mainstream space travel via SpaceX, the visionary behind revolutionary human-computer interfaces via Neuralink, the overwhelmed owner left holding the bag when Twitter finally collapsed—or the misunderstood genius who transformed the social media platform into something beyond present imagining. Therefore, we advise readers to instead look to Isaacon’s Elon Musk for insight into the upbringing of an all-too-public figure—and to expect some of what they learn to be challenged in public (on X, no doubt) by the book’s subject.