86 new books coming out August 29 – September 9, 2024

By Kobo • August 27, 2024New eBooks and Audiobooks

The best books coming out before summer ends

Kate Atkinson’s Brodie Jackson books might be the most popular series of crime novels among readers whose tastes don’t always lead them to crime fiction. For nearly thirty years, the award-winning Life After Life author has swung as the muses allow between standalone works of literary fiction (which may yield sequels, such as A God in Ruins) and the ongoing story of ex-detective Jackson Brodie. Following its predecessor Big Sky by 5 years, Death at the Sign of the Rook finds Brodie in Yorkshire on the hunt for a stolen painting which soon leads him to an estate presently being used to host Murder Mystery weekends. The irony-rich setup fuels Atkinson’s homage to the Agatha Christie-type mystery stories that we seem to have fallen in love with all over again, in movies such as Knives Out.

Matt Haig’s new novels is a mystery of another sort: in The Life Impossible a retired math teacher inherits a house in the Mediterranean from a friend she hasn’t spoken to in ages. She sets out to satisfy her curiosity about her friend and the house but finds something wondrous. (But a surprise free house sounds pretty wondrous on its own.)

YA author Sarah Rees Brennon makes her adult epic fantasy debut with Long Live Evil, the story of a woman who strikes a bargain at the brink of death: to live on in the world of her favourite fantasy series.

Journalist Tanya Talaga’s prize winning 2017 book Seven Fallen Feathers brought readers into the city of Thunder Bay over 11 years to get to know seven Indigenous high school students who were in the city because of a lack of high schools in the communities where they grew up. Each of the seven died, and Talaga’s writing shows how each of these kids were failed by systems lacking in sympathy or care, even after their needless deaths. In The Knowing Talaga turns her investigative lens on her own family history, chasing loose threads of family members who disappeared into residential schools, but also other institutions of supposed care such as “Indian hospitals,” and in so doing weaves a history of Canada that in which these and other cruelties to Indigenous people were no accidents or shadowy misdeeds, but rather a core part of nation-building.

Historian Josephine Quinn takes aim at the founding mythos of the entire Western world in How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History, arguing that borrowing and incorporating elements of culture and technology from other societies has been an essential part of the growth of the Western world that goes back further than the founding of the Roman Empire.

Literary icon Jane Urquhart returns with In Winter I Get Up at Night, the story of Emer, an imaginative girl who sustains an injury from a prairie storm and ingests the stories of her ward-mates at the children’s hospital during her recovery, and who grows up to have an affair with a brilliant scientist whose work changes life in the 20^th century.

That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America by Amanda Jones tells her story as a small town school librarian who was caught up in the hysteria of book-bannings (typically books with any LGBTQ+ content, references to or depictions of any kind of sex, or discussions of racism referred to inaccurately as “CRT”) happening across the US. Though her fight isn’t over, Jones is able to tell the story of what happened to her and what she did about it, while also explaining to readers how we arrived at this moment of exactly the wrong kind of excitement around books.