5 Sensational New Books for October 2024
New Books coming out in October 2024 include a non fiction book from Ta-Nehisi Coates and long awaited new novel from the wonderful Yuri Herrera. Enjoy 5 Sensational New Books for October 2024!
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5 Sensational New Books for October 2024
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
In his keenly anticipated new book, The Message, he explores the urgent question of how our stories – our reporting, imaginative narratives and mythmaking – both expose and distort our realities. Travelling to three resonant sites of conflict, he illuminates how the stories we tell – as well as the ones we don’t – work to shape us.
The first of the book’s three main parts finds Coates on his inaugural trip to Africa – a journey to Dakar, where he finds himself in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and the ghost-haunted country of his imagination. He then takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on the banning of his own work and the deep roots of a false and fiercely protected American mythology – visibly on display in this capital of the confederacy, with statues of segregationists still looming over its public squares. Finally in Palestine, Coates sees with devastating clarity the tragedy that grows in the clash between the stories we tell and reality on the ground.
Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world – and our own souls – and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
In Argus, North Dakota, a fraught wedding is taking place.
Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe. Gary thinks Kismet is the answer to all of his problems; Kismet can’t even imagine her future, let alone the kind of future Gary might offer. During a clumsy proposal, Kismet misses her chance to say ‘no’ and so the die is cast.
Hugo has been in love with Kismet for years. He has been her friend, confidante and occasionally her lover – and now she is marrying Gary, Hugo is determined to steal her back.
Meanwhile Kismet’s mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary’s family, and on her nightly truck drives along the highway from the farm to the factories, she tunes in to the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future – both her daughter’s and her own.
Starkly beautiful like the landscape it inhabits, The Mighty Red is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets. And as with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendour.
Comrade Papa by GauZ’
Following the death of his parents, Dabilly, a young white man, seeks a life of colonial adventure in Cote d’Ivoire. It is 1880 and Dabilly joins a beleaguered French general trying to set up trading routes into a coast as yet untouched by colonisation.
A century later, a Black boy born to communist parents in Amsterdam begins to research his family history. When he is sent to Cote d’Ivoire to visit his grandmother, he will discover traces of an ancestor he never knew existed.
GauZ’ looks across continents and centuries to create a portrait of two very different men, tracing the paths and histories that connect them and plunging us deep into the history of colonisation in the Cote d’Ivoire.
Djinns by Fatma Aydemir
For thirty years, Huseyin has worked in Germany, taking every extra shift and carefully saving, even as he provides for his wife and their four children. Finally, he has set aside enough to buy an apartment back in Istanbul – a new centre for the family and a place for him to retire. But just as this future is in reach, Huseyin’s tired heart gives up. His family rush to him, travelling from Germany by plane and car, each of his children conflicted as they process their relationship with their parents and each other.
Reminiscent of Bernardine Evaristo or Zadie Smith, Djinns portrays a family at the end of the 20th century in all its complexity – full of secrets, questions, silence and love.
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera
New Orleans, 1853. A young Zapotec man named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp along with a small group of fellow political exiles from Mexico. Later, in 1858, he is to become the first indigenous Mexican president, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city. He falls in love with the music and food, but unavoidable, too, is the trade in human beings.
A magnificent work of speculative history and a love letter to New Orleans.
If you enjoyed 5 Sensational New Books for October 2024, check out our Book of the Month September 2024 My Friends by Hisham Matar
