Among the best new books released this month, the first one dive deep into a range of topics, from a wrenching portrait of homelessness and poverty in America to the dissection of a marriage and its eventual unravelling. October welcomes the return of best-selling author John Le Carr and a posthumous book from British spy master Amor Towles. Between thought-provoking fiction, thrilling examinations of fictional relationships and more, there s something for everyone this month. In her debut book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrea Elliott tells the harrowing story of a girl's coming-of-age against the backdrop of the homeless crisis in New York City. Invisible Child traces almost a decade of the life of Dasani Coates, beginning in 2012 when she lived in a Brooklyn shelter at 11 years old. As she grows older, Dasani is forced to decide whether to leave her family or instead attend boarding school and keep them behind. Along her journey Elliot crafts an intimate exploration of poverty and racism in the U.S. as well as a portrait of a young person s resilience.
Right Within: How to Heal From Racial Trauma in the Workplace Minda Harts Oct. 5 In 2019, Minda Harts debuted The Memo, a career guidebook specifically written for women of color. Her follow up is a self-help book that is tailored for the same readership, but offers actionable advice on how to heal from racism in workplaces. Incorporating guidance from therapists and faith leaders, Harts takes a comprehensive look at what this trauma can look like and provides strategies for how to talk about it. Moving beyond how to heal, Harts also points to the future and shares tactics to help women of color succeed in their workplaces.
While searching her late mother s belongings, Anna makes some curious discoveries about her father who has never been part of her life. His student and scholarship diaries have revealed his involvement in radical politics in London in 1970 s. She learns that he was president of a country in West Africa and that he is still alive. The revelation comes amid Angora s self identity crisis — she s not more with her husband, her daughter has grown and sends her searching to find out who and where her father really is. Author Chibundu Onuzo offers a stirring narrative about family, our capacity to change and the need to belong.
It s June 1954 and the 18 - year old Emmett Watson is being released from a juvenile work farm. He served 15 months for involuntary manslaughter and is now back in his childhood home in California where he plans to pick up his little brother and hit the road, aiming for a fresh start in Nebraska. But the brothers plans are quickly thwarted by the surprise arrival of two escaped inmates, and soon the group is off to New York City. Flipping between perspectives and taking place over just 10 days, The Lincoln Highway showcases the talent of Amor Towles, author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility, as he guides readers through a vivid and engrossing cross-country road trip.
In his nonfiction debut, writer and editor Jay Caspian Kang dissects the loneliness of the Asian American experience. The son of Korean immigrants, Kang combines personal family history with deft reporting in a provocative and sweeping examination of Racial Identity, belonging and family. In America there are still two races: Black and white, writes he. Almost everyone else is part of a demographic group headed in one direction or the other. Arriving almost a year after his death in December 2020, John le Carr's thriller promises to be a fitting final piece in his career as an espionage novelist. Silverview is a classic Le Carr spy tale. In it, a bookkeeper in an English coastal town is unnerved by the presence of a new visitor to his shop, someone who knows a bit too much about his familial history. In London, news of a potential leak sends a spy chief to the same seaside town. In Asali Solomon s satirical novel, two middle-aged Black women dating in college are thrown back into each other's orbits after losing touch for years. Liselle is planning to have a dinner party after her failed bid for the state legislature by her white husband. When he learns that he might be indicted for corruption, she becomes consumed by questions about everything she knew and leaves a message to her ex-friend and old friend Selena, who lives across town. Solomon flips between past and present, and interrogates the conversations and intimate moments that shape a relationship by describing the woman's time together and apart.
Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name Is Lucy Barton returns to the world of the latter in her new novel, Oh William! Strout explores Lucy s relationship with William, her ex-husband and the father of her two adult daughters as an old family secret ties them closer together. It is a story about happiness, mystery and the revelations about humanity that can arise in an instant. Comme the rest of her acclaimed fiction, Strout s latest is a quiet domestic drama that tackles the thorniness of everyday existence in incisive and at times heartbreaking terms.