By Damla
September was a month for big and exciting names when it comes to publishing. Dan Brown’s latest book in the thrilling Robert Langdon series, The Secret of Secrets, has hit the shelves after a long hiatus. Ian McEwan has also released a new book this month, called What We Can Now, which has already been a hit among literary fiction lovers who enjoy a bit of mystery.
Another title to look out for this month was SenLinYu’s dark fantasy debut, Alchemised. The story had already made a huge splash and gained a massive following online when it was first published as fanfic of a popular series, but has been reworked as a standalone piece for its publication.
The two volumes of the Japanese Dictionary of Color Combinations have been surprise bestsellers this month, following a highly positive review in the Volkskrant. Together with Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club movie tie-in, we see the boost media can have on some great books.
On the nonfiction front, Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and Kishimi and Koga’s The Courage to Be Disliked continue their popularity, which are clearly ABC favorites with good reason!
Secret of Secrets – Dan Brown
Accompanying celebrated academic, Katherine Solomon, to a lecture she’s been invited to give in Prague, Robert Langdon’s world spirals out of control when she disappears without trace from their hotel room.
Against a backdrop of vast castles, towering churches, graveyards buried twelve deep and labyrinthine underground passages, Langdon must navigate a shadow city hiding in plain sight, a city which has successfully kept its secrets for centuries and will not readily deliver them. The Secret Of Secrets is Dan Brown’s first novel for over eight years and sees the stunning return of Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon.
What We Can Know – Ian McEwan
2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.
2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately.
The Thursday Murder Club – Richard Osman
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders.But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case.
Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it’s too late?
Staff choice by Júlia.
The Courage To Be Disliked – Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
The Japanese phenomenon that teaches us the simple yet profound lessons required to liberate our real selves and find lasting happiness.
A philosopher and a student have a discussion. Their conversation reveals a profoundly liberating way of thinking: by developing the courage to change, set healthy boundaries and resist the impulse to please others, it is possible to find genuine and lasting happiness.
Staff choice by Sophie.
Alchemised – SenLinYu
Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner—of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed. To uncover the memories buried deep within her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world. Trapped on his crumbling estate, Helena’s fight—to protect her lost history and to preserve the last remaining shreds of her former self—is just beginning. For her prison and captor have secrets of their own . . . secrets Helena must unearth, whatever the cost.
Unlikely Skylight: Poems – Hollis Kurman
In these urbane, emotionally charged poems, international strategist, prizewinning children’s author, and human rights advocate Hollis Kurman is fearless in confronting crucial issues of our time. Whether she’s examining repercussions of war, migration, and personal history or the joys of art and dance, there are few sociopolitical or cultural spaces that don’t intersect and are transformed by Kurman’s nimble craft and daring empathy.
Wild Card – Elsie Silver
Sebastian Rousseau is a grumpy, hot as hell fire pilot who is too damn good with his hands. It’s the perfect combination. But unfortunately for me, he’s also my ex-boyfriend’s dad. A chance meeting brought us together and a missed connection has kept us apart. One year later, a stroke of fate has us living under the same roof—which makes everything between us downright messy. We both know there are rules when it comes to situations like this. But then again…following the rules never has been my strong suit.
The Gingerbread Bakery – Laurie Gilmore
With Jeanie and Logan set to tie the knot, and Kira desperate to hire out her newly renovated barn at the Christmas tree farm, everything seems to be going well. Annie has agreed to bake the cake, and Mac is responsible for, well… just being Mac. And as the whole of Dream Harbor comes together to celebrate the wedding of the year with the snow falling around them, can Annie and Mac put aside their dislike for each just long enough for the ‘I Do’s’ or is that one request too far…
A Dictionary of Color Combinations – Sanzo Wada
This book is a collection of 348 color combinations originated by Sanzo Wada who, in that time of increasingly avant-garde and diversified use of color, was quick to focus on the importance of color and laid the foundation for contemporary color research.
The book not only presents color combinations that are an important record from the Taisho and Showa periods; readers may also perceive a universal sensitivity toward color that can be applied in daily life today.
Staff choice by Tiemen.
Katabasis – R. F. Kuang
Grad student Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become the brightest mind in the field of analytic magick. But the only person who can make her dream come true is dead and – inconveniently – in Hell.
And Alice, along with her biggest rival Peter Murdoch, is going after him. But Hell is not as the philosophers claim, its rules are upside-down, and if she’s going to get out of there alive, she and Peter will have to work together. That’s if they can agree on anything.
Staff choice by Damla, Else, and Júlia.
You can also take a look at the book review here.
I Who Have Never Known Men – Jacqueline Harper
Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus? Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. But, as the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl – the fortieth prisoner – sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others’ escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. The woman who will never know men.
Staff choice by Bruna, Else, and Matty.
Kitchen Confidential – Anthony Bourdain
After twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine, chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain decided to tell all – and he meant all. From his first oyster in the Gironde as a child, to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown; from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in the East Village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain’s tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable, as shocking as they are funny.
Staff choice by Júlia.
