October New Releases

‘Chris Kraus reinvents the true-crime novel’The New Yorker

‘A writer whose antennae are attuned to subtle connections and strange cross-currents’ Colm Tóibín

‘This is Chris Kraus’s masterpiece’ Constance Debré

An unforgettable new novel from the author of the modern classic I Love Dick — a witty, probing journey into a fractured America, culminating in the investigation of a teenage murder.

On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, rundown town, the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned. No one knows why they did it.

At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they’d bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Undergoing a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota — between the urban art world and the rural poverty of the icy Iron Range — Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the mystery surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers’ lives, Catt also finds herself travelling back through the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut.

Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent the Day Together explores the histories of three generations of American lives and the patterns that repeat over lifetimes, and is piercing commentary on the pressures of lives lived on the edge.

Two of the world’s most respected scientists reveal the forces behind the dangerous antiscience movement — and show us how to fight back.

From pandemics to the climate crisis, humanity faces tougher challenges than ever. Whether it’s the health of our people or the health of our planet, we know we are on an unsustainable path. But our efforts to effectively tackle these existential crises are now hampered by a common threat: politically and ideologically motivated opposition to science.

Michael Mann and Peter Hotez are two of the most respected and well-known scientists in the world, and have spent the last twenty years on the front lines of the battle to convey accurate, reliable, and trustworthy information about science in the face of determined and nihilistic opposition.

In this powerful manifesto, they reveal the five main forces threatening science: plutocrats, pros, petrostates, phonies, and the press. It is a call to arms and a road map for dismantling the forces of anti-science. Armed with the information in this book, we can be empowered to promote scientific truths, shine light on channels of dark money, dismantle the corporations poisoning the planet, and ultimately avert disaster.

How key concepts in modern physics came from the work of a New Zealander whom Einstein labelled ‘a second Newton’.

By the mid-nineteenth century, physicists believed they had discovered the last secrets of the universe. Then a new world opened up: one of waves, particles, and new, fundamental forces. This mysterious world swiftly captured the public imagination, not least because of the technical revolution that emerged from it, giving the world everything from radio to TV, X-ray machines, smoke detectors, and more.

One of the key movers of this new world was Ernest Rutherford, a no-nonsense New Zealander who became popularly known as the ‘father of the atom’ in recognition of his pioneering role in particle physics. But he was far more than that. Through his roles at Manchester University and then the Cavendish Laboratory in England, he steered a new generation of highly influential physicists such as Niels Bohr, helping to shape much of the way we understand physics today.

This book explores the discovery of that science, using Rutherford’s life as a vehicle to steer the journey. It explains just why this science seized the public imagination of the day, and why Rutherford’s contribution was integral not just to the technical revolution of the twentieth century, but to the way we now understand the nature of the universe. And it explains how that science works, in terms clear to the widest readership.

A panoramic novel of European history, by an internationally bestselling writer.

The whole truth, as the name implies, is the collective knowledge of all those involved. Which is why you can never piece it together again properly afterwards. Because a few of those who possessed a part of it are always already dead. Or lying, or their memories are bad.

It’s 1989, and in a small town on the Austria–Hungary border, nobody talks about the war; the older residents pretend not to remember, and the younger ones are too busy making plans to leave. The walls are thin, the curtains twitch, there is a face at every window, and everyone knows what they are not supposed to say.

But as thousands of East German refugees mass at the border, it seems that the past is knocking on Darkenbloom’s door.

Still, though, nobody talks about the war.

Until a mysterious visitor shows up asking questions.

Until townspeople start receiving threatening letters and even disappearing.

Until a body is found.

Darkenbloom is a sweeping novel of exiled counts, Nazis-turned-Soviet-enforcers, secret marriages, mislabelled graves, remembrance, guilt, and the devastating power of silence, by one of Austria’s most significant contemporary writers.