Friends, October is officially O for Overwhelming. I spend each one of these columns trying to cover as many new releases as I can, but there are so many great books published this month, my task is D for Doomed, and omissions will be legion. Let me start at a logical point though, with our Fiction and Nonfiction Books of the Month, both of them undoubtedly two of the publishing highlights of 2023.

Edenglassie is Melissa Lucashenko’s long-awaited follow-up to the 2019 Miles Franklin Award-winning Too Much Lip. Set in both colonial Magan-djin-Brisbane during the mid-1850s, as the long-term consequences of invasion begin to reveal themselves fully, as well as a point in the near future, this is a knockout book, epic in scope, deeply researched, and finely crafted, full of unforgettable characters and great dialogue. In the words of our reviewer, it is ‘rage-informed, joyful, rollicking, straight-talking’, and manages a masterful balance between providing rich historical detail and a compulsive reading experience. Don’t miss Edenglassie, it’s brilliant!

Another unmissable book is Tyson Yunkaporta’s second work (following the wildly successful Sand Talk, now in a smart new B-format edition), Right Story, Wrong Story, which takes readers further into the ways in which Indigenous thinking and knowledge systems can change the discourse, or turn what he calls the ‘wrong story’ in another direction. Yunkaporta’s style is approachable and compelling, and as our reviewer puts it is, ‘an invitation to sit, listen and share space in your head with another human being for a while’. This seems like the best kind of reading we can ever do.

Our Melbourne City Reads pick (the last for 2023), is a delightfully funny debut by Eleanor Elliott Thomas called The Opposite of Success. It won our reviewer over to the extent that she had a new favourite author by the end of the first chapter: that’s serious passion! Our reviewers are also excited about more Australian debuts, Madeleine Gray’s Green Dot (‘gorgeous’) and Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie (‘riveting’), as well as the new books from Trent Dalton, Laura Jean McKay, and Katherine Brabon.

In international fiction, you’ll see reviews of the highly anticipated new novel from Mona Awad, Rouge; a collection of translated short stories from Jhumpa Lahiri; a new translation of trailblazing Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto’s 1988 book, The Premonition; and the first publication from the Atlantic Australia imprint, And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott. David Diop, Jeanette Winterson, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rose Tremain, C. Pam Zhang, Ken Follett, and Beth O’Leary are some of the other writers you’ll know who have new books in Overwhelming October, and there’s much more besides.

In nonfiction, make sure you read our reviewers’ words about David Marr’s Killing for Country, Gemma Nisbet’s The Things We Live With, Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism, and Sarah Firth’s Eventually Everything Connects. Robyn Davidson, author of the classic travel-writing narrative Tracks, has written a memoir of her fascinating life that is bound to inspire called Unfinished Woman. Acclaimed garden designer Paul Bangay has written his memoir, A Life in Garden Design (published with appropriately gorgeous book design).

I’ve found Katie Holten’s The Language of Trees to be somewhat irresistible: it’s another beautiful object full of interesting pieces of writing, including a mesmerising font in trees created by the artist. Roxane Gay’s Opinions is a collection of her influential pieces of writing from the last decade.

In news just in, we have procured a strictly limited number of signed copies of Marr’s Guitars from the legend who is Johnny Marr: you know at least one person who will find this news extremely exciting (or are one such person yourself): it should be arriving in our shops on 17 October.

And finally, dear reader, my dear colleague Jason Austin set himself a reading project for 2023: to read only books from the horror genre. As he observes, ‘As booksellers, we’re often reading for others and not necessarily for ourselves’, and so it’s not always possible to read exactly what you want to read when you want to read it. Sometimes you have to take a stand! Jason has written a great account of the results of his ‘year of horror’ on page 5.