The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood
Stan and Charmaine are struggling to survive and living in a car when they agree to take part in an experiment. The couple will get jobs and a home – but every second month they must swap their house for a prison cell. Dark comedy. (Bloomsbury, September 24)
Grief is the thing with feathers by Max Porter
Two young boys lose their mother. Their father, a scholar of the poet Ted Hughes, imagines a future of emptiness but soon the trio are visited by a crow, who helps them cope. A literary portrait of grief and loss. (Faber and Faber, September 17)
Stories From Other Places by Nicholas Shakespeare
From a First World War encounter in Australia to the faded charm of 1960s Mumbai to a story of civic folly in Bolivia these short stories traverse the globe. Many of the characters are ordinary people swept up in major events. (Harvill Secker, September 3)
Pacific: The Ocean of the Future by Simon Winchester
It is the place of Ferdinand Magellan, tsunamis and atomic bomb testing. The world’s largest body of water is also the site of renewed geopolitical jousting and here, Winchester argues that in economic, political and military terms, it has a hugely important future. (Collins, September 24)
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder
The Holocaust is viewed as a brutal, once-off event. But Snyder argues that some of our beliefs are worryingly close to those expressed by Hitler, particularly on “ecological panic”. And our societies are more vulnerable than we think to a repeat. (Bodley Head, September 17)
The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos
Algorithms play more of a role in our life than ever: they find jobs, discover new films and manage our investments. Here, one of the field’s leading lights looks at the search for the “master algorithm” – one capable of distilling any knowledge from data, and thereby remaking the world. (Allen Lane, September 22)