Given the sizeable number of new releases that arrive in store each month, it’s easy to miss some hidden gems. We’ve compiled a short list of books you might have missed this October.

Indigo by Clemens J. Setz

Set in a world uncannily familiar and yet entirely strange, Indigo (Austrian writer Clemens J. Setz’s first novel to be translated into English) is part thrilling detective story, part post-modern puzzle. It is 2007 and Austria is in the grip of a sinister epidemic: Indigo Syndrome. Children are the carriers, and those infected are sent away to the Helianau Institute in Styria, deep within the mountainous heart of the country. There, one of the teachers, Clemens Setz, witnesses students being taken away in strange masks. They never come back.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 edited by Daniel Handler

The Best American Nonrequired Reading is an annual anthology of the everything that should be on the radar of America’s youth – that won’t be found on a syllabus. The content is invariably funny and revealing, unexpected and – of course – entirely necessary. This year’s edition has been put together by Daniel Handler AKA Lemony Snicket (the narrator of the beloved A Series of Unfortunate Events series), along with the students of 826 Valencia and 826 Michigan writing labs.

How We Got to Now: The History and Power of Great Ideas by Steven Johnson

In How We Got to Now, Steven Johnson traces six essential innovations that made the modern world; from their origins in ancient history to the technological advancements of recent years: How did the advent of refrigeration help create the golden age of Hollywood? How did the invention of flash photography help shift public opinion on the plight of New York’s poorest inhabitants and bring about social reform? A reviewer for the Guardian described this book as, ‘a challenge to any jaded sensibility that has become inured to the everyday miracles all around us.’

A History of Loneliness by John Boyne

It has taken John Boyne (author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) fifteen years and twelve novels to write about his home country of Ireland but he has done so now in a powerful new novel. Propelled into the priesthood by a family tragedy, Odran Yates is full of hope and ambition, but forty years later, Odran’s devotion is caught in revelations that shatter the Irish people’s faith in the Catholic Church. A novel as intimate as it is universal, A History of Loneliness is about the stories we tell ourselves to make peace with our lives.