Why the biggest month of the year for booksellers just got that bit bigger

It’s all happening in the books world at the moment: this week shortlists for both the Goldsmiths and TS Eliot prizes were announced, while Ross Raisin was crowned winner of the BBC national short story award. Meanwhile bookshops are about to get flooded with new titles, as publishing’s busiest week of the year is upon us.

More on that after this week’s picks – and scroll down for recommendations from Amy Liptrot, whose memoir The Outrun is our audiobook of the week, and the film adaptation of which is in cinemas now.

Around this time of year more books are published than ever, as publishers gear up for their busiest sales period in the lead up to Christmas. This coming Thursday is the day that more books will be published than on any other day this year – known in the trade as “Super Thursday”. Nearly 1,900 books will be published on 10 October, up from last year’s 1,286, which was a particularly small year – likely a hangover from the pandemic’s effect on book production.

“Super Thursday is an exciting day for booksellers with hundreds of new books arriving in bookshops on the same day,” says Kate Skipper, chief operating officer at Waterstones. “It is always a hugely busy day but there is a real buzz to unpacking so many of the big books for Christmas at once.”

And this year it looks like Christmas shoppers are going to be spoilt for choice: arriving in bookshops on Thursday will be the latest in AF Steadman’s Skandar children’s fantasy series and Ian Rankin’s latest Rebus novel, Midnight and Blue, which will surely attract more fans than ever following May’s BBC One dramatisation of the book series. On top of that, Thursday will bring Sophie Kinsella’s novella What Does it Feel Like?, about a woman who gets diagnosed with a brain tumour (Kinsella revealed her own cancer diagnosis earlier this year), and Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name, a novel that imagines the true identity of Shakespeare to be a woman.

One of the biggest hitters on Thursday will be Boris Johnson’s Unleashed – not, according to our reviewer Martin Kettle “the political memoir of the century” as billed by the Daily Mail, but an “overhyped book” by a man who is clearly “not going to change”. Sales-wise, however, the book is already at the top of the Amazon bestsellers list thanks to preorders alone, and is expected to be the bestselling politics book of the year.

Johnson is also in contention for the bestselling memoir of the year – although there are plenty of other high-profile autobiographies out this autumn, including those by Rick Astley and Alison Steadman – also out on Thursday – as well as titles from both Bill and Hillary Clinton, Stanley Tucci, Miranda Hart, Al Pacino, Cher and the posthumous writings of Alexei Navalny. Let’s see who can cut through all the noise.

Lately I’ve loved Late Light by Michael Malay. It explores a selection of “non-charismatic” species such as eels, mussels, and moths, and how they link into wider forces of economics and extinction – a worthy winner of this year’s Wainwright prize for nature writing. O Brother by John Niven, about the life and death of the author’s brother, is a blistering and brilliant book. It’s so good on growing up in Scotland, personalities, guilt and unanswerable questions, with a heartbreaking virtuoso ending.

I finally read the last novel by Orkney’s great George Mackay Brown, Beside the Ocean of Time, which carried me into the fluid imagination of a small island lad through the ages. And sticking with island life, I loved Storm Pegs, poet Jen Hadfield’s first prose book about her life in Shetland. Her accounts of people and places – the North Boat, the folk festival, the dialect – are spot on.

• The Outrun by Amy Liptrot is published by Canongate (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, preorder your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply