Here’s my list of good books I’ve read recently, updated every so often. If you’d like to hear when I add more suggestions, please sign up to my newsletter.
Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. I hope that you do!

(See also my definitive list of books to give as gifts, another list of books that make great presents, my books of the year from 2019 and 2017 , my list of travel books that you must read, travel books that make good presents, books from other countries, and some useful business books.)

• A quick pause in all the lists to summarise my favourite reads of 2023.
• I asked ChatGPT to analyse all the books I recommend here and recommend me some new books to read. Read them here.

Part 13

Thirteen Lessons that Saved Thirteen Lives: The Inside Story of the Thai Cave Rescue

In this first-hand account, John Volanthen reveals how he pushed the limits of human endurance in the life-or-death mission to rescue the Thai youth soccer team trapped in the flooded cave.

The world held its breath in 2018 when the Wild Boars soccer team and their coach went missing deep underground in the Tham Luang cave complex in northern Thailand. They had been stranded by sudden, continuous monsoon rains while exploring the caves after practice.

With torrential rain pouring down and the waters still on the rise, an army of rescue teams and equipment was deployed, including Thai Navy SEALs, a US Air Force special tactics squadron, police sniffer dogs, drones and robots. But it was British cave diver John Volanthen and his partner, Rick Stanton, who were first to reach the stranded team and who played a key role in their ultimate rescue.

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada’s oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.

For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture and civilization. Yet in our age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in ways never before witnessed by human beings. With masterly prose and cinematic style, Vaillant delves into the intertwined histories of the oil industry and climate science, the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern wildfires, and the lives forever changed by these disasters. Fire Weather is urgent reading for our new century of fire.

Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

The end of the Second World War saw a terrible explosion of violence across Europe. Prisoners murdered jailers. Soldiers visited atrocities on civilians. Resistance fighters killed and pilloried collaborators. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, rape and murder were rife in the days, months and years after hostilities ended. Exploring a Europe consumed by vengeance, Savage Continent is a shocking portrait of an until-now unacknowledged time of lawlessness and terror.

The Golden Mole: and Other Vanishing Treasure

Katherine Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world’s strangest and most awe-inspiring animals, including pangolins, wombats, lemurs and seahorses. But each of these animals is endangered. And so, this most passionately persuasive and sharply funny book is also an urgent, inspiring clarion call: to treasure and act – to save nature’s vanishing wonders, before it is too late.

Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI

Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, written by Reid Hoffman with GPT-4, takes readers on a travelog of the future – exploring how AI, and especially Large Language Models like GPT-4, can elevate humanity across key areas like education, business, and creativity.

But, it’s not just a book, it’s a conversation. In a first, Hoffman doesn’t just write about GPT-4; he interacts and writes with GPT-4, letting readers see the technology’s capabilities — its strengths and limitations alike. Using GPT-4 as his “author’s co-pilot,” Hoffman paints an intriguing, challenging, and often entertaining picture of what’s possible: where trouble may arise, but also crucially, what could possibly go right. His conversation with AI takes us on a journey to the future, where AI is not a threat, but a partner. A partner that can help us unlock our full potential as human beings.

How might humanity use GPT-4 to continue our long-standing quest to make life more meaningful and prosperous? How can we use it to help solve some of the hardest challenges we face? To expand opportunities for self-determination and self-expression?

Along with solutions and opportunities, GPT-4 will also create its own challenges and uncertainties. Impromptu explores how we might address risk as we continue to develop AI technologies that can boost human progress at a time when the need for rapid solutions at scale has never been greater. Impromptu starts the conversation, and invites us to join that conversation to shape our collaborative journey and achieve our destiny.

Reflections: What Wildlife Needs and How to Provide it

Blurb Your Enthusiasm: A Cracking Compendium of Book Blurbs, Writing Tips, Literary Folklore and Publishing Secrets

We love the words in books – but what about the words on them? How do they work their magic? Penguin Books blurb wizard Louise Willder joyfully divulges what those 100-or-so words can tell us about literary history, the craft of writing, authors from George Orwell to Zadie Smith, genres from children’s fiction to bonkbusters, cover design, the dark arts of persuasion and even why we read. She also answers burning questions such as:

• Should all adjectives be murdered?
• Is blurbing sometimes maybe lying?
• Which classic novel was nearly called The High Bouncing Lover?
• What are the worst blurbs of all time?

Manifesto: The Battle for Green Britain

Dale Vince never intended to start a business. Driven by a passion for sustainability, he left school aged 15 and became a New Age traveller, living for free in a wind-powered double decker bus. But after building his first wind turbine, he realised that to change the world he needed to be on the grid, not off it. In 1996 he founded green energy company Ecotricity based on principles of social, financial and environmental sustainability, and changed the landscape of UK energy forever.

Since then, Dale has been appointed a UN ambassador for climate issues, become the owner of the first ever vegan football club, and amassed a fortune of over £120 million built on sustainability. He has also been a vocal supporter of Extinction Rebellion which, like Ecotricity, is based in Stroud. In this book, he shares his single-minded and uniquely purpose-orientated approach to business, with lessons learned from experience that will speak to any fledgling entrepreneur.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving only a tiny sliver of this world.
In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, welcoming us into previously unfathomable dimensions – the world as it is truly perceived by other animals. Showing us that in order to understand our world we don’t need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.

The Bee Sting

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under – but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman.
His wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.
Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil?
Can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written – is there still time to find a happy ending?

Part 12

What We Owe The Future: A Million-Year View

In What We Owe The Future, philosopher William MacAskill persuasively argues for longtermism, the idea that positively influencing the distant future is a moral priority of our time. It isn’t enough to mitigate climate change or avert the next pandemic. We can ensure that civilization would rebound if it collapsed; cultivate value pluralism; and prepare for a planet where the most sophisticated beings are digital and not human.

The challenges we face are enormous. But so is the influence we have.

Pompeii

During a sweltering week in late August, as Rome’s richest citizens relax in their villas around Pompeii and Herculaneum, there are ominous warnings that something is going wrong. Wells and springs are failing, a man has disappeared, and now the greatest aqueduct in the world – the mighty Aqua Augusta – has suddenly ceased to flow . . .

Through the eyes of four characters – a young engineer, an adolescent girl, a corrupt millionaire and an elderly scientist – Robert Harris brilliantly recreates a luxurious world on the brink of destruction.

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele: A Novel

For three decades, until the day he collapsed in the Brazilian surf in 1979, Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death who performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, floated through South America in linen suits, keeping two steps ahead of Mossad agents, international police and the world’s journalists. In this rigorusly researched factual novel-drawn almost entirely from historical documents-Olivier Guez traces Mengele’s footsteps through these years of flight. This chilling novel situates the reader in a literary manhunt on the trail of one of the most elusive and evil figures of the twentieth century.

Part 11

Apollo Remastered: The Sunday Times Bestseller

In a frozen vault in Houston sits the original NASA photographic film of the Apollo missions. For half a century, almost every image of the Moon landings publicly available was produced from a lower-quality copy of these originals.

Now we can view them as never before. Expert image restorer Andy Saunders has taken newly available digital scans and, applying pain-staking care and cutting-edge enhancement techniques, he has created the highest quality Apollo photographs ever produced. Never-before-seen spacewalks and crystal-clear portraits of astronauts in their spacecraft, along with startling new visions of the Earth and the Moon, offer astounding new insight into one of our greatest endeavours.

This is the definitive record of the Apollo missions and a mesmerizing, high definition journey into the unknown.

Foster

Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes

The creator of the phenomenally bestselling Discworld series, Terry Pratchett was known and loved around the world for his hugely popular books, his smart satirical humour and the humanity of his campaign work. But that’s only part of the picture.

Before his untimely death, Terry was writing a memoir: the story of a boy who aged six was told by his teacher that he would never amount to anything and spent the rest of his life proving him wrong. For Terry lived a life full of astonishing achievements: becoming one of the UK’s bestselling and most beloved writers, winning the prestigious Carnegie Medal and being awarded a knighthood.

Now, the book Terry sadly couldn’t finish has been written by Rob Wilkins, his former assistant, friend and now head of the Pratchett literary estate. Drawing on his own extensive memories, along with those of the author’s family, friends and colleagues, Rob unveils the full picture of Terry’s life – from childhood to his astonishing writing career, and how he met and coped with what he called the ‘Embuggerance’ of Alzheimer’s disease.

The Undertaking

Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius

In Nick Hornby’s completely joyous and original new book two great figures share the stage. Charles Dickens and Prince. Two wildly different artists who caught fire and lit up the world in ways no others could. Where did their magic come from? How did they work so hard and produce so much? How did they manage or give in to the restlessness and intensity of their creativity? How did they use it, and did it kill them?

With wit, curiosity and deep admiration Nick Hornby traces their extraordinary lives – from their difficult beginnings to the women they fell for to their limitless energy for work, to their money and the movies – and brilliantly illuminates their very particular kind of genius.

Solito

Young Javier dreams of eating orange sherbet ice cream with his parents in the United States. For this to happen, he must embark on a three-thousand-mile journey alone. It should last only two weeks. But it takes seven.

In limbo, Javier learns what people will do to survive – and what they will forfeit to save someone else. This is a memoir of perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, and pointed guns. But it is also a story of tasting tacos for the first time, of who passes you their water jug in the crippling heat, and of longing to be in your mother’s arms.

Land Healer: How Farming Can Save Britain’s Countryside

Jake Fiennes is on a mission to change the face of the English countryside. As Conservation Manager at Holkham in Norfolk, one of the country’s largest historic country estates, his radical habitat restoration and agricultural work has nurtured its species and risen its crop yields – bringing back wetlands, hedgerows, birds and butterflies over 25,000 acres of land.

But this isn’t rewilding – there is no ‘wild’ in Britain anymore. Mass farming, crop science and industrial chemicals have destroyed the majority of our natural landscape and wildlife over the last century. Land Healer is the story of Fiennes’s ambition to bring back our flora and fauna – by reclaiming our traditions and trialling new experiments which could restore our symbiosis with our land, and save our shared future.

Following the farming year and the natural cycle of the seasons, Land Healer chronicles a life of conservation lived at the edges, and is a manifesto for rethinking our relationship with the natural world before it’s too late.

My Fourth Time, We Drowned

Demon Copperhead

Demon’s story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking ‘like a little blue prizefighter.’ For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.

In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn’t an idea, it’s as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn’t an abstraction, it’s neighbours, parents, and friends. ‘Family’ could mean love, or reluctant foster care. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day. The wonder is in how far he’s willing to travel to try and get there.

Suffused with truth, anger and compassion, Demon Copperhead is an epic tale of love, loss and everything in between.

Quartered Safe Out Here

Life and death in Nine Section, a small group of hard-bitten and (to modern eyes) possibly eccentric Cumbrian borderers with whom the author, then nineteen, served in the last great land campaign of World War II, when the 17th Black Cat Division captured a vital strongpoint deep in Japanese territory, held it against counter-attack and spearheaded the final assault in which the Japanese armies were, to quote General Slim, “torn apart”.

What About Men?

As any feminist who talks about the problems of girls and women will know, the first question you will ever be asked is ‘But what about MEN?’ After eleven years of writing bestsellers about women and dismissing this question, having been very sure that the concerns of feminism and men are very different things, Caitlin Moran realised that this wasn’t quite right, and that the problems of feminism are also the problems of, yes, men.

So, what about men? Why do they only go to the doctor if their wife or girlfriend makes them? Why do they never discuss their penises with each other – but make endless jokes about their balls? What is porn doing for young men? Is their fondness for super-skinny jeans leading to an epidemic of bad mental health? Are men allowed to be sad? Are men allowed to lose? Have Men’s Rights Activists confused ‘power’ with ’empowerment’? And is Jordan B Peterson just your mum – but with some mad theory about a lobster?

In this book, Caitlin intends to answer all this and more – because if men haven’t yet answered the question ‘What About Men?’, it’s going to be down to a busy woman to do it.

Part 10

The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg

We still have time to change the world. From Greta Thunberg, the world’s leading climate activist, comes the essential handbook for making it happen.
You might think it’s an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed never seen, against all the odds. There is hope – but only if we listen to the science before it’s too late.

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time

One Two Three Four traces the chance fusion of the four key elements that made up The Beatles: fire (John), water (Paul), air (George) and earth (Ringo). It also tells the bizarre and often unfortunate tales of the disparate and colourful people within their orbit, among them Fred Lennon, Yoko Ono, the Maharishi, Aunt Mimi, Helen Shapiro, the con artist Magic Alex, Phil Spector, their psychedelic dentist John Riley and their failed nemesis, Det Sgt Norman Pilcher.

Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius

In Nick Hornby’s completely joyous and original new book two great figures share the stage. Charles Dickens and Prince. Two wildly different artists who caught fire and lit up the world in ways no others could. Where did their magic come from? How did they work so hard and produce so much? How did they manage or give in to the restlessness and intensity of their creativity? How did they use it, and did it kill them?

City of Thieves

Four months into the siege of Leningrad, the city is starving. Seventeen-year-old Lev fears for his life when he is arrested for looting the body of a dead German paratrooper, while his charismatic cellmate, Kolya, a handsome young soldier arrested for desertion, seems bizarrely unafraid.

Dawn brings, instead of an execution squad, an impossible challenge. Lev and Kolya can find a dozen eggs for an NKVD colonel to use for his daughter’s wedding cake, and live. Or fail, and die.

Bat, Ball and Field: The Elements of Cricket

Chronicling the evolution of the sport since its earliest years, highlighting transcendent moments as well as tragedies, Jon Hotten lifts the seemingly impregnable veil from the Laws, batting strokes, types of bowling and the sometimes absurd names given to where fielders stand, allowing anyone a pathway into enjoying the sport, and an introductory immersion into its long history.

The Meaning of Cricket

Cricket is a strange game. It is a team sport that is almost entirely dependent on individual performance. Its combination of time, opportunity and the constant threat of disaster can drive its participants to despair. To survive a single delivery propelled at almost 100 miles an hour takes the body and brain to the edges of their capabilities, yet its abiding image is of the gentle village green, and the glorious absurdities of the amateur game.

A Moveable Feast

Hemingway’s memories of his life as an unknown writer living in Paris in the twenties are deeply personal, warmly affectionate and full of wit. Looking back not only at his own much younger self, but also at the other writers who shared Paris with him – James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald – he recalls the time when, poor, happy and writing in cafes, he discovered his vocation. Written during the last years of Hemingway’s life, his memoir is a lively and powerful reflection of his genius that scintillates with the romance of the city.

The Old Man and the Sea

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway’s magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man’s challenge to the elements.

Young Mungo

The extraordinary, powerful second novel from the Booker prizewinning author of Shuggie Bain , Young Mungo is both a vivid portrayal of working-class life and the deeply moving story of the dangerous first love of two young men: Mungo and James.

Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in a hyper-masculine world. They are caught between two of Glasgow’s housing estates where young working-class men divide themselves along sectarian lines, and fight territorial battles for the sake of reputation. They should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all, and yet they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the doocot that James has built for his prize racing pigeons. As they begin to fall in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, and Mungo must work hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold.

Operation Mincemeat

April, 1943: a sardine fisherman spots the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and sets off a train of events that would change the course of the Second World War.

Operation Mincemeat was the most successful wartime deception ever attempted, and the strangest. It hoodwinked the Nazi espionage chiefs, sent German troops hurtling in the wrong direction, and saved thousands of lives by deploying a secret agent who was different, in one crucial respect, from any spy before or since: he was dead. His mission: to convince the Germans that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allied armies planned to invade Greece.

This is the true story of the most extraordinary deception ever planned by Churchill’s spies: an outrageous lie that travelled from a Whitehall basement all the way to Hitler’s desk.

Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950

A captivating portrait of those who lived, loved, fought, played and flourished in Paris between 1940 and 1950 and whose intellectual and artistic output still influences us today.

Paris After the Liberation: 1944 – 1949

Post-liberation Paris: an epoch charged with political and conflicting emotions. Liberation was greeted with joy but marked by recriminations and the trauma of purges. The feverish intellectual arguments of the young took place amidst the mundane reality of hunger and fuel shortages. This is a thrilling, unsurpassed account of the drama and upheaval of one of history’s most fascinating eras.

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich

Germany, 1945: a country in ruins. Cities have been reduced to rubble and more than half of the population are where they do not belong or do not want to be. How can a functioning society ever emerge from this chaos?

The Reader

Visitation

The Housekeeper and the Professor

Each morning, the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to one another. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant mathematical equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles – based on her shoe size or her birthday – and the numbers reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her ten-year-old son. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.

Candide

‘If this is the best of all possible worlds, then what must the others be like?’
Young Candide is tossed on a hilarious tide of misfortune, experiencing the full horror and injustice of this ‘best of all possible worlds’ – the Old and the New – before finally accepting that his old philosophy tutor Dr Pangloss has got it all wrong. There are no grounds for his daft theory of Optimism. Yet life goes on. We must cultivate our garden, for there is certainly room for improvement.

Part 9

Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior

When physical disability from combat wounds brought about Jim Stockdale’s early retirement from military life, he had the distinction of being the only three-star officer in the history of the navy to wear both aviator wings and the Congressional Medal of Honor. His writings have been many and varied, but all converge on the central theme of how man can rise with dignity to prevail in the face of adversity.

A Still Life: A Memoir

Josie George lives in a tiny terraced house in the urban West Midlands with her son. Since her early childhood, she has lived with the fluctuating and confusing challenge of disabling chronic illness. Her days are watchful and solitary, lived out in the same hundred or so metres around her home. But Josie’s world is surprising, intricate, dynamic. She has learned what to look for: the complex patterns of ice on a frozen puddle; the routines of her friends at the community centre; the neighbourhood birds in flight; the slow changes in the morning light, in her small garden, in her growing son, in herself.

In January 2018, Josie sets out to tell the story of her still life, over the course of a year. As the seasons shift, and the tides of her body draw in and out, Josie begins to unfurl her history: her childhood bright with promise but shadowed by confinement; her painful adolescence and her hopeful coming of age; the struggle of her marriage, and the triumph of motherhood. And then a most unexpected thing happens in Josie’s quiet present: she falls in love. A Still Life is a story of illness and pain that rarely sees the light: illness and pain with no end or resolution; illness and pain that we must meet with courage, joy, ingenuity and hope. Against a world which values ‘feel good’ progress and productivity above all else, Josie sets out a quietly radical alternative: to value and treasure life for life itself, with all its defeats and victories, with all its great and small miracles.

The Snow Child

Alaska, the 1920s. Jack and Mabel have staked everything on a fresh start in a remote homestead, but the wilderness is a stark place, and Mabel is haunted by the baby she lost many years before. When a little girl appears mysteriously on their land, each is filled with wonder, but also foreboding: is she what she seems, and can they find room in their hearts for her?
Written with the clarity and vividness of the Russian fairy tale from which it takes its inspiration, The Snow Child is an instant classic.

All Quiet on the Western Front

The Captain Class: The Hidden Force Behind the World’s Greatest Teams

The secret to winning is not what you think it is.
It’s not the coach. It’s not the star.
It’s not money. It’s not a strategy.
It’s something else entirely.

The founding editor of The Wall Street Journal ‘s sports section profiles the greatest teams in history and identifies the counterintuitive leadership qualities of the unconventional men and women who drove them to succeed. Fuelled by a lifetime of sports spectating, twenty years of reporting, and a decade of painstaking research, The Captain Class i s not just a book on sports; it is the key to how successful teams are built and how transformative leadership is born.
Several years ago, Sam Walker set out to answer the most hotly debated sports question: what are the greatest teams of all time? He devised a formula, applied it to thousands of teams and listed the 16 most dominant teams ever across all sports, from the English Premiere League to the NFL. But what did these freak teams have in common?
As Walker dug deeper, a pattern emerged: all teams were driven by a singular type of leader, a captain, but not one you might expect. They were unorthodox outliers – awkward and disagreeable, marginally skilled, poor communicators, rule breaking and rather than pursuing fame, hid in the shadows. Captains, in short, who challenge your assumption of what inspired leadership looks like.
Covering world renowned teams like Barcelona, Brazil, the All Blacks and the New York Yankees to lesser known successes of Soviet ice hockey or French handball, The Captain Class unveils the seven key qualities that make an exceptional leader. Drawing on original interviews with athletes, coaches and managers from two dozen countries, Walker questions if great captains are made or born, why teams pick the wrong captain and how the value of the captain can be revived.

The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In The Wayfinders, renowned anthropologist, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world’s indigenous cultures.

Modern China: A Very Short Introduction

China today is never out of the news: from international finance to human rights controversies, global coverage of its rising international presence, and the Chinese ‘economic miracle’. It seems to be a country of contradictions: a peasant society with some of the world’s most futuristic cities, heir to an ancient civilization that is still trying to find a modern identity.

This Very Short Introduction offers the reader an entry to understanding the world’s most populous nation, giving an integrated picture of modern Chinese society, culture, economy, politics, and art. In this new edition, Rana Mitter addresses China’s current global position, accounting for the country’s growth in global significance over the past decade.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

When We Cease to Understand the World

When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain.

Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness. Some of their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

With breakneck pace and wondrous detail, Benjamin Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to break open the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.

Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet

Farming is the world’s greatest cause of environmental destruction – and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticise urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have ploughed, fenced and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry.
Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, we can resolve the biggest of our dilemmas and feed the world without devouring the planet.
Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionising our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from ploughs and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.

The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them bigger than a matchbox: Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in his great uncle Iggie’s Tokyo apartment. When he later inherited the ‘netsuke’, they unlocked a story far larger and more dramatic than he could ever have imagined.
From a burgeoning empire in Odessa to fin de siecle Paris, from occupied Vienna to Tokyo, Edmund de Waal traces the netsuke’s journey through generations of his remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century.

Red Notice: A True Story of Corruption, Murder and how I became Putin’s no. 1 enemy

In November 2009, the young lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was beaten to death by eight police officers in a freezing cell in a Moscow prison. His crime? Testifying against Russian officials who were involved in a conspiracy to steal $230 million of taxes.
Red Notice is a searing expose of the whitewash of this imprisonment and murder. The killing hasn’t been investigated. It hasn’t been punished. Bill Browder is still campaigning for justice for his late lawyer and friend. This is his explosive journey from the heady world of finance in New York and London in the 1990s, through battles with ruthless oligarchs in turbulent post-Soviet Union Moscow, to the shadowy heart of the Kremlin.

A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed By the Rise of Fascism

Hidden deep in the Bavarian mountains lies the picturesque village of Oberstdorf – a place where for hundreds of years people lived simple lives while history was made elsewhere.

Yet even this remote idyll could not escape the brutal iron grip of the Nazi regime.

From the author of the bestselling Travellers in the Third Reich comes A Village in the Third Reich : an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Germany under Hitler, shining a light on the lives of ordinary people. Drawing on personal archives, letters, interviews and memoirs, it lays bare their brutality and love; courage and weakness; action, apathy and grief; hope, pain, joy and despair.

Within its pages we encounter people from all walks of life – foresters, priests, farmers and nuns; innkeepers, Nazi officials, veterans and party members; village councillors, mountaineers, socialists, slave labourers, schoolchildren, tourists and aristocrats. We meet the Jews who survived – and those who didn’t; the Nazi mayor who tried to shield those persecuted by the regime; and a blind boy whose life was judged ‘not worth living’.

This is a tale of conflicting loyalties and desires, of shattered dreams – but one in which, ultimately, human resilience triumphs.

These are the stories of ordinary lives at the crossroads of history.

The Piano Shop On The Left Bank

The Satanic Verses

Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional

Isaac Fitzgerald has lived many lives. He’s been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, a prince of New England. But before all that, he was a bomb that exploded his parents’ lives – or so he was told.
In Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Fitzgerald, with warmth and humour, recounts his ongoing search for forgiveness, a more far-reaching vision of masculinity, and a more expansive definition of family and self. Fitzgerald’s memoir-in-essays begins with a childhood that moves at breakneck speed from safety to violence, recounting an extraordinary pilgrimage through trauma to self-understanding and, ultimately, acceptance. From growing up in a Boston homeless shelter to bartending in San Francisco, from smuggling medical supplies into Burma to his lifelong struggle to make peace with his body, Fitzgerald strives to take control of his own story: one that aims to put aside anger, isolation and entitlement to embrace the idea that one can be generous to oneself by being generous to others.
Gritty and clear-eyed, loud-hearted and beautiful, Dirtbag, Massachusetts is a rollicking book that might also be a lifeline.

Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time

Humans are a planet-altering force. Gaia Vince argues that our unique ability – compared with other species – to determine the course of our own destiny rests on a special relationship between our genes, environment and culture going back into deep time. It is our collective culture, rather than our individual intelligence, that makes humans unique. Vince shows how four evolutionary drivers – Fire, Language, Beauty and Time – are further transforming our species into a transcendent superorganism: a hyper-cooperative mass of humanity that she calls Homo omnis. Drawing on leading-edge advances in population genetics, archaeology, palaeontology and neuroscience, Transcendence compels us to reimagine ourselves, showing us to be on the brink of something grander – and potentially more destructive.

Part 8

1. Explore Everything: Place-hacking the City
   

   It is assumed that every inch of the world has been explored and charted; that there is nowhere new to go. But perhaps it is the everyday places around us–the cities we live in–that need to be rediscovered. What does it feel like to find the city’s edge, to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis? “Explore Everything” reclaims the city, recasting it as a place for endless adventure. Plotting expeditions from London, Paris, Berlin, Detroit, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Bradley L. Garrett has evaded urban security in order to experience the city in ways beyond the boundaries of conventional life. He calls it ‘place hacking’ the recoding of closed, secret, hidden and forgotten urban space to make them realms of opportunity. “Explore Everything “is an account of the author’s escapades with the London Consolidation Crew, an urban exploration collective. The book is also a manifesto, combining philosophy, politics and adventure, on our rights to the city and how to understand the twenty-first century metropolis.

•  Woodsman

• Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain
  

Strangely hidden from view, the British Empire remains a subject of both shame and glorification. In his bestselling book, Sathnam Sanghera shows how our imperial past is everywhere: from how we live and think to the foundation of the NHS and even our response to the COVID-19 crisis.
At a time of great division, when we are arguing about what it means to be British, Empireland is a groundbreaking revelation – a much-needed and enlightening portrait of contemporary British society, shining a light on everything that usually gets left unsaid.

• The Wood: The Life & Times of Cockshutt Wood

• At the Edge of the Orchard

• North to Paradise: A Memoir

A book that shows up the ‘adventure’ genre I love and read and write for being a rather shallow, privileged, contrived genre. This is REAL ‘adventure’, but built upon survival and hope for a better future. The story of a young refugee’s quest for a new life.

• A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

One of the great fears many of us face is that despite all our effort and striving, we will discover at the end that we have wasted our life. In A Guide to the Good Life, William B. Irvine plumbs the wisdom of Stoic philosophy, one of the most popular and successful schools of thought in ancient Rome, and shows how its insight and advice are still remarkably applicable to modern lives.

• Night Boat to Tangier

• The Hummingbird

Marco Carrera is ‘the hummingbird,’ a man with the almost supernatural ability to stay still as the world around him continues to change.
As he navigates the challenges of life – confronting the death of his sister and the absence of his brother; taking care of his parents as they approach the end of their lives; raising his granddaughter when her mother, Marco’s own child, can no longer be there for her; coming to terms with his love for the enigmatic Luisa – Marco Carrera comes to represent the quiet heroism that pervades so much of our everyday existence.
A thrilling novel about the need to look to the future with hope and live with intensity to the very end.

Part 7

Once upon a time I went around the world by bike. Later I trekked around my city , to see whether I could find the adventures of the world on my own doorstep. I even tried eating my way around the world foods of London. My latest attempt to travel the world – to capture a hint of its excitement, its variety, its people, and all the lessons of different languages and cultures – has been through reading. I sat down to read a novel from the world’s ten most populous countries, written by an author from that country. It was a really interesting little project and one that will definitely continue. A concurrent challenge is to cook a meal from each of the countries I read about, preferably food that was mentioned in the book itself. Check out the books I read here.

Part 6

• Fermat’s Last Theorem

‘I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.’

It was with these words, written in the 1630s, that Pierre de Fermat intrigued and infuriated the mathematics community. For over 350 years, proving Fermat’s Last Theorem was the most notorious unsolved mathematical problem, a puzzle whose basics most children could grasp but whose solution eluded the greatest minds in the world. In 1993, after years of secret toil, Englishman Andrew Wiles announced to an astounded audience that he had cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem. He had no idea of the nightmare that lay ahead.

In ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’ Simon Singh has crafted a remarkable tale of intellectual endeavour spanning three centuries, and a moving testament to the obsession, sacrifice and extraordinary determination of Andrew Wiles: one man against all the odds.

• On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes

You are missing at least eighty percent of what is happening around you right now. You are missing what is happening in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. In marshalling your attention to these words, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses.

This ignorance is useful: indeed, we compliment it and call it concentration. It enables us to not just notice the shapes on the page, but to absorb them as intelligible words, phrases, ideas. Alas, we tend to bring this focus to every activity we do. In so doing, it is inevitable that we also bring along attention’s companion: inattention to everything else.

This book begins with that inattention. It is not a book about how to bring more focus to your reading of Tolstoy; it is not about how to multitask, attending to two or three or four tasks at once. It is not about how to avoid falling asleep at a public lecture, or at your grandfather’s tales of boyhood misadventures. It is about attending to the joys of the unattended, the perceived ‘ordinary’. Even when engaged in the simplest of activities – taking a walk around the block – we pay so little attention to most of what is right before us that we are sleepwalkers in our own lives. This book is about that walk around the block, and how to rediscover the extraordinary things that we are missing in our ordinary activities.

Buy Now

• That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix

Now with over 207 million subscribers, Netflix’s triumph feels inevitable but the twenty-first century’s most disruptive start-up began with few believers and calamity at every turn. Marc Randolph’s transformational journey exemplifies how anyone with grit and determination can change the world – even with an idea that many think will never work.

What emerges, however, isn’t just the inside story of one of the world’s most iconic companies. Full of counter-intuitive concepts and written in binge-worthy prose, it answers some of our most fundamental questions about taking that leap of faith in life: How do you begin? How do you weather disappointment and failure? What is success?

Buy Now

• Three Women

All Lina wanted was to be desired. How did she end up in a marriage with two children and a husband who wouldn’t touch her?

All Maggie wanted was to be understood. How did she end up in a relationship with her teacher and then in court, a hated pariah in her small town?

All Sloane wanted was to be admired. How did she end up a sexual object of men, including her husband, who liked to watch her have sex with other men and women?

• Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up

Jerry Colonna helps start-up CEOs make peace with their demons, the psychological habits and behavioral patterns that have helped them to succeed-molding them into highly accomplished individuals-yet have been detrimental to their relationships and ultimate well-being. Now, this venture capitalist turned executive coach shares his unusual yet highly effective blend of Buddhism, Jungian therapy, and entrepreneurial straight talk to help leaders overcome their own psychological traumas. Reboot is a journey of radical self-inquiry, helping you to reset your life by sorting through the emotional baggage that is holding you back professionally, and even more important, in your relationships.

Jerry has taught CEOs and their top teams to realize their potential by using the raw material of their lives to find meaning, to build healthy interpersonal bonds, and to become more compassionate and bold leaders. In Reboot , he inspires everyone to hold themselves responsible for their choices and for the possibility of truly achieving their dreams.

Work does not have to destroy us. Work can be the way in which we achieve our fullest self, Jerry firmly believes. What we need, sometimes, is a chance to reset our goals and to reconnect with our deepest selves and with each other. Reboot moves and empowers us to begin this journey.

• Sapiens

What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens?

Yuval Noah Harari challenges everything we know about being human.

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it: us.

In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we’re going.

• Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Sapiens showed us where we came from. In uncertain times, Homo Deus shows us where we’re going.

Yuval Noah Harari envisions a near future in which we face a new set of challenges. Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century and beyond – from overcoming death to creating artificial life.

It asks the fundamental questions: how can we protect this fragile world from our own destructive power? And what does our future hold?

• 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

In twenty-one bite-sized lessons, Yuval Noah Harari explores what it means to be human in an age of bewilderment.

How can we protect ourselves from nuclear war, ecological cataclysms and technological disruptions? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news or the threat of terrorism? What should we teach our children?

Yuval Noah Harari takes us on a thrilling journey through today’s most urgent issues. The golden thread running through his exhilarating new book is the challenge of maintaining our collective and individual focus in the face of constant and disorienting change.

Are we still capable of understanding the world we have created?

• Leonardo Da Vinci

The creator of Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World) officially sold at auction in New York in November 2017 for the record-breaking sum of GBP341 million.

He was history’s most creative genius. What secrets can he teach us?

Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy.

He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa . But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and technology. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry . His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man , made him history’s most creative genius.

His creativity, like that of other great innovators, came from having wide-ranging passions. He peeled flesh off the faces of cadavers, drew the muscles that move the lips, and then painted history’s most memorable smile. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper . Isaacson also describes how Leonardo’s lifelong enthusiasm for staging theatrical productions informed his paintings and inventions.

Leonardo’s delight at combining diverse passions remains the ultimate recipe for creativity. So, too, does his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His life should remind us of the importance of instilling, both in ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it-to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think differently.

• Thirst: A Story of Redemption, Compassion, and a Mission to Bring Clean Water to the World

At 28 years old, Scott Harrison had it all. A top nightclub promoter in New York City, his life was an endless cycle of drugs, booze, models–repeat. But 10 years in, desperately unhappy and morally bankrupt, he asked himself, What would the exact opposite of my life look like? Walking away from everything, Harrison spent the next 16 months on a hospital ship in West Africa and discovered his true calling. In 2006, with no money and less than no experience, Harrison founded charity: water. Today, his organization has raised over $400 million to bring clean drinking water to more than 10 million people around the globe.

In Thirst, Harrison recounts the twists and turns that built charity: water into one of the most trusted and admired nonprofits in the world. Renowned for its 100% donation model, bold storytelling, imaginative branding, and radical commitment to transparency, charity: water has disrupted how social entrepreneurs work while inspiring millions of people to join its mission of bringing clean water to everyone on the planet within our lifetime.

In the tradition of such bestselling books as Shoe Dog and Mountains Beyond Mountains, Thirst is a riveting account of how to build a better charity, a better business, a better life–and a gritty tale that proves it’s never too late to make a change.

100% of the author’s net proceeds from Thirst will go to fund charity: water projects around the world.

Buy Now

• The Overstory

An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. An Air Force crew member in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.
This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe.

• When Breath Becomes Air
  

What makes life worth living in the face of death?
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live.
When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity – the brain – and finally into a patient and a new father.
Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both.

• This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor
  

Welcome to the life of a junior doctor: 97-hour weeks, life and death decisions, a constant tsunami of bodily fluids, and the hospital parking meter earns more than you.

Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the NHS front line. Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking, this diary is everything you wanted to know – and more than a few things you didn’t – about life on and off the hospital ward.

• The Tattooist of Auschwitz 

I tattooed a number on her arm. She tattooed her name on my heart.

In 1942, Lale Sokolov arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was given the job of tattooing the prisoners marked for survival – scratching numbers into his fellow victims’ arms in indelible ink to create what would become one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust.

Waiting in line to be tattooed, terrified and shaking, was a young girl. For Lale – a dandy, a jack-the-lad, a bit of a chancer – it was love at first sight. And he was determined not only to survive himself, but to ensure this woman, Gita, did, too.

So begins one of the most life-affirming, courageous, unforgettable and human stories of the Holocaust: the love story of the tattooist of Auschwitz.

• The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World

Are trees social beings? How do trees live? Do they feel pain or have awareness of their surroundings?

In The Hidden Life of Trees Peter Wohlleben makes the case that the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben also shares his deep love of woods and forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death and regeneration he has observed in his woodland.

A walk in the woods will never be the same again.

• Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

The international bestseller, inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world, and make you realise things are better than you thought.

• Limits of the Known

In a book that is part memoir and part history, David Roberts looks back at his personal relationship to extreme risk and tries to make sense of why so many have committed their lives to the desperate pursuit of adventure.

In the wake of his diagnosis with throat cancer, Roberts seeks the answer with sharp new urgency. He explores his own lifelong commitment to adventuring, as well as the cultural contributions of explorers throughout history. He looks at what it meant in 1911 for Amundsen to reach the South Pole or in 1953 for Hillary and Norgay to summit the highest point on earth. And he asks what the future of adventure is in a world we have mapped and trodden all the way to the most remote corners of the wilderness.

• To Kill a Mockingbird

Part 5

• Nests
  I bloody love this book!
  An exquisitely illustrated, one-of-a-kind celebration of the hidden beauty of nature and the ingenuity of birds
  Susan Ogilvy started painting bird nests almost by accident. One day, while tidying up her garden after a storm, she found a chaffinch nest – a strange, sodden lump on the grass under a fir tree. She carried it inside and placed it on a newspaper; over the next few hours, as the water drained out of it, the sodden lump blossomed into a mossy jewel. She was amazed, and dropped everything to make a painting of the nest at exact life size.
  This was the start of an obsession; Ogilvy has since painted more than fifty bird nests from life, each time marvelling at its ingenious construction. Every species of bird has its own vernacular, but sources its materials – most commonly twigs, roots, grasses, reeds, leaves, moss, lichen, hair, feathers and cobwebs, less usually, mattress stuffing and string – according to local availability. Ogilvy would, of course, never disturb nesting birds; instead she relies upon serendipity, which is why all her nests have either been abandoned after fulfilling their purpose, or displaced by strong winds.
• Further Adventures in Rough Stuff: The Rough-Stuff Fellowship Archive volume 2
  I bloody love this book!
  A second volume of photos from the archive of the oldest off-road cycling club in the world is a further look into an unseen corner of cycling, social history and outdoor culture.See also…
  Founded in 1955, the Rough-Stuff Fellowship is the world’s oldest off-road cycling club. Its archive contains thousands of stunning images, hand-drawn maps and documents – an unexpected treasure trove of incredible value and beauty that is now being brought to a wider public by Isola Press.
  The photos are evocative of a bygone age and a bygone style – a time when you might set off on a bike ride wearing a shirt and tie or a bobble hat, and no ride was complete without a stop to brew up some tea and smoke a pipe.
  They are also a record of intrepid adventures. RSF riders explored the Lake District, the Cairngorms, the Alps and further afield, and their exploits were beautifully documented by amateur and professional photographers.
  In their own very British way, these men and women were pioneers, pedalling and carrying their bikes where angels feared to tread. Mountain bikes, gravel bikes, adventure bikes all owe them a debt. This book celebrates their style and their spirit. It is a stunning visual resource of cycling heritage that will inspire new adventures.
• The Ghost Road
  1918, the closing months of the war. Army psychiatrist William Rivers is increasingly concerned for the men who have been in his care – particularly Billy Prior, who is about to return to combat in France with young poet Wilfred Owen. As Rivers tries to make sense of what, if anything, he has done to help these injured men, Prior and Owen await the final battles in a war that has decimated a generation. The Ghost Road is a vivid and unforgettable account of the devastating final months of the First World War.
• Featherhood
  This is a story about birds and fathers.
  About the young magpie that fell from its nest in a Bermondsey junkyard into Charlie Gilmour’s life – and swiftly changed it. Demanding worms around the clock, riffling through his wallet, sharing his baths and roosting in his hair…
  About the jackdaw kept at a Cornish stately home by Heathcote Williams, anarchist, poet, magician, stealer of Christmas, and Charlie’s biological father who vanished from his life in the dead of night.
  It is a story about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one’s own.
  It is a story about change – from wild to tame; from sanity to madness; from life to death to birth; from freedom to captivity and back again, via an insane asylum, a prison and a magpie’s nest. And ultimately, it is the story of a love affair between a man and a magpie.

• The Second World War
  A magisterial, single-volume history of the greatest conflict the world has ever known by our foremost military historian.
  The Second World War began in August 1939 on the edge of Manchuria and ended there exactly six years later with the Soviet invasion of northern China. The war in Europe appeared completely divorced from the war in the Pacific and China, and yet events on opposite sides of the world had profound effects. Using the most up-to-date scholarship and research, Beevor assembles the whole picture in a gripping narrative that extends from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific and from the snowbound steppe to the North African Desert.
  Although filling the broadest canvas on a heroic scale, Beevor’s The Second World War never loses sight of the fate of the ordinary soldiers and civilians whose lives were crushed by the titanic forces unleashed in this, the most terrible war in history.

• The Frozen Water Trade
  In the days before artificial refrigeration, it was thought impossible to transport ice for long distances. But one man, Frederic Tudor, was convinced it could be done. This is the story of how, almost single-handedly, and in the face of near-universal mockery, he established a vast industry that would introduce the benefits of fresh ice to large parts of the globe.
  Thanks to Tudor, the American fashion for drinks ‘on the rocks’ spread to tropical areas such as the West Indies and British India. By the 1830s fleets of schooners carried the frozen cargo, packed with sawdust and tarpaulins for insulation, to all corners of the world. The harvesting of the ice from New England’s lakes employed thousands of men.
  The frozen water trade had a profound influence on the tastes of a large part of the world, but with the development of artificial cooling systems in the first quarter of the 20th century, the huge industry established by Frederic Tudor vanished as if it had never been.
  

• All That Remains: A Life in Death Sue Black confronts death every day. As a Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, she focuses on mortal remains in her lab, at burial sites, at scenes of violence, murder and criminal dismemberment, and when investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident or natural disaster.
  In All That Remains she reveals the many faces of death she has come to know, using key cases to explore how forensic science has developed, and examining what her life and work has taught her.
  Do we expect a book about death to be sad? Macabre? Sue’s book is neither. There is tragedy, but there is also humour in stories as gripping as the best crime novel.
  Part memoir, part science, part meditation on death, her book is compassionate, surprisingly funny, and it will make you think about death in a new light.

• A Fighter’s Heart: One man’s journey through the world of fighting
  After a series of adventurous jobs around the world, Sam Sheridan found himself in Australia, cash-rich and with time on his hands to spend it. It occurred to him that he could finally explore a long-held obsession: fighting. Within a year, he was in Bangkok training with Thailand’s greatest kickboxing champion and stepping through the ropes for his first professional bout. But one fight wasn’t enough, and Sheridan set out to test himself on an epic journey into how and why we fight, facing Olympic boxers, Brazilian jiu-jitsu stars, and Ultimate Fighting champions.
• How Britain Really Works: Understanding the Ideas and Institutions of a Nation
  Getting to grips with Great Britain is harder than ever. We are a nation that chose Brexit, rejects immigration but is dependent on it, is getting older but less healthy, is more demanding of public services but less willing to pay for them, is tired of intervention abroad but wants to remain a global authority. We have an over-stretched, free health service (an idea from the 1940s that may not survive the 2020s), overcrowded prisons, a military without an evident purpose, an education system the envy of none of the Western world.
  How did we get here and where are we going?
  How Britain Really Works is a guide to Britain and its institutions (the economy, the military, schools, hospitals, the media, and more), which explains just how we got to wherever it is we are. It will not tell you what opinions to have, but will give you the information to help you reach your own. By the end, you will know how Britain works – or doesn’t.
• The Paper Palace
  Before anyone else is awake, on a perfect August morning, Elle Bishop heads out for a swim in the glorious freshwater pond below ‘The Paper Palace’ — the gently decaying summer camp in the back woods of Cape Cod where her family has spent every summer for generations. As she passes the house, Elle glances through the screen porch at the uncleared table from the dinner the previous evening; empty wine glasses, candle wax on the tablecloth, echoes of laughter of family and friends. Then she dives beneath the surface of the freezing water to the shocking memory of the sudden passionate encounter she had the night before, up against the wall behind the house, as her husband and mother chatted to the guests inside.
  So begins a story that unfolds over twenty-four hours and across fifty years, as decades of family legacies, love, lies, secrets, and one unspeakable incident in her childhood lead Elle to the precipice of a life-changing decision. Over the next twenty-four hours, Elle will have to decide between the world she has made with her much-loved husband, Peter, and the life she imagined would be hers with her childhood love, Jonas, if a tragic event hadn’t forever changed the course of their lives.
• The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel
  Over the course of a year, leading historian and nature writer David Gange kayaked the weather-ravaged coasts of Atlantic Britain and Ireland from north to south: every cove, sound, inlet, island.
  The idea was to travel slowly and close to the water: in touch with both the natural world and the histories of communities on Atlantic coastlines. The story of his journey is one of staggering adventure, range and beauty. For too long, Gange argues, the significance of coasts has been underestimated, and the potential of small boats as tools to make sense of these histories rarely explored. This book seeks to put that imbalance right.
• Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas
  Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of his final five years, centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas’s fatal decision to fight in the war.
• People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows
  In the summer of 2000, Jane Steare received the phone call every mother dreads. Her daughter Lucie Blackman – tall, blonde, and twenty-one years old – had stepped into the vastness of a Tokyo summer and disappeared forever. That winter, her dismembered remains were found buried in a desolate seaside cave.
  Her disappearance was mystifying. Had Lucie been abducted by a religious cult? Who was the mysterious man she had gone to meet? What did her work, as a ‘hostess’ in the notorious Roppongi district of Tokyo, really involve? And could Lucie’s fate be linked to the disappearance of another girl some ten years earlier?
  Over the course of a decade, Richard Lloyd Parry has travelled to four continents to interview those caught up in the story and been given unprecedented access to Lucie’s bitterly divided family to reveal the astonishing truth about Lucie and her fate.
• Relentless: Secrets of the Sporting Elite
  From an early age Alistair Brownlee has been obsessed with being the very best, and not just improving his sporting performance across his three specialist triathlon disciplines of swimming, cycling and running, but also understanding how a winner becomes a dominant champion. Winning gold in consecutive Olympic Games has only strengthened this need and desire.
  Over the last 4 years Alistair has been on a journey to learn from the best, talking to elite figures across multiple sports as well as leading thinkers and scientists, to understand what enabled these remarkable individuals to rise to the very top, and to push the limits of human capability in their relentless pursuit of perfection.
  Alistair uses these fascinating interviews, along with extensive research, to explore a range of sports and environments – athletics, cycling, football, rugby, horseracing, hockey, cricket, golf, motor racing, snooker, swimming and ultra-running – to reveal how talent alone is never enough and how hard work, pain, pressure, stress, risk, focus, sacrifice, innovation, reinvention, passion, ruthlessness, luck, failure and even a lockdown can all play a crucial part in honing a winning mentality and achieving sustained success.
• Goodbye to All That
  In one of the most honest and candid self-portraits ever committed to paper, Robert Graves tells the extraordinary story of his experiences as a young officer in the First World War. He describes life in the trenches in vivid, raw detail, how the dehumanizing horrors he witnessed left him shell-shocked. They were to haunt him for the rest of his life.
• I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain
  Anita’s journey through the natural landscapes of the North is one of reclamation, a way of saying that this is her land too and she belongs in the UK as a brown woman, as much as a white man does. Her journey transforms what began as an ugly experience of hate into one offering hope and finding beauty after brutality. Anita transforms her personal experience into one of universal resonance, offering a call to action, to keep walking onwards. Every footstep taken is an act of persistence. Every word written against the rising tide of hate speech, such as this book, is an act of resistance.
• The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance
  In THE ART OF LEARNING,Waitzkin offers an inside look at two of the world’s most intense subcultures while also sharing the principles at the core of his success. One must focus on long-term goals, Waitzkin argues, instead of the immediate thrill of victory or crush of defeat, enduring the difficult periods that result in growth to reach higher levels of achievement.
• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness
  Advice on careers & achieving success.
• One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey
• Nightwalk: A Journey to the Heart of Nature
  Chris Yates, one of Britain’s most insightful and lyrical writers, raises his gaze from his beloved rivers and ponds and takes us on a mesmerizing tour of the British countryside.
  “Last November, the sudden appearance of a hundred wintering ravens in a wood in Cranborne Chase, where I have lived for twenty-five years without seeing more than a few solitary specimens, reminded me that there is always something ready to flame up again in the landscape, just when it seemed the fire had gone out.”
  In Nightwalk we accompany Chris Yates on the most magical of journeys into the very heart of the British countryside. His acute observation of the natural world and ability to transcend it exquisitely sets Chris apart from his contemporaries.
  Time slows down for a deeper intimacy with nature, and through Chris’s writing we hear every rustle of a leaf, every call of a bird. He widens the power of our imagination, heightening our senses and revealing beauty in the smallest details.
• Four Thousand Weeks: Embrace your limits. Change your life.
  We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, the struggle against distraction, and the sense that our attention spans are shrivelling. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the question of how best to use our ridiculously brief time on the planet, which amounts on average to about four thousand weeks.
  Four Thousand Weeks is an uplifting, engrossing and deeply realistic exploration of the challenge. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with ‘getting everything done,’ it introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing rather than denying their limitations. And it shows how the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made, as individuals and as a society. Its many revelations will transform the reader’s worldview.
  Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman sets out to realign our relationship with time – and in doing so, to liberate us from its tyranny.
• Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes
  Fashion has blighted our planet. Today, one out of six people on earth work in fashion, churning out 100 billion garments a year. Yet 98 percent of them do not earn a living wage, and 2.1 billion tonnes of clothing is thrown away annually. The clothing industry’s exploitation of fellow humans and the environment has reached epic levels. What should we do?
• A Vagabond for Beauty: A John Murray Journey
  Artist and wanderer Everett Ruess left home at the age of sixteen to immerse himself in the harsh desert landscapes of the American Southwest. With only his donkeys for company, driven by an insatiable longing for beauty and experience, he ventured ever further from civilisation and into the wilderness of Navajo country.
  In 1934, at the age of twenty, he vanished without trace in Utah, a disappearance that remains unsolved to this day. Through letters, diary excerpts and poems – charting not only his rugged adventures and his exquisite nature writing but his progression as a writer, and into adulthood – and with commentary by W. L. Rusho, A Vagabond for Beauty tells his remarkable story.
• Rodham: What if Hillary hadn’t married Bill?
  Smart, diligent, and a bit plain, that’s the general consensus. Then Hillary goes to college, and her star rises. At Yale Law School, she continues to be a leader- and catches the eye of driven, handsome and charismatic Bill. But when he asks her to marry him, Hillary gives him a firm No.
  How might things have turned out for them, for America, for the world itself, if Hillary Rodham had really turned down Bill Clinton?
• Five Days in London, May 1940
  The days from May 24 to May 28, 1940 altered the course of the history of this century, as the members of the British War Cabinet debated whether to negotiate with Hitler or to continue what became known as the Second World War. The decisive importance of these five days is the focus of John Lukacs’s magisterial new book.
• Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth
  The Apollo Moon Programme has been called the last optimistic act of the twentieth century. In Moondust, Andrew Smith set out to find and interview the nine remaining Moonwalkers in order to learn how their lives, and ours, were irrevocably changed by this surreal expedition.
• Choose FI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence
  If you are in debt, bad with money, or looking for a straightforward way to take command of your finances, this book is for you. This isn’t just another personal finance book or budgeting guide telling you how to live like someone else. This book will give you the framework for success from dozens of people who have found their own path to financial independence.
• The Simple Path to Wealth
  This book grew out of a series of letters to my daughter concerning various things—mostly about money and investing—she was not yet quite ready to hear.
  Since money is the single most powerful tool we have for navigating this complex world we’ve created, understanding it is critical.
  “But Dad,” she once said, “I know money is important. I just don’t want to spend my life thinking about it.” This was eye-opening. I love this stuff. But most people have better things to do with their precious time. Bridges to build, diseases to cure, treaties to negotiate, mountains to climb, technologies to create, children to teach, businesses to run.
  Unfortunately, benign neglect of things financial leaves you open to the charlatans of the financial world. The people who make investing endlessly complex, because if it can be made complex it becomes more profitable for them, more expensive for us, and we are forced into their waiting arms.
  Here’s an important truth: Complex investments exist only to profit those who create and sell them. Not only are they more costly to the investor, they are less effective.
  The simple approach I created for her and present now to you, is not only easy to understand and implement, it is more powerful than any other.
  
• Investing To Save The Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference
  Investing responsibly is one of the most powerful ways that you can fight climate change.
  No longer a niche sector for rebel fund managers, conscious investing has the potential to raise huge sums of money to the companies and organisations on the front line fighting the climate crisis and make investors positive returns in the process.
  In this essential introduction to green investing, Alice Ross shows you how you can turn your savings and pensions, however big or small, into a force for change.
• England’s Villages: An Extraordinary Journey Through Time
  England’s villages have survived, developed, persisted and thrived over hundreds of years. Entirely new villages are still being built today. But when did the first villages appear and why is this form of settlement so enduring and endearing? What makes a village and how has that changed over time? How did village pubs and village halls originate, and why do they matter?
  Take a charming and unexpected journey through the quirks of England’s villages across the ages in the excellent company of Dr Ben Robinson, expert archaeologist. Join him in visiting villages from prehistoric and Roman times, throughout medieval England, to today’s urban villages. Discover how landowners, governments and communities have shaped villages, why village greens and ponds exist, and the real meaning behind village names like Bunny, Yelling, Lover, Great Snoring and Slaughter.
• A Woman in the Polar Night
  In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to “read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart’s content”, but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive.
  At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape the lack of equipment and supplies… But as time passes, after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months on end of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic’s harsh, otherworldly beauty, gaining a great sense of inner peace and a new appreciation for the sanctity of life.
• The Stranger in the Woods: ‘A meditation on solitude, wildness and survival’
  In 1986, twenty-year-old Christopher Knight left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the woods.
  He would not speak to another human being until three decades later when he was arrested for stealing food.
  Christopher survived by his wits and courage, developing ingenious ways to store food and water in order to avoid freezing to death in his tent during the harsh Maine winters. He broke into nearby cottages for food, clothes, reading material and other provisions, taking only what he needed. In the process, he unwittingly terrified a community unable to solve the mysterious burglaries. Myths abounded amongst the locals eager to find this legendary hermit.
  Based on extensive interviews with Knight himself, this is a vividly detailed account of his secluded life and the challenges he faced returning to the world. The Stranger in the Woods is a riveting story of survival that asks fundamental questions about solitude and what makes for a good life.
  Above all, this is a deeply moving portrait of a man determined to live life his own way.
• The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
  You want fewer distractions and less on your plate. The daily barrage of e-mails, texts, tweets, messages, and meetings distract you and stress you out. The simultaneous demands of work and family are taking a toll. And what’s the cost? Second-rate work, missed deadlines, smaller pay cheques, fewer promotions – and lots of stress.
  You want more productivity from your work. More income for a better lifestyle. You want more satisfaction from life, and more time for yourself, your family, and your friends.
• Too Many Reasons to Live
  Rob Burrow is one of the greatest rugby league players of all time. And the most inspirational. As a boy, Rob was told he was too small to play the sport. Even when he made his debut for Leeds Rhinos, people wrote him off as a novelty. But Rob never stopped proving people wrong. During his time at Leeds, for whom he played almost 500 games, he won eight Super League Grand Finals, two Challenge Cups and three World Club Challenges. He also played for his country in two World Cups.
  In December 2019, Rob was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, a rare degenerative condition, and given a couple of years to live. He was only thirty-seven, not long retired and had three young children. When he went public with the devastating news, the outpouring of affection and support was extraordinary. When it became clear that Rob was going to fight it all the way, sympathy turned to awe.
  This is the story of a tiny kid who adored rugby league but never should have made it – and ended up in the Leeds hall of fame. It’s the story of a man who resolved to turn a terrible predicament into something positive – when he could have thrown the towel in. It’s about the power of love, between Rob and his childhood sweetheart Lindsey, and of friendship, between Rob and his faithful teammates. Far more than a sports memoir, Too Many Reasons to Live is a story of boundless courage and infinite kindness.
• The Book Collectors of Daraya
  In 2012 the rebel suburb of Daraya in Damascus was brutally besieged by Syrian government forces. Four years of suffering ensued, punctuated by shelling, barrel bombs and chemical gas attacks. People’s homes were destroyed and their food supplies cut off; disease was rife.
  Yet in this man-made hell, forty young Syrian revolutionaries embarked on an extraordinary project, rescuing all the books they could find in the bombed-out ruins of their home town. They used them to create a secret library, in a safe place, deep underground. It became their school, their university, their refuge. It was a place to learn, to exchange ideas, to dream and to hope.
• Eat Like a Fish: My adventures as a fisherman turned restorative ocean farmer
  ‘I used to be a commercial fisherman, chasing your dinner on the high seas for a living, but now I farm twenty acres of saltwater, growing a mix of sea greens and shellfish.’
  In Eat Like a Fish Bren Smith – a former commercial fisherman turned restorative ocean farmer – shares a bold new vision for the future of food: seaweed. Part memoir, part manifesto, through tales that span from his childhood in Newfoundland to his years on the high seas aboard commercial fishing trawlers, from pioneering new forms of ocean farming to surfing the frontiers of the food movement, Smith introduces the world of sea-based agriculture and advocates getting ocean vegetables onto our plates. There are thousands of edible varieties in the sea!
• Rutherford and Fry’s Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything
  In Rutherford and Fry’s comprehensive guidebook, they tell the complete story of the universe and absolutely everything in it – skipping over some of the boring parts .
  This is a celebration of the weirdness of the cosmos, the strangeness of humans and the fact that amid all the mess, we can somehow make sense of life.
• RESET: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy
  What if that way doesn’t involve jacking in your job, leaving your partner, having a midlife crisis, uprooting your existence? What if that way just involves small actions, taken every day? With no more effort than you now spend tending your social media flock, superglued to a screen.
  Best of all, what if that way costs you little? In fact, what if that way saves you a tonne of money and lets you retire a few years earlier?
  (NB: I skipped all of this book except for the UK-specific financial advice, which I found invaluable. Others might appreciate the self-help chapters, but they weren’t what I was after.)
  

  ————————————————

  Part 4

  NATURAL WORLD

  • The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers. I really enjoyed this book, more than I thought I would. The full story of seabirds from one of the greatest nature writers. The book looks at the pattern of their lives, their habitats, the threats they face and the passions they inspire.

  HOW WE LIVE

  • Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Unforeseen financial crises. Extreme wealth inequality. Relentless pressure on the environment. Can we go on like this? Is there an alternative? In Doughnut Economics, Oxford academic Kate Raworth lays out the seven deadly mistakes of economics and offers a radical re-envisioning of the system that has brought us to the point of ruin. Moving beyond the myths of ‘rational economic man’ and unlimited growth, Doughnut Economics zeroes in on the sweet spot: a system that meets all our needs without exhausting the planet. The demands of the 21st century require a new shape of economics. This might just be it.
  • The Future We Choose. Discover why there’s hope for the planet and how we can each make a difference in the climate crisis, starting today. Humanity is not doomed, and we can and will survive. The future is ours to create: it will be shaped by who we choose to be in the coming years. The coming decade is a turning point – it is time to turn from indifference or despair and towards a stubborn, determined optimism.
  • The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us. The vast majority of our country is entirely unknown to us because we are banned from setting foot on it. By law of trespass, we are excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of its waterways, blocked by walls whose legitimacy is rarely questioned. But behind them lies a story of enclosure, exploitation and dispossession of public rights whose effects last to this day. The Book of Trespass takes us on a journey over the walls of England, into the thousands of square miles of rivers, woodland, lakes and meadows that are blocked from public access. By trespassing the land of the media magnates, Lords, politicians and private corporations that own England, Nick Hayes argues that the root of social inequality is the uneven distribution of land.
  • The Green Grocer: One Man’s Manifesto for Corporate Activism. Running a sustainable business doesn’t mean that you can’t make a profit. In this inspiring book, readers that own businesses of all sizes will learn the value of pursuing ethical policies through the journey of the author’s quest to “do it right”.
  • We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People. How did a collective of self-taught internet sleuths end up solving some of the biggest crimes of our time? Bellingcat, the home-grown investigative unit, is redefining the way we think about news, politics and the digital future. Here, their founder – a high-school dropout on a kitchen laptop – tells the story of how they created a whole new category of information-gathering, galvanising citizen journalists across the globe to expose war crimes and pick apart disinformation, using just their computers.
  • I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. In this first volume of her seven books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination, violence and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration.
  • The Manual: A Philosopher’s Guide to Life. The Manual is a collection of Epictetus’ essential teachings and pithy sayings, compiled by his closet student. It is the most accessible and actionable guide to Stoic philosophy, as relevant today as it was in the Roman Empire.
  • Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight: Sheltering with Thoreau in the Age of Crisis. When the pandemic struck, nature writer David Gessner turned to Henry David Thoreau, the original social distancer, for lessons on how to live. Those lessons—of learning our own backyard, re–wilding, loving nature, self–reliance, and civil disobedience—hold a secret that could help save us as we face the greater crisis of climate.

  COURAGE

  • The Choice: A true story of hope. In 1944, sixteen-year-old ballerina Edith Eger was sent to Auschwitz. Separated from her parents on arrival, she endures unimaginable experiences, including being made to dance for the infamous Josef Mengele. When the camp is finally liberated, she is pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive. The horrors of the Holocaust didn’t break Edith. In fact, they helped her learn to live again with a life-affirming strength and a truly remarkable resilience. The Choice is her unforgettable story. It shows that hope can flower in the most unlikely places.
  • Unbroken. In 1943 a bomber crashes into the Pacific Ocean. Against all odds, one young lieutenant survives. Louise Zamperini had already transformed himself from child delinquent to prodigious athlete, running in the Berlin Olympics. Now he must embark on one of the Second World War’s most extraordinary odysseys. Zamperini faces thousands of miles of open ocean on a failing raft. Beyond lie only greater trials, in Japan’s prisoner-of-war camps.
  • Road to Valour: Gino Bartali – Tour de France Legend and World War Two Hero. The inspirational story of Gino Bartali, who made the greatest comeback in Tour de France history and secretly aided the Italian Resistance during the Second World War. This is the inspiring, against-the-odds story of Gino Bartali, the cyclist who made the greatest comeback in Tour de France history and still holds the record for the longest gap between victories. Yet it was his actions during the Second World War, when he secretly aided the Resistance, rather than his remarkable exploits on a bike, that truly cemented his place in the hearts and minds of the Italian people.

  ADVENTURE

  • The Push: A Climber’s Journey of Endurance, Risk and Going Beyond Limits to Climb the Dawn Wall. In 2015 climber Tommy Caldwell took on the hardest challenge of his life, spending 19 days freeclimbing Yosemite’s vertical, 3000-foot Dawn Wall – regarded as the most difficult climb in history and a route nobody had ever done before. This odds-defying feat was the culmination of seven years planning and a lifetime of determination. Here, he recounts how he got there, the falls and setbacks – being held hostage, losing his index finger, the break-up of his marriage – the summits conquered and the fears overcome.
  • The Backyard Adventurer. YouTuber, new dad, and self-described oddball who needs to shower more, Beau is what happens when you cross Bear Grylls with Casey Neistat. After years of adventuring around the globe – running, kayaking, hitchhiking, exploring – Beau Miles came back to his block in country Victoria. Staying put for the first time in years, Beau developed a new kind of lifestyle as the Backyard Adventurer. Whether it was walking 90 km to work with no provisions, building a canoe paddle out of scavenged scrap or running a disused railway line through properties, blackberry thickets and past inquiring police officers, Beau has been finding ways to satisfy his adventurous spirit close to home.

  LEARNING

  • Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. For many of us, the last time we learned a new skill was during childhood. We live in an age which reveres expertise but looks down on the beginner. Upon entering adulthood and middle age, we begin to shy away from trying new things, instead preferring to stay nestled firmly in our comfort zones. Beginners asks the question: why are children the only ones allowed to experience the inherent fun of facing daily challenges? And could we benefit from embracing new skills, even if we’re initially hopeless? Bestselling author Tom Vanderbilt sets out to find the answer, tasking himself with acquiring several new skills under the tutelage of professionals, including drawing, juggling, surfing and much more. Witty and often surprisingly profound, Beginners is an uplifting exploration of the science of brain plasticity and how we can learn how to learn anew.
  • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. A literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves – and our world today. For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

  FICTION

  • The Ghost Road. 1918, the closing months of the war. Army psychiatrist William Rivers is increasingly concerned for the men who have been in his care – particularly Billy Prior, who is about to return to combat in France with young poet Wilfred Owen. As Rivers tries to make sense of what, if anything, he has done to help these injured men, Prior and Owen await the final battles in a war that has decimated a generation. The Ghost Road is a vivid and unforgettable account of the devastating final months of the First World War.
  • The Underground Railroad. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North.
  • Atonement. On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl’s imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.
  • Little. Born in Alsace in 1761, the unsightly, diminutive Marie Grosholtz is quickly nicknamed ‘Little’. Orphaned at the age of six, she finds employment in Bern, Switzerland, under the charge of reclusive anatomist, Dr Curtius. In time the unlikely pair form an unlikely bond, and together they pursue an unusual passion: the fine art of wax-modelling.
  • Three Men in a Boat. A comic masterpiece that has never been out of print. Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a ‘T’. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather forecasts and tins of pineapple chunks – not to mention the devastation left in the wake of J.’s small fox-terrier Montmorency. 
  • The Girl on the Train. Rachel Watson longs for a different life. Her only escape is the perfect couple she watches through the train window every day, happy and in love. Or so it appears. When Rachel learns that the woman she’s been secretly watching has suddenly disappeared, she finds herself as a witness and even a suspect in a thrilling mystery which she will face bigger revelations than she could ever have anticipated.
  • The Godfather. Tyrant, blackmailer, racketeer, murderer – his influence reaches every level of American society. Meet Don Corleone, a friendly man, a just man, a reasonable man. The deadliest lord of the Cosa Nostra. The Godfather.

  ————————————————

  Part 3

  Adventure

  • The Moth and the Mountain: A True Story of Love, War and Everest. In the 1930s, as official government expeditions set their sights on conquering Everest, a little-known World War I veteran named Maurice Wilson conceived his own crazy, beautiful plan: he would fly a Gipsy Moth aeroplane from England to Everest, crash land on its lower slopes, then become the first person to reach its summit – all utterly alone. Wilson didn’t know how to climb. He barely knew how to fly. But he had pluck, daring and a vision – he wanted to be the first man to stand on top of the world. Traumatised by his wartime experiences and leaving behind a trail of broken hearts, Wilson believed that Everest could redeem him. This is the tale of an adventurer unlike any you have ever encountered: an unforgettable story about the power of the human spirit in the face of adversity. Maurice Wilson is a man written out of the history books – dismissed as an eccentric and a charlatan by many, but held in the highest regard by renowned mountaineers such as Reinhold Messner. The Moth and the Mountain restores him to his rightful place in the annals of Everest and in doing so attempts to answer that perennial question – why do we climb mountains?
  • Endless Perfect Circles: Lessons from the little-known world of ultradistance cycling. A professional psychologist spent his entire life believing he had no ability or interest in sport. Then, in his forties, he became a champion ultradistance athlete before breaking the world record for the fastest bicycle crossing of Europe. This journey – made entirely alone and without any support crew – went from the northernmost point in the Arctic down to the very southernmost point in Spain. Averaging 377 kilometres each day and with up to 18 hours in the saddle at a time, the total distance of 6367 km was covered in well under 17 days, knocking well over two days off the previous record. It was a journey of ultimate self-reliance. Endless Perfect Circles is not just a tale of sleep deprivation and eating terrible food in supermarket car parks, it is also a celebration of how tough sporting challenges offer ordinary people a path to self-improvement. Weaving his own experiences together with psychological insights, Ian Walker demonstrates the rewards we can all find from setting ourselves difficult personal goals and working out how we will rise to meet these.
  • The Runner: Four Years Living and Running in the Wilderness. Markus Torgeby was just 20 years old when he headed off into the remote Swedish forest to live as a recluse and dedicate himself to his one true passion: running. He lived in a tent in the wilderness, braving the harsh Swedish winters – for four years. This is his story. An international bestseller, this extraordinary book is a powerful exploration of running, resilience, loss, and self-discovery. A talented long-distance runner in his teens, Markus Torgeby excelled in training, but often failed inexplicably in competition. Pressurised by his coach and consumed by the suffering of his MS-afflicted mother, he chose to do something that most of us only dream of: escape the modern world. In his stripped-back lifestyle in the woods, surviving with the bare minimum of supplies and enduring extreme cold, he found salvation and ultimately his true direction in life.
  • Three Against the Wilderness. Timeless tales about wilderness living. Eric Collier’s riveting recollections about the 26 years that he, his wife Lillian and son Veasy spent homesteading in the isolated Chilcotin wilderness made for an international bestseller and one of the most famous books ever written about British Columbia. In the early 1930s, Collier and his family moved to Meldrum Creek, where the couple built their own log house and learned to live off the land. Fulfilling a promise to Lillian’s grandmother to bring the beavers back to the area she knew as a child before the White man came, Collier was instrumental in the species’ survival. Collier’s timeless tales about roughing it in the bush and the resourcefulness inspired by this lifestyle’s challenges will engage readers young and old.

  Non-Fiction

  • Slow Rise. Over the course of a year, Robert Penn learns how to plant, harvest, thresh and mill his own wheat, in order to bake bread for his family. In returning to this pre-industrial practice, he tells the fascinating story of our relationship with bread: from the domestication of wheat in the Fertile Crescent at the dawn of civilization, to the rise of mass-produced loaves and the resurgence in homebaking today. Gathering knowledge and wisdom from experts around the world – farmers on the banks of the Nile, harvesters in the American Midwest and Parisian boulangers – Penn reconnects the joy of making and eating bread with a deep appreciation for the skill and patience required to cultivate its key ingredient. This book is a celebration of the millennia-old craft of breadmaking, and how it is woven into the story of humanity.
  • Eleven Rings. I don’t know of any book about football, rugby or cricket that writes about leadership and spiritualism in such an interesting way. Try this if you enjoyed ‘The Last Dance’ on Netflix. During his storied career as head coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, Phil Jackson won more championships than any coach in the history of professional sports. Even more important, he succeeded in never wavering from coaching his way, from a place of deep values. Jackson was tagged as the ‘Zen master’ half in jest by sportswriters, but the nickname speaks to an important truth: this is a coach who inspired, not goaded; who led by awakening and challenging the better angels of his players’ nature, not their egos, fear, or greed. This is the story of a preacher’s kid from North Dakota who grew up to be one of the most innovative leaders of our time. In his quest to reinvent himself, Jackson explored everything from humanistic psychology and Native American philosophy to Zen meditation. In the process, he developed a new approach to leadership based on freedom, authenticity, and selfless teamwork that turned the hyper-competitive world of professional sports on its head.
  • Gang Leader for a Day. Sudhir Venkatesh the young sociologist who became famous in Freakonomics ( Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? ) describes his time living with the gangs on the Southside of Chicago and answers another question: what’s it like to live in hell? In the Robert Taylor Homes projects on Chicago’s South Side, Sudhir befriends J.T., a gang leader for the Black Kings. As he slowly gains J.T.’s trust, one day, in order to convince Sudhir of his own CEO-like qualities, J.T. makes him leader of the gang… Why does J.T. make his henchmen, the ‘shorties’, stay in school? What is the difference between a ‘regular’ hustler and a ‘hype’ – and is Peanut telling him the truth about which she is? And, when the FBI finally starts cracking down on the Black Kings, is it time to get out – or is it too late?
  • One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder. When Brian Doyle passed away at the age of sixty after a bout with brain cancer, he left behind a cult-like following of devoted readers who regard his writing as one of the best-kept secrets of the twenty- first century. Doyle writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the sanctity of everyday things, and about love and connection in all their forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon. At a moment when the world can sometimes feel darker than ever, Doyle’s writing, which constantly evokes the humour and even bliss that life affords, is a balm. His essays manage to find, again and again, exquisite beauty in the quotidian, whether it’s the awe of a child the first time she hears a river, or a husband’s whiskers that a grieving widow misses seeing in her sink every morning. Through Doyle’s eyes, nothing is dull.
  • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.
  • Calypso. When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it’s impossible to take a vacation from yourself. With Calypso, Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. Make no mistake: these stories are very, very funny – it’s a book that can make you laugh ’til you snort, the way only family can. Sedaris’s writing has never been sharper, and his ability to shock readers into laughter unparalleled. But much of the comedy here is born out of that vertiginous moment when your own body betrays you and you realize that the story of your life is made up of more past than future.
  • Smoke in the Lanes. A classic account of the reality of life as a Gypsy in the 1950s when Travellers lived in horse drawn wagons and stopped by the wayside in quiet country lanes wherever possible, but were often driven to “atch” besides main highways as so many of the old stopping-places were fenced-off or built upon. This book is full of stories of life on the road and descriptions of colourful characters living for the present despite constant harassment by police and suspicious landowners. The author, Dominic Reeve, still lives the life of a Traveller but in a modern caravan pulled by a heavily chromed four wheel drive pickup. Illustrated with his wife, Beshlie’s fine drawings this is an inside account of “life on the road” and as such is of permanent value to both students and the general reader as a vivid portrayal of a vanished way of life.
  • Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers. In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work. In Bad Blood , John Carreyrou tells the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.
  • Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future. South African born Elon Musk is the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity. Musk wants to save our planet; he wants to send citizens into space, to form a colony on Mars; he wants to make money while doing these things; and he wants us all to know about it. He is the real-life inspiration for the Iron Man series of films starring Robert Downey Junior. The personal tale of Musk’s life comes with all the trappings one associates with a great, drama-filled story. He was a freakishly bright kid who was bullied brutally at school, and abused by his father. In the midst of these rough conditions, and the violence of apartheid South Africa, Musk still thrived academically and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he paid his own way through school by turning his house into a club and throwing massive parties.
  • The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design. Have you ever wondered what those bright, squiggly graffiti marks on the sidewalk mean? Or stopped to ponder who gets to name the streets we walk along? Or what the story is behind those dancing inflatable figures in car dealerships? 99% Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive, and the sidewalks we traverse. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs. Now, in The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to Hidden World of Everyday Design , host Roman Mars and coauthor Kurt Kohlstedt zoom in on the various elements that make our cities work, exploring the origins and other fascinating stories behind everything from power grids and fire escapes to drinking fountains and street signs. With deeply researched entries and beautiful line drawings throughout, The 99% Invisible City will captivate devoted fans of the show and anyone curious about design, urban environments, and the unsung marvels of the world around them.
  • A Promised Land. In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency-a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.

  The Natural World

  • How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical – and accessible – plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet’s slide toward certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal.
  • Lab Girl. Lab Girl is a book about work and about love, and the mountains that can be moved when those two things come together. It is told through Jahren’s remarkable stories: about the discoveries she has made in her lab, as well as her struggle to get there; about her childhood playing in her father’s laboratory; about how lab work became a sanctuary for both her heart and her hands; about Bill, the brilliant, wounded man who became her loyal colleague and best friend; about their field trips – sometimes authorised, sometimes very much not – that took them from the Midwest across the USA, to Norway and to Ireland, from the pale skies of North Pole to tropical Hawaii; and about her constant striving to do and be her best, and her unswerving dedication to her life’s work.
  • The New Climate War: the fight to take back our planet. Recycle. Fly less. Eat less meat. These are some of the ways that we’ve been told we can save the planet. But are individuals really to blame for the climate crisis? Seventy-one per cent of global emissions come from the same hundred companies, but fossil-fuel companies have taken no responsibility themselves. Instead, they have waged a thirty-year campaign to blame individuals for climate change. The result has been disastrous for our planet. In The New Climate War , renowned scientist Michael E. Mann argues that all is not lost. He draws the battle lines between the people and the polluters – fossil-fuel companies, right-wing plutocrats, and petro-states – and outlines a plan for forcing our governments and corporations to wake up and make real change.
  • Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them. Neither plant nor animal, they are found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. They can be microscopic, yet also account for the largest organisms ever recorded. They enabled the first life on land, can survive unprotected in space and thrive amidst nuclear radiation. In fact, nearly all life relies in some way on fungi. These endlessly surprising organisms have no brain but can solve problems and manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. Their ability to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web’, is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented. Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into a spectacular and neglected world, and shows that fungi provide a key to understanding both the planet on which we live, and life itself.
  • Edgelands. The wilderness is much closer than you think. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged: the edgelands – those familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside – have become the great wild places on our doorsteps. In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst.
  • The Unofficial Countryside. During the early 1970s Richard Mabey set about mapping his unofficial countryside. He walked crumbling city docks and overgrown bomb sites, navigating inner city canals and car parks, exploring sewage works, gravel pits, rubbish tips. What he discovered runs deeper than a natural history of our suburbs and cities. The Unofficial Countryside prescribes another way of seeing, another way of experiencing nature in our daily lives. Wild flowers glimpsed from a commuter train. A kestrel hawking above a public park. Enchanter’s nightshade growing through pavement cracks. Fox cubs playing on a motorway’s scrubby fringe. There is a scarcely a nook in our urban landscape incapable of supporting life. It is an inspiration to find this abundance, to discover how plants, birds, mammals and insects flourish against the odds in the most obscure and surprising places.
  • The Hidden Life of Trees. Are trees social beings? How do trees live? Do they feel pain or have awareness of their surroundings? In The Hidden Life of Trees Peter Wohlleben makes the case that the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben also shares his deep love of woods and forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death and regeneration he has observed in his woodland.
  • The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us. The vast majority of our country is entirely unknown to us because we are banned from setting foot on it. By law of trespass, we are excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of its waterways, blocked by walls whose legitimacy is rarely questioned. But behind them lies a story of enclosure, exploitation and dispossession of public rights whose effects last to this day. The Book of Trespass takes us on a journey over the walls of England, into the thousands of square miles of rivers, woodland, lakes and meadows that are blocked from public access.

  Fiction

  • Shuggie Bain. It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. Shuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother’s sense of snobbish propriety. The miners’ children pick on him and adults condemn him as no’ right . But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place.
  • The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway will stand as the definitive collection by the man whose craft and vision remains an enduring influence on generations of readers and writers.
  • The Book Thief. It is 1939. In Nazi Germany, the country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier – and will become busier still. By her brother’s graveside, Liesel’s life is changed forever when she picks up a single object, abandoned in the snow. It is The Gravedigger’s Handbook , and this is her first act of book thievery. So begins Liesel’s love affair with books and words, and soon she is stealing from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor’s wife’s library . . . wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times, and when Liesel’s foster family hides a Jew in their basement, nothing will ever be the same again.
  • Hotel Silence. Jonas feels like his life is over. His wife has left him, his mother is slipping deeper into dementia, and his daughter is no longer who he thought. So he comes up with a foolproof plan: to buy a one-way ticket to a chaotic,war-ravaged country and put an end to it all. But on arriving at Hotel Silence, he finds his plans – and his anonymity – begin to dissolve under the foreign sun. Now there are other things that need his attention, like the crumbling hotel itself, the staff who run it, and his unusual fellow guests. And soon it becomes clear that Jonas must decide whether he really wants to leave it all behind; or give life a second chance, albeit down a most unexpected path…
  • An American Marriage. Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of the American Dream. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. Until one day they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Devastated and unmoored, Celestial finds herself struggling to hold on to the love that has been her centre, taking comfort in Andre, their closest friend. When Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, he returns home ready to resume their life together.

  War

  • Three Sips of Gin: Dominating the Battlespace with Rhodesia’s Elite Selous Scouts. There is nothing that terrorized Russian and Chinese-backed guerrillas fighting Rhodesia’s bush war in the 1970s more than the famed Selous Scouts. The very name of the unit struck fear into the very heart and soul of even the most battle-hardened guerrillas. Too afraid to even whisper the name amongst themselves, they referred to soldiers of the unit simply as Skuzapu, or pickpockets. It wasn’t for nothing that history has recorded the Selous Scouts Regiment as being one of the deadliest and most effective killing machines in modern counter-insurgency warfare. The Selous Scouts comprised specially selected soldiers of the Rhodesian army, supplemented with the inclusion of hardcore terrorists captured on the battlefield. Dressed and equipped as communist guerrillas and with faces and arms blackened, members of this elite Special Forces unit would slip silently into the shadows of the night to seek and destroy real terrorist gangs. It became a deadly game of hide-and-seek played out between gangs and counter-gangs in the harsh and unforgiving landscape of the African bush. So successful were the Selous Scouts at being able to locate and destroy terrorist in their lairs that by the mid 1970s, they had begun to dominate Rhodesia’s battlespace. Working in close conjunction with the elite airborne assault troops of the Rhodesian Light Infantry, the Selous Scouts accounted for an extraordinary high proportion of terrorists killed in Rhodesia’s bush war.
  • The Choice: A true story of hope. In 1944, sixteen-year-old ballerina Edith Eger was sent to Auschwitz. Separated from her parents on arrival, she endures unimaginable experiences, including being made to dance for the infamous Josef Mengele. When the camp is finally liberated, she is pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive. The horrors of the Holocaust didn’t break Edith. In fact, they helped her learn to live again with a life-affirming strength and a truly remarkable resilience. The Choice is her unforgettable story. It shows that hope can flower in the most unlikely places.
  • The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero who Infiltrated Auschwitz. In the Summer of 1940, after the Nazi occupation of Poland, an underground operative called Witold Pilecki accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands of people being interned at a new concentration camp on the border of the Reich. His mission was to report on Nazi crimes and raise a secret army to stage an uprising. The name of the detention centre – Auschwitz. It was only after arriving at the camp that he started to discover the Nazi’s terrifying plans. Over the next two and half years, Witold forged an underground army that smuggled evidence of Nazi atrocities out of Auschwitz. His reports from the camp were to shape the Allies response to the Holocaust – yet his story was all but forgotten for decades.
  • In The Garden of Beasts: Love and terror in Hitler’s Berlin. Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the times, and with brilliant portraits of Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Himmler amongst others, Erik Larson’s new book sheds unique light on events as they unfold, resulting in an unforgettable, addictively readable work of narrative history. Berlin,1933. William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered academic from Chicago, has to his own and everyone else’s surprise, become America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany, in a year that proves to be a turning point in history. Dodd and his family, notably his vivacious daughter, Martha, observe at first-hand the many changes – some subtle, some disturbing, and some horrifically violent – that signal Hitler’s consolidation of power. Dodd has little choice but to associate with key figures in the Nazi party, his increasingly concerned cables make little impact on an indifferent U.S. State Department, while Martha is drawn to the Nazis and their vision of a ‘New Germany’ and has a succession of affairs with senior party players, including first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as the year darkens, Dodd and his daughter find their lives transformed and any last illusion they might have about Hitler are shattered by the violence of the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in the summer of 1934 that established him as supreme dictator.

  ————————————————

  Part 2

  THE NATURAL WORLD

  • • Mudlarking has made a late run for my favourite book of the year. Exploration and curiosity right under our noses. Wonderful. (And @london.mudlark’s Instagram photos are fabulous too.) Lara Maiklem has scoured the banks of the Thames for nearly twenty years, in pursuit of the objects the river unearths: from Neolithic flints to Roman hairpins, medieval buckles to Tudor buttons, Georgian clay pipes to Victorian toys. What began as a search for solitude came to reveal the story of a city, its people and their lost ways of life.

  • • Food and Climate Change without the hot air: Change your diet: the easiest way to help save the planetA quarter of the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change come from food. In Food and Climate Change without the hot air, Sarah Bridle details the carbon footprint of the food we eat, from breakfast to lunch, from snacks to supper. She breaks down the environmental impact of each food, so we can see where the emissions are highest and where we can make sustainable food choices. With this knowledge, we can make changes to our diet – e.g. eating more locally grown produce and introducing meat-free days. This will reduce the greenhouse gas emissions so damaging to our planet and probably be healthier for us, too.
    • We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (I’ve written about this book on my blog, here.) It is all too easy to feel paralysed and hopeless in the face of climate crisis, but the truth is that every one of us has the power to change history’s course. We have done it before: making collective sacrifices to protect our freedoms, our families, our way of life. And we can do it again.
      In this extraordinarily powerful and deeply personal book, Jonathan Safran Foer lays bare the battle to save the planet. Calling each one of us to action, he answers the most urgent question of all: what will it take for things to change?
      It all starts with what we eat for breakfast.
    • Pondlife: A Swimmer’s Journal. The ponds of Hampstead Heath are small oases; fragments of wild nature nestled in the heart of north-west London. For the best part of his life Al Alvarez – poet, critic, novelist, rock-climber and poker player – has swum in them almost daily. An athlete in his youth, Alvarez, now in his eighties, chronicles what it is to grow old with humour and fierce honesty – from his relentlessly nagging ankle which makes daily life a struggle, to infuriating bureaucratic battles with the council to keep his disabled person’s Blue Badge, the devastating effects of a stroke, and the salvation he finds in the three Ss – Swimming, Sex and Sleep. As Alvarez swims in the ponds he considers how it feels when you begin to miss that person you used to be – to miss yourself. Swimming is his own private form of protest against the onslaught of time; proof to others, and himself, that he’s not yet beaten.
      By turns funny, poetic and indignant, Pondlife is a meditation on love, the importance of life’s small pleasures and, above all, a lesson in not going gently in to that good night.
      

  • • The Daily Henry David Thoreau: A Year of Quotes from the Man Who Lived in Season
      

  • • English Pastoral As a boy, James Rebanks’s grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognisable. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song.
      English Pastoral is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future.
      This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.

  • Our Isles: Poems celebrating the art of rural trades and traditions  From baker, beekeeper and birdwatcher to falconer, farrier and forager, join poet Angus and printmaker Lilly as they explore the British Isles, uncovering and celebrating our crafts and traditions. This collection of poetry and printmaking aims to capture and celebrate the heritage and craftsmanship of the British Isles. The book comprises of thirty poems with accompanying black and white linocut prints. In this book, Angus and Lilly draw attention to traditional, artisan crafts of particular importance as many are in danger of becoming ‘extinct’ and there is a fear that, without recognition, aspects of our cultural heritage will disappear. This is a timely celebration of rural lifestyle.
  • The Forager’s Calendar: A Seasonal Guide to Nature’s Wild Harvests
    “A frequent comment is, ‘Have you brought me to a special place?’ The answer is that, yes, it is a good place, though much like many others. The difference is that today I have given them time to look. Searching for wild food has a powerful effect on how people see the natural world. They suddenly find themselves a part of it, rather than merely an onlooker.”Look out of your window, walk down a country path or go to the beach in Great Britain, and you are sure to see many wild species that you can take home and eat. From dandelions in spring to sloe berries in autumn, via wild garlic, samphire, chanterelles and even grasshoppers, our countryside is full of edible delights in any season.
  • The Garden Jungle: or Gardening to Save the Planet
    “Planting more flowers is a far better way to help the bees than trying to keep more bees.”
    “Most parents and grandparents would do almost anything for their offspring, except, it seems, when it comes to leaving them a healthy planet to live on.”
    “76 per cent of the Earth’s farmland is currently being used for meat production, either directly or indirectly. Overall, nearly three-quarters of the greenhouse gases produced by farming activities come from livestock production.”
    The Garden Jungle is about the wildlife that lives right under our noses, in our gardens and parks, between the gaps in the pavement, and in the soil beneath our feet. Dave Goulson gives us an insight into the fascinating and sometimes weird lives of these creatures, taking us burrowing into the compost heap, digging under the lawn and diving into the garden pond. He explains how our lives and ultimately the fate of humankind are inextricably intertwined with that of earwigs, bees, lacewings and hoverflies, unappreciated heroes of the natural world.

  TRAVEL

  • • The Stopping Places: A Journey Through Gypsy Britain
      “This thing is the Gypsy belief – the core belief of the culture – that it is possible to live in a different way; in your own way, part of the world, but not imprisoned by the rules. That you can know the ropes and yet not be hemmed in by them. That you can dwell alongside the mainstream, whilst not being part of it. Otter-like, you can live in the bank of the river and swim and hunt there when you need to, and then climb back out with equal ease and alacrity.”
      “Everyone wants nice things if they can get them. The yearning for a spartan life sometimes comes to a culture later, when the wolf of poverty no longer scratches at the door.
      “Travellers are alone, perhaps, in visualising a destination which has no proper name; knowing that if needs be, they could go back to living nowhere. ‘Back on the road.’ ‘Roadside again.’ Back to wherever we end up, each hedge or lay-by only so different from the next; and so on.”
      “The Scottish mountaineer and writer Nan Shepherd wrote that ‘no one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it’, and I believed the same would be true of the stopping places.
      “It also suddenly hits me that my interest in the old Gypsy ways and my fascination with British explorers are not so contradictory as they always seemed to me: people equipped to live out in all seasons, making fires and cups of tea to boost their tired morale.”

  FICTION

  • • That Old Country Music

  In this rapturous story collection we encounter a ragbag of west of Ireland characters, many on the cusp between love and catastrophe, heartbreak and epiphany, resignation and hope. These stories affirm Kevin Barry as one of the world’s most accomplished and gifted writers, and show an Ireland in a condition of great flux but also as a place where older rhythms, and an older magic, somehow persist.

  • A Gentleman in Moscow On 21 June 1922, Count Alexander Rostov – recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt – is escorted out of the Kremlin, across Red Square and through the elegant revolving doors of the Hotel Metropol.
    Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count has been sentenced to house arrest indefinitely. But instead of his usual suite, he must now live in an attic room while Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval.
    Can a life without luxury be the richest of all?
  • PachinkoYeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then Isak, a Christian minister, offers her a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife.
    Following a man she barely knows to a hostile country in which she has no friends, no home, and whose language she cannot speak, Sunja’s salvation is just the beginning of her story.
    Through eight decades and four generations, Pachinko is an epic tale of family, identity, love, death and survival.
  • Convenience Store Woman Keiko is 36 years old. She’s never had a boyfriend, and she’s been working in the same supermarket for eighteen years.
    Keiko’s family wishes she’d get a proper job. Her friends wonder why she won’t get married.
    But Keiko knows what makes her happy, and she’s not going to let anyone come between her and her convenience store…
    
  • Home Fire Isma is free. After years spent raising her twin siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, she is finally studying in America, resuming a dream long deferred. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London – or their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream: to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew.
    Then Eamonn enters the sisters’ lives. Handsome and privileged, he inhabits a London worlds away from theirs. As the son of a powerful British Muslim politician, Eamonn has his own birthright to live up to – or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz’s salvation? Two families’ fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined in this searing novel that asks: what sacrifices will we make in the name of love?
  • My Sister, the Serial Killer When Korede’s dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what’s expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This’ll be the third boyfriend Ayoola’s dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede’s long been in love with him, and isn’t prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other…

  NON-FICTION

  • Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All
    “Puzzles bring out important qualities in each of us: concentration, curiosity, a sense of play, the eagerness to discover a solution. These are the very same qualities that form the bedrock for all human creativity.”
    “What does it mean to be curious? I think it is the capacity to be surprised and then to try to comprehend what it was that may have surprised you. One gets curious about something that one finds unusual. It is an almost paradoxical fact that the deepest and most difficult questions can be found in connection to the most common things that we at first take for granted. To find the secret of a magician’s trick is much easier than to understand why the apple is falling from the tree. Curiosity is like thirst or hunger, a drive to fill a gap, scratch an intellectual and emotional itch. With curiosity, you have the feeling that something is there but you aren’t quite sure what it is. There is an internal drive to follow up and some kind of promise that there may be a discovery of something that is hidden and I may be the only one to whom it is not visible. What is beneath the surface is the need to comprehend. In that sense, we are not creators but discoverers. Inside that stone there is a statue; you need a sculptor to show you how it emerges.”
  • Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence
    “It is difficult to believe we are alone in a cosmos which contains perhaps 2 trillion galaxies, each containing 100 billion stars.”
    
  • Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking This is the only cook book I have ever read cover to cover. It taught me so much.
    
  • Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me Kate Clanchy wants to change the world and thinks school is an excellent place to do it. She invites you to meet some of the kids she has taught in her thirty-year career.
    Join her as she explains everything about sex to a classroom of thirteen-year-olds. As she works in the school ‘Inclusion Unit’, trying to improve the fortunes of kids excluded from regular lessons because of their terrifying power to end learning in an instant. Or as she nurtures her multicultural poetry group, full of migrants and refugees, watches them find their voice and produce work of heartbreaking brilliance.
    While Clanchy doesn’t deny stinging humiliations or hide painful accidents, she celebrates this most creative, passionate and practically useful of jobs. Teaching today is all too often demeaned, diminished and drastically under-resourced. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me will show you why it shouldn’t be.
    
  • What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading Around 2000, people began to believe that books were on verge of extinction. Their obsolescence, in turn, was expected to doom the habits of mind that longform print had once prompted: the capacity to follow a demanding idea from start to finish, to look beyond the day’s news, or even just to be alone. The “death of the book” is an anxiety that has spawned a thousand jeremiads about the dumbing down of American culture, the ever-shorter attention spans of our children, the collapse of civilized discourse.
    
  • Fermat’s Last Theorem ‘I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.’
    It was with these words, written in the 1630s, that Pierre de Fermat intrigued and infuriated the mathematics community. For over 350 years, proving Fermat’s Last Theorem was the most notorious unsolved mathematical problem, a puzzle whose basics most children could grasp but whose solution eluded the greatest minds in the world. In 1993, after years of secret toil, Englishman Andrew Wiles announced to an astounded audience that he had cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem. He had no idea of the nightmare that lay ahead.
    In ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’ Simon Singh has crafted a remarkable tale of intellectual endeavour spanning three centuries, and a moving testament to the obsession, sacrifice and extraordinary determination of Andrew Wiles: one man against all the odds.
    
  • Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum Annawadi is a slum at the edge of Mumbai Airport, in the shadow of shining new luxury hotels. Its residents are garbage recyclers and construction workers, economic migrants, all of them living in the hope that a small part of India’s booming future will eventually be theirs. But when a crime rocks the slum community and global recession and terrorism shocks the city, tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy begin to turn brutal. As Boo gets to know those who dwell at Mumbai’s margins, she evokes an extraordinarily vivid and vigorous group of individuals flourishing against the odds amid the complications, corruptions and gross inequalities of the new India.
    

  SELF-HELP

  • Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life Perfect for lovers of Quiet and The Power of Now, Emotional Agility shares a new way of relating to yourself and the world around you. Every day we speak around 16,000 words – but inside minds we create tens of thousands more.
    Thoughts such as ‘I’m not spending enough time with my children’ or ‘I’m not good enough to present my work’ can seem to be unshakeable facts. In reality, they’re the judgemental opinions of our inner voice.
    Drawing on more than twenty years of academic research and her own experiences, Susan David PhD, a psychologist and faculty member at Harvard Medical School, has pioneered a new way to make peace with our inner self, achieve our most valued goals and live life to the fullest. Become aware of your true nature, learn to face your emotions with acceptance and generosity, act according to your deepest values, and flourish.
    
  • The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams – Lessons in Living When Randy Pausch , a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give ‘a last lecture’ lecture, he didn’t have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer . But the lecture he gave, ‘ Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams ‘, wasn’t about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles , of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment ( because time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think ). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.
    
  • The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking What if ‘positive thinking’ and relentless optimism aren’t the solution to the happiness dilemma, but part of the problem? Oliver Burkeman turns decades of self-help advice on its head and paradoxically forces us to rethink our attitudes towards failure, uncertainty and death. It’s our constant efforts to avoid negative thinking that cause us to feel anxious, insecure and unhappy. What if happiness can be found embracing the things we spend our lives trying to escape? Wise, practical and funny, The Antidote is a thought-provoking, counter-intuitive and ultimately uplifting read, celebrating the power of negative thinking.
    
  • The Dip: The extraordinary benefits of knowing when to quit (and when to stick)
    “When it comes right down to it, right down to the hard decisions, are you quitting any project that isn’t a Dip? Or is it just easier not to rock the boat, to hang in there, to avoid the short-term hassle of changing paths?”
    Every new project (or career or relationship) starts out exciting and fun. Then it gets harder and less fun, until it hits a low point – really hard, really not fun. At this point you might be in a Dip, which will get better if you keep pushing, or a Cul-de-Sac, which will never get better no matter how hard you try. The hard part is knowing the difference and acting on it.
    According to marketing guru and best-selling author Seth Godin, what sets successful entrepreneurs (and pop stars and weight lifters and car salesmen) apart from everyone else is their ability to give up on Cul-de-Sacs while staying motivated in Dips. Winners quit fast, quit often and quit without guilt – until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons. You’ll never be number one at anything without picking your shots very carefully. The Dip is a short, entertaining book that helps you do just that. It will forever alter the way you think about success.
    

  WAR

  • The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz
  • The Wooden Horse
    “The best part of escaping was when we were in charge of things. Building the horse, digging, planning – the break itself, and travelling across Germany. The feeling that every minute was vital, that everything one did could sway the balance between success and failure … The part I didn’t enjoy was when we were in other people’s hands – not knowing the score and having no say.”
  • The Colditz Story
    “A. J. Evans said that escaping is the greatest sport in the world. In my early twenties I thought that to ride in the Grand National Steeplechase at Aintree would be the epitome of sporting excitement – more so even than big-game hunting. I longed to do both. Since the war and my experiences as an escaper, my one-time ambitions have died a natural death. I feel I have quaffed deeply of the intoxicating cup of excitement and can retire to contemplate those ‘unforgettable moments’ of the past. I can think of no sport that is the peer of escape, where freedom, life, and loved ones are the prize of victory, and death the possible though by no means inevitable price of failure.”
    “It was the first escape from this prison, probably the first escape of British officers from any organized prison in Germany. We were the guinea-pigs. We undertook the experiment with our eyes open, choosing between two alternatives: to attempt escape and risk the ultimate price, or face up to the sentence of indefinite imprisonment. There were many who resigned themselves from the beginning to the second of these alternatives. They were brave, but their natures differed from those of the men who escaped and failed, and escaped again; who having once made the choice between escape and resignation, could not give up, even if the war lasted the remainder of their lives. I am sure that the majority of the men who sought to escape did it for self-preservation. Instinctively, unconsciously, they felt that resignation meant not physical but mental death – maybe lunacy. My own case was not exceptional. One awful fit of depression sufficed to determine my future course as a prisoner. One dose of morbidity in which the vista of emptiness stretched beyond the horizon of my mind was quite enough.”
  • The Road to En-Dor

  ————————————————

  Part 1

  Not all of these books will appeal to you, of course. But they all made an impression on me for one reason or another. Those underlined are my pick of the bunch.

  Adventure

  • Alone at Sea. Crazy man (actually a Doctor) rows ocean in dugout canoe.
  • Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe

  General Interest

  • Nabokov’s Favourite Word Is Mauve: The literary quirks and oddities of our most-loved authors
  • Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life
  • The Ghost Runner: The Tragedy of the Man They Couldn’t Stop
  • Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker
  • Unnatural Causes: the life and many deaths of a pathologist
  • The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
  • The Wright Brothers
  • Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
  • On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes
  • People of Providence: A Housing Estate and Some of Its Inhabitants

  War

  • A Higher Call: The Incredible True Story of Heroism and Chivalry during the Second World War
  • No Easy Day
  • First Light (the best of these three books)

  Nature

  • Every Day Nature: How noticing nature can quietly change your life
  • Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills
  • Fingers in the Sparkle Jar: A Memoir

  Living Life

  • The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere
  • The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity
  • Figuring by Maria Popova
  • Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine by Derren Brown  (better than most ‘happiness’ books)
  • Beachcombing at Miramar: The Quest for an Authentic Life
  • Intervention: Course Corrections for the Athlete and Trainer (niche!)
  • On Liberty and Other Essays
  • The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living

  Fiction

  • Where the Crawdads Sing
  • The Narrow Road to the Deep North
  • The Nickel Boys
  • The Orphan Master’s Son
  • Olive, Again
  • Leonard and Hungry Paul
  • The Bricks that Built the Houses

  Race

  • So You Want to Talk About Race
  • Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
  • Caste: The Lies That Divide Us
  • The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

  Our World

  • How Bad are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything
  • Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World
  • The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future
  • Grass-Fed Nation