A Sunday Times Best Book of 2025More and more people are being diagnosed with ADHD and autism.More and more people are being diagnosed with mental disorders.Young people are being medicalised for behaviours that might be explained as entirely normal in other parts of the world.Distress has been commodified over many decades by pharmaceutical companies, the media and the psychiatric establishment.So how can we know when distress is normal and when it is something that needs to...
A revelatory account of the racist conspiracy theory that now pervades global politics – from the prize-winning author of the million-copy bestseller How To Be an AntiracistThroughout the world, authoritarian movements are radically reshaping our politics and our lives. At the heart of them all lies ‘great replacement theory’, which insists that peoples of colour, migrants and minorities are being deliberately empowered to displace white majorities.In Chain of Ideas, Ibram X....
The Genius of Trees tells the mind-expanding global story of the inventive and astonishing ways trees learned to shape our natural world.Over hundreds of millions of years, from prehistoric forests to the trees around us today, we see trees using fire as a reproductive tool, harnessing large mammals to spread their seeds (but poisoning smaller, less useful mammals), and splitting rock to create fertile ground in barren landscapes.Because trees, we discover, manipulate fundame...
A gripping international thriller from the author of THE STAR OF THE NORTHIt's 2018. A desperate, starving 18-year-old North Korean defector makes it to the US consulate in Hanoi, Vietnam. He knows only one Western name. Jenna Williams. He asks to meet her. Jenna works under an alias at the US embassy in Russia arranging university exchanges - the cover for her role as a senior intelligence officer assigned to the CIA's Moscow station. She 37 years old, a Korean-African-Ame...
‘A bookworm’s delight’ Sara Collins‘Funny, warm and charming’ Marian Keyes‘Like butter on toast: perfect’ Caitlin Moran A love letter to all those who come alive when they pull a new treasure off the shelf, stay up late reading just one more page and pack their suitcases with clothes wedged between books instead of the other way around.From well-worn literary classics to steamy bonkbusters, gripping thrillers, young adult novels and other not-so-guilty pleasures Bookish brims...
A tragicomic portrait of one man's unravelling in an absurd, twisted world, Howl is the propulsive new novel from Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson. 'The undisputed British master of black comedies' ObserverIn the aftermath of October 7, Ferdinand Draxler walks the streets of London in despair. Everything has changed – the sights, the sound, the spirit. He too is not who he was. Is he at the crossroads of history or is it just a bend in the cul-de-sac of his own gloomy natu...
Society isn’t working for women - or any of us.But what if the rules were different?Imagine a world in which women have all the power. A world in which they work together to shape their societies and their futures.In reality, women's communities have always existed, and continue to thrive. In this vital and groundbreaking book, Megha Mohan goes in search of their roots, discovering a vibrant global history, brought together here for the first time. She also takes us into toda...
With one impatient phone call, a young Christopher Isherwood is drawn into the film industry.On the other end of the line is temperamental Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann. Christopher’s job is to rescue the script of an idiotic love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet. Meanwhile, in the real Vienna of 1934, the Austrian right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught; his prophecy of a coming war goes unheeded. As tensions on se...
This is a graphic memoir (like a graphic novel, but true – and also a bit graphic).It’s about the delirium, chaos and strangeness of becoming a parent for the first time.It’s for every one who has ever wondered if it’s ok to cry when the baby cries – and also laugh, snort, lie on the floor naked and drool when the baby drools.This is definitely not a parenting manual, but it might be the only book about parenting you’ll ever need....
One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while her father Serk, a Korean émigré, completes an academic secondment from his American university. When Louisa wakes hours later, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, probably drowned.The disappearance of Louisa’s father shatters their small family unit. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, this...
Twenty years ago Putin's fiercest critic was gunned down. Anna Politkovskaya was one of the great, heroic investigative journalists of the modern era. Shining a light on Russian state corruption, human rights abuses, and the brutal conflict in Chechnya she was renowned for her unwavering commitment to exposing the harsh realities of life in Russia under Vladimir Putin's regime. That was until her violent murder in 2006.In this collection, published ahead of the twentieth anni...
Victorian Egyptologist Clemmie’s dark talents have torn her family apart. Now she has one chance to atone for the past.Clemmie’s gift for reading hieroglyphs shines at the Egyptian relic parties which have made her father the toast of Victorian society. But at one party, the words she interprets from an unusual amulet strike fear into her heart. The childhood game she used to play about the immortal sisters, Isis and Nephthys, takes on a devastating resonance and it is only b...
**THE SUNDAY TIMES AND #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** A sweeping indictment of the West’s culture of complacency and a passionate call to wake up to our new reality from the bold thinkers behind tech giant PalantirOur most brilliant engineering minds once collaborated with government to advance world-changing technologies. Their efforts secured the West’s dominant place in the geopolitical order. But that relationship has now eroded, with perilous repercussions. In this groun...
After a long and happy life with a loving human family, tabby cat Fuuta has passed into the afterlife. But he is not as far from his owner Michiru as it seems. Sometimes the divide between the lands of the living and the dead can be traversed.Eager to see Michiru again, Fuuta interviews for a position at Café Pont, which sits in the liminal space between the two worlds. The café is known for its unique service: its living customers can request meetings with the person they'd ...
This is the iconic Josephine Baker in her own words.Funny, candid and unconventional: the wildly famous but elusive Josephine Baker tells her own story in this enchanting memoir.Baker took Paris by storm in the 1920s, dazzling audiences with her humour, beauty and effervescence on stage. She became an icon. Later, as one of the most recognisable women in the world, she became a spy for the French resistance and was awarded the Légion d’honneur for military service. After the ...
She can't read his mind. He can't read hers. But you can read both.The iconic '90s rom-com from the number-one bestselling authors. Dating in the 90s sucks. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus and no one is getting a call after the first date.Meet Jack: twenty-seven-year old commitment-phobe and serious partier. He tried love – it didn’t work out. So why bother, when being single is this much fun? Right?Meet Amy: while she’s stuck in dead-end temp jobs, her friends are se...
An utterly absorbing collection of depraved, delectable and enchanting short stories from the queen of weird girl fiction. 'Absolutely obsessed. Savage, strange and spicy' Lucy Rose, author of LambCan 'no' be a declaration of love? What happens when love is savage, dangerous and all-consuming? In this gorgeous and unsettling collection, women navigate the complexities and cruelties of desire across time and place, from a medieval convent to a Victorian parlour to a 1990s high...
Corruption, sleaze and violence were woven into the fabric of twentieth-century Sicilian life, as the Mafia rose to dominance. This is the story of one man who stood in opposition.In 1986, the largest Mafia trial in Italy’s history took place in Sicily. The maxi-processo saw 471 men and 4 women take the stand, accused of kidnapping, extortion, drug trafficking and many thousands of murders. Sitting in the gallery was Leonardo Sciascia, then aged sixty-five. One of the greates...
As Cabaret returns to the West End, revisit the KitKat Club in the book that introduced Sally Bowles to the world.Set in the 1930s, Goodbye to Berlin is the novella that inspired Cabaret, evoking the glamour and sleaze, excess and repression of Berlin society. Isherwood shows the lives of people under threat from the rise of the Nazis: a wealthy Jewish heiress, Natalia Landauer, a gay couple, Peter and Otto, and an English upper-class waif, the divinely decadent Sally Bowles....
George is heartbroken after the death of his lover.An English professor in suburban California, George must now adjust to a tragic new solitude in the sun. Beneath George’s rigid British restraint, waves of sorrow and fury surge. He doggedly persists with the routines of his past life, heading out to work, to the gym, on again to dinner. Yet along the way, George rediscovers the unexpected pleasures of life and the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation. Thi...
Weddings aren't just about the happy couple… A funny, touching, hopeful gem about love, marriage and second chancesIt’s the day before her daughter’s wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines.First thing, she loses her job (or quits, depending who you ask). Then her ex-husband Max turns up at her door looking for somewhere to stay. He doesn’t even have a suit. Instead, he’s brought memories – and a cat looking for a new home.Just as Gail is wondering what’s next, ...
Three powerful heroines – a queen, a sorceress and woman made of flowers – plot revenge against the villain who wronged them. A gorgeously dark debut novel inspired by Celtic Britain’s first fantasy fiction.Three powerful heroines – a queen, a sorceress and woman made of flowers – plot revenge against the villain who wronged them. A gorgeously dark debut novel inspired by Celtic Britain’s original fantasy fiction.Man is cruel but the flowers will take their revenge.Three grea...
A philosophical defence of what makes us human – and a powerful argument for reclaiming ourselves in a digital worldDrawing on decades of research, The Extinction of Experience is a philosophical defence of what makes us human – and a powerful, urgent call to reclaim ourselves in a digital world.Human experiences are disappearing.Social media, gaming and dating apps have usurped in-person interaction; handwriting is no longer prioritised in schools; and emotion is sooner expr...
'There is no living writer whose new books I fall on with greater delight than Laurent Binet. . .Perspectives is a proper treat' Naomi Alderman 'A dazzling romp' GuardianFlorence,1557. As dawn breaks, a painter is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. Above him, the paintings he laboured over for more than a decade.At his home, a hidden portrait scandalously depicting Maria de Medici, daughter of the Duke of Florence, as a naked Venus. Who is t...
