5 books
Yuval Noah Harari
The whole run of the species in one volume, organized around three revolutions: Cognitive, agricultural, scientific. Harari’s central move is that what let us take over wasn’t intelligence exactly but the ability to believe in things that don’t physically exist…
Christina Thompson
How did people reach every habitable island across ten million square miles of Pacific, upwind, centuries before Europeans could cross an ocean at all? Thompson takes the whole history of that question: Cook and his crews puzzling over it, missionaries,…
Jess Walter
Rhys Kinnick blew up his life seven years ago and has been living off the grid in the woods of eastern Washington, no phone, no news, growing his own food and stewing. Then his granddaughter and grandson turn up at…
Evelyn Clarke
A locked-room mystery published under the pseudonym Evelyn Clarke, which is V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke writing together. Arthur Fletch, a reclusive bestselling novelist, invites six struggling midlist authors — one each from thriller, romance, YA, sci-fi, horror — to…
Diane Cook
Many dream of the camping trip that never ends. Surely our best selves are found in nature, right? In Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, a mother saves her daughter from pollution-induced asthma by moving to the Wilderness State, an…
