55 books
Allegra Goodman
There’s little in the opening pages to suggest this 2025 novel will turn into a great adventure yarn replete with the hand-knife beheading of an attacking polar bear. It’s the early 1500s and orphaned French noblewoman Marguerite de la Rocque…
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Simpson is Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, a writer and musician, and this book thinks with water rather than about it. She starts from a Nishnaabeg story about a woman and a flood and works outward through ice, rain, tributaries, and the…
Cory Doctorow
Doctorow coined the word in 2022 and it spread fast enough that the American Dialect Society made it word of the year in 2023. This is the long version of the argument. Platforms show up good — cheap, useful, generous…
M. L. Rio
Summer 1989: Ten-year-old Suzanne talks her way onto tour with her father Gil, a metal guitarist one break away from being somebody, and his band the Kills. She’s a music obsessive with a camera and no ability to play, and…
Delaney Nolan
Beatrice is twenty-nine and works at Twin Bridge, a broke residential treatment center in a dust-blown East Texas town called Askewn, minding a floor of furious teenage girls who are on too many drugs or not enough. It’s the near…
Mick Herron
Ninth in the Slough House run, where MI5 parks the agents it can’t fire — bad spies serving out their careers shuffling paper under Jackson Lamb, who is filthy, cruel, and smarter than everybody. River Cartwright is off duty waiting…
Sarah Wynn-Williams
Wynn-Williams was a New Zealand diplomat who talked her way into a job at Facebook in 2011 because she believed the thing could do some good in the world. She stayed seven years running global public policy, in the room…
Zoë Schlanger
Plants can hear a caterpillar chewing and respond with defensive chemistry. They warn their neighbors. Some appear to count, some to remember, and one Chilean vine imitates the leaves of whatever it climbs, including plastic ones, with no known mechanism…
James Rebanks
Rebanks, the Lake District shepherd who wrote The Shepherd’s Life, went to a bare island off the coast of northern Norway for a season to work with a woman named Anna in her seventies — one of the last of…
Laura Poppick
Deep time told through the layers themselves. Poppick is a science journalist and she goes to the outcrops with the geologists reading them — banded iron formations recording the moment oxygen first flooded the ocean, the black shales of a…
