O ne of the most rewarding aspects of editing Five Books is seeing which books end up being popular with our readers. In the UK, where I live, four out of five of the current bestsellers on Amazon are all by one author: the American crime novelist (and practising doctor) Freida McFadden. These are fun reads if you’re into crime fiction and want some entertainment, and I’m sure I’ll end up reading her latest, Dear Debby Five Books readers, which this month even include a book explaining physics equations.
🏆 Winner of the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction⭐ Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022
Read expert recommendations
“That’s one of the most powerful elements of this book—the disjunction between the horror and the humour. Again, this is a historical narrative, beginning with the killing of Emmett Till in 1955, and addressing racial oppression in the United States, but with wonderful moments of fantasy, mysticism, magic, mixed with knockabout farce. It’s disconcerting, while you’re thinking about the long tradition of lynching in the South, to have these Keystone Cops moments. But it does intensify the emotional response and keeps you thinking on every page about what it is really like to live with this kind of systemic injustice over centuries.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Neil MacGregor ,
Art Historians, Critics & Curator
⭐ Longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a charming, prize-winning novel by Mark Haddon. Written as a mystery, the story is told through the eyes of a teenage boy who is great at maths but finds many other aspects of life difficult.
Read expert recommendations
“This book is actually brilliant for any age. The story pitches the theme of autism implicitly. It’s set in a plot, a story, and the autism is not the main point. For me, that was a great way of presenting it. The story is sad, it’s funny, it has twists and turns. So I recommend it to everyone.” Read more...
The Best Books for Parents of Autistic Children
Syreeta Brown ,
Memoirist
In Ancient Greek , Plato's famous dialogue was known as Politeia. The Romans called it Res Publica, the title we now use. Below, philosophers and political scientists recommend which edition of Plato's Republic to read and explain, in detail, why it remains a work of such significance (Our interview about all Plato's books and his life is with Melissa Lane of Princeton).
Read expert recommendations
“It contains a tremendous amount of nonsense about what the ideal society would be like. But it is an unmissable book because of Socrates. He invented the method of doing and teaching philosophy that has never been improved on. His persistent questions forced people to spell out their beliefs more fully and precisely, often unearthing beliefs they hardly knew they had. He would then challenge them with counter-examples, putting pressure on beliefs by pointing out unwelcome consequences they had. This questioning is often both intimidating and liberating. Those of us who teach philosophy aim, not always successfully, for the liberation without the intimidation…Some of Socrates’s opponents in The Republic challenge him as to whether there is any reason to be moral, apart from social pressures. They use a simple but brilliant thought experiment. Would you have any reason to avoid wrongdoing if you had a ring that made you invisible, so there was no chance of getting caught? It is not the answers given to this and the other questions in the book, but the absolutely fundamental challenges of the questions themselves.” Read more...
The best books on Moral Philosophy
Jonathan Glover ,
Philosopher
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean Carroll is a book with a brilliant premise: that it is possible to write a popular science book that introduces the general reader to the "real stuff" of physics—in other words, equations. The book starts with the equation for momentum (p=mv) and goes all the way to general relativity (Rμν − ½Rgμν = 8πGTμν). It's a bold endeavour, and we can't yet confirm whether it's successful at taking the beginner-in-physics reader the whole way. However, it's nicely mixed with titbits from the history of physics—for example, that it was Ibn Sina (Avicenna ), the Persian polymath, who first proposed the key idea that in the vacuum of empty space, with no air resistance, a moving body would keep moving forever.
Read expert recommendations
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy is regarded by many as one of the greatest novels ever written. In our interviews, philosophers, historians and novelists have recommended it as critical reading for understanding a variety of subjects. Like many great books, it was greeted with some scepticism on publication.
Read expert recommendations
“Tolstoy famously said of War and Peace that it wasn’t even a novel. In a sense, it’s a total history of that epoch in Russia in a fictional form…It’s very interesting what happens with the novel linguistically. There’s been a study of the French words in the novel, because there are a large number, and they feature particularly in the early phases of the novel. Towards the end, the novel becomes more Russian in its literary and vernacular style, in its lexicon and syntax. In a sense, the Russian language is the true character of the novel. The growing Russianness of the language is the epiphany, that moment of self-discovery, that the Russian aristocracy goes through at that time.” Read more...
The Best Russian Novels
Orlando Figes ,
Historian
Interview by Sophie Roell , Editor
December 8, 2024. Updated: February 4, 2026
Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]
Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount .
