With so many new books coming out, what’s the best way to choose what to read? At Five Books, we believe that any book that helps with either enjoying life or understanding the world better is worth reading, and those are the qualities we’ve looked for in our list below. If you’re interested in a particular area—like philosophy or historical fiction–we’ve also got more detailed lists you can click on, with a wider range of books.
Having trawled through dozens of catalogues this is our list so far. Publishing these days is very focused on identifying bestsellers and pushing them via highly focused marketing campaigns. We love bestsellers as much as the next person, but we try to look at the output of smaller publishers as well, to find books of lasting value or that have something a bit special about them.
(Note: We also have a list of 'most recommended' books. These have to be picked again and again in our expert interviews, so tend to be older books, with a few exceptions. Many of them are novels or historic texts already in the public domain and available as free ebooks).
The Story of Russia
by Orlando Figes
The Story of Russia is a highly readable account of the whole of Russian history, from the early days of the Rus to the current war in Ukraine, in fewer than 300 pages. Historian Orlando Figes, author of our most recommended book on Russian history—A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution—shows how that history is essentially a story. This is no different from any other country's national history, constantly changing to reflect current concerns, but it is a story many Westerners are unfamiliar with and crucial to understanding Russia today.
The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I
by Lindsey Fitzharris
For those who like the history of medicine and aren't squeamish, the much-awaited new book by Lindsey Fitzharris, author of The Butchering Art, is now out. It went straight onto the New York Times bestseller list and does not disappoint.
Venice: A Sketchbook Guide
by Matthew Rice
Now that most practical information needed when travelling—restaurants, hotels, bus and train times—is more up-to-date when researched online, the role of a physical guidebook is harder to nail down. Venice: A Sketchbook Guide by watercolour artist Matthew Rice offers a solution: this guidebook is a short, detailed, beautiful, quirky introduction to a city telling you everything you need to know for a meaningful visit.
Box set: The Passenger & Stella Maris
by Cormac McCarthy
Sixteen years after his devastating, Pulitzer Prize-winning post-apocalyptic novel The Road was released, Cormac McCarthy—one of the greatest living American authors—is to publish two further books: two linked novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
The two books tell the story of Bobby and Alicia Western, a brother and sister pair tormented by their family history—their physicist father helped invent the atom bomb. In The Passenger, salvage diver Bobby stumbles upon a murder mystery while exploring a submerged plane wreck. In Stella Maris—a novel that unfolds entirely through a transcript of dialogue—maths prodigy Alicia is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Jenny Jackson, McCarthy's editor, described it to The New York Times as "a novel of ideas". (“What do you do after you’ve written ‘The Road’?” Jackson added. “The answer is, two books that take on God and existence.”)
The novels will be released in close succession in the United States: The Passenger on Oct 25, 2022 and Stella Maris on Nov 20, 2022. A box set will follow the following month. The books will be released simultaneously in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
The Shortest History of the Soviet Union
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Australian historian and 20th century Russia specialist Sheila Fitzpatrick's The Shortest History of the Soviet Union covers its seven-decade, complex history in just 230 pages—with comfortable spacing and quite a few illustrations. It’s part of ‘The Shortest History of…’ series (which also has a highly recommended short history of China by Linda Jaivin).
Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher
by Laura Beatty
Looking for Theophrastus is a charming, meditative travel/philosophy book by Laura Beatty, a British writer of fiction and literary nonfiction. Theophrastus attended Plato’s academy and worked closely with Aristotle but has all but been forgotten. In this book, he comes to life across the millennia. “Once, when asked who his friends were, Theophrastus answered quickly, How would I know? I am rich.”
“In Atoms and Ashes, Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy, author of a brilliant book on Chernobyl, looks at six nuclear disasters around the world—starting with the testing of a hydrogen bomb in Bikini Atoll in 1954 and ending with Fukushima—to see what lessons can be learned from them. As citizens, the pros and cons of nuclear power is something we have a duty to think about, and this book is a gripping way in.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Spring 2022
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“Probably the most important and touching book I’ve read this year is My Fourth Time, We Drowned by Irish journalist Sally Hayden. This is the story of refugees trying to get from countries in Africa to Europe, and what they go through. It’s horrific and nobody comes out looking good, least of all us citizens of Europe, who have allowed terrible things to go on in our name.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Spring 2022
Sophie Roell, Journalist
Liberalism and Its Discontents
by Francis Fukuyama
It’s a good time to reflect on liberal democracy, and Francis Fukuyama has a new, short, book out: Liberalism and its Discontents, addressing both what it is and some of the challenges it faces from both left and right. He’s a clear thinker and talked about which other books to read about liberal democracy in our most recent interview with him.
“Piketty’s doorstopper books have been bestsellers but his latest, A Brief History of Equality, is short and so a nice introduction to his approach. As some commentators have pointed out, it’s also a little more optimistic, which we probably all need right now” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Spring 2022
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“I love history and I find medical history in particular very gripping (especially the discovery of vaccines), so I really enjoyed The Empress and the English Doctor: How Catherine the Great Defied a Deadly Virus. The author, Lucy Ward, is a journalist so it’s good bedtime reading, bringing home nicely the story of the fight against the horrors of smallpox as well as focusing on Catherine the Great” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Spring 2022
Sophie Roell, Journalist
The Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses
by Patrick Hastings
It's supposed to be an amazing experience reading James Joyce's Ulysses but, unfortunately, many of us aren't up to the task on our own: we need help. The Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses is by Patrick Hastings, creator of the UlyssesGuide.com and a long-term teacher of Ulysses. The book is accessible and easy to read, comprehensive without being intimidating.
The Last Emperor of Mexico
by Edward Shawcross
The surreal story of Ferdinand Maximilian (1832-1867), the Habsburg archduke and younger brother of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria who was executed after a brief reign as Emperor of Mexico. In addition to the inherent interest of this strange tale, the book is also a nice introduction to a period when Mexico—which had been the centre of the Spanish empire in the Americas for three centuries—became independent but also lost ground to the emerging power of the United States.
The Ink Black Heart
by Robert Galbraith
The Ink Black Heart is the sixth book in Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike series, one of our favourite crime fiction series. The plot revolves around a cartoon and an online game based on that cartoon, and London's Highgate Cemetery plays a key role in events (if you've never visited, you should: both Karl Marx and Douglas Adams are buried there, amongst hundreds of graves and ash trees growing all over the place. All in all, an ideal setting for a murder). The book is long, and it's for readers who enjoy living daily life with the two main protagonists, Strike and Robin, as they go out about running their detective agency, rather than a pacy thriller you rush through at speed to find out whodunnit. As we’ve noted previously, this is a series where character development is important and while you can read each of the books as standalones, it’s best to start at the beginning with The Cuckoo’s Calling. The audiobook narrator for every book in the series so far, Robert Glenister, is excellent.
Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus
by Catherine Green & Sarah Gilbert
Vaxxers is a book by two scientists at the University of Oxford who, with their team, developed the AstraZeneca vaccine against Covid-19. Professor Catherine Green heads the Nuffield Department of Medicine's Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility and Sarah Gilbert is Professor of Vaccinology. Behind the impressive titles and incredible achievement, it's the story of two scientists working flat out and what it was like on a day-to-day basis—scientifically, practically and emotionally.
The title is telling: this is a book written with anti-vaxxers in mind, outlining what it is that vaxxers do, or did in the case of this particular vaccine. The writing of the book was prompted by a campsite encounter Green had with an anti-vaxxer, who had told her, "I'm not saying there is definitely a conspiracy...but I do worry that we don't know what they put in these vaccines: mercury and other toxic chemicals. I don't trust them. They don't tell the truth." Green had to tell her, "I am 'them': and, appropriately, at the end of the book all the ingredients of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine are listed.
Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern
by Mary Beard
It was the Roman historian Suetonius who first wrote about the lives of The Twelve Caesars, a potboiler of a history featuring incest, poisonings, and various depraved tyrants. They lived two millennia ago now, on a peninsula in southern Europe, but we know most of their names, even what they probably looked like. In this beautifully presented book, classicist Mary Beard investigates the phenomenon, looking in particular at visual representations of the Roman emperors down the centuries. Statues and pictures of Augustus (and other emperors) were ubiquitous at the time, but exploded again in the Renaissance and remain with us to this day. The illustrations are beautifully done, starting on the first page, where there's pictures of all 12 of them (including dates and manner of death).
Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
by Anil Seth
In Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, brings the findings of neuroscience to bear on one of the hardest problems of philosophy: how we experience consciousness and perceive our own reality. This is likely to be one of the most important books of 2021, so keep an eye out of it: it's due to be published in the UK at the beginning of September and the US at the beginning of October.
Silverview: A Novel
by John le Carré
Yep, it's true. Even though he died in December 2020, John le Carré (aka David Cornwell) has a new book. It was completed before he died and he gave his blessing to his sons to publish it. Silverview is a house on the edge of the seaside town where the main protagonist, Julian Lawndsley, has retreated to set up a bookshop. Silverview is very le Carré in its slow pace, and reads almost like a languid farewell from the greatest spy novelist of the 20th century.
Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India
by Kapil Komireddi
Malevolent Republic by K.S. Komireddi, an Indian essayist and author, is a highly readable polemic tracing India's history over the last seven decades in just 200 pages. The title makes no bones about the author's angle: he is relentlessly critical, sparing no one and nothing in his quest to understand how India got to the point it's at today. He writes, "India can scarcely be taken seriously as a 'democratic counterweight' to China...as it itself transforms into a brutally exclusionary Hindu-supremacist state" run by "bigots dedicated to destroying all that made it." It's not just India's current leader that comes under attack. Indeed, Modi’s path to power seems almost incidental given the missteps of the preceding prime ministers—from Indira Gandhi, a ruthless leader “devoured by the ogre she fostered”, to Manmohan Singh, politically “the least qualified candidate for the job”.
Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing
by Chris Bail
At his 'Polarization Lab', Duke sociology professor Chris Bail looks at what effect social media actually has on our political behaviour. Breaking the Social Media Prism sums up, in a shortish book, the results of that research, and it's not what you expect. Definitely a book worth reading if you're a user of social media, not only to understand other people's behaviour, but your own. (Also quite fun: if you have a Twitter account you can test your political ideology)
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
by Walter Isaacson
The Code Breaker is the story of Jennifer Doudna, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her development of the CRISPR technology that allows gene editing. It is also the story of genes and gene editing and women in science. Walter Isaacson is a veteran biographer. He writes in highly readable prose that is particularly welcome when it comes to writing about science, when the concepts can be difficult. He also writes it like a pacy story, where you want to know what happens next. It is little surprise that on coming out, The Code Breaker went straight to the top of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.
Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer
by Steven Johnson
In Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer bestselling author Steven Johnson—who among other books wrote the brilliant The Ghost Map—looks at what it is that has enabled human beings to radically increase their life expectancy over the last century.
Combating Inequality: Rethinking Government's Role
by Dani Rodrik & Olivier Blanchard (editors)
We've all become aware of the problem of inequality in recent years—with a few individuals now richer than entire countries. Where we've had less clarity is around what to do about it. Combating Inequality is a collection of essays by leading economists, edited by Olivier Blanchard (MIT) and Dani Rodrik (Harvard). It's based on a conference on inequality held at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington DC-based think tank. Consider it the collective wisdom of dozens of top economists, several of them also former policymakers. In short, the book we've all been waiting for.
River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads
by Cat Jarman
That many of the things we thought we knew about the Vikings is wrong was revealed to us in our Five Books interview about the Vikings with medieval historian Eleanor Barraclough in 2016. With our interest in Vikings awakened, it was exciting to see a book called River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads published in February 2021. River Kings is by archaeologist Dr Cat Jarman, who is a senior adviser to the new Museum of the Viking Age in Oslo. Specifically, she is a bioarchaeologist, which means she uses forensic tools—like isotope analysis, carbon dating, and DNA analysis—to try and figure out what happened to bodies buried more than a millennium ago. The book is absolutely mesmerizing, both about the techniques she deploys, and the story she tells about the Viking skeletons she uses those techniques on.
See/Saw: Looking at Photographs
by Geoff Dyer
The wonderful Geoff Dyer, writer of genre-defying fiction and nonfiction, has a new photography book coming out, gathering together his criticism. His last photography book, The Ongoing Moment, won the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography as well as being recommended on Five Books. Geoff spoke to us about five works of literary nonfiction which he described as 'unusual histories.'
On the Ho Chi Minh Trail
by Sherry Buchanan
The Ho Chi Minh Trail was the quasi-mythical network of roads, paths and tunnels that North Vietnam used, in its war against South Vietnam and the Americans, to transport military supplies to its supporters in the South, the Viet Cong. On the Ho Chi Minh Trail is a travelogue, charting American journalist, author and publisher Sherry Buchanan's trip down the trail in 2014, collecting the stories of the young women who played a vital role in keeping the trail open despite the constant American bombing. The book includes pictures of Vietnamese war art, maps and an itinerary (in case you want to follow in her footsteps!) and brings all of the author's knowledge of Vietnam to bear. It includes a photo of the author meeting with Võ Nguyên Giáp, the mastermind behind Vietnam's victory against both the French and the Americans, in 2006.
Untraceable
Sergei Lebedev and Antonina Bouis (translator)
Untraceable, by Russian novelist Sergei Lebedev (born 1981), is a thriller that investigates what leads people to develop lethal poisons and use them on others in the name of the state. In atmosphere, it's a mixture of Death in Venice and John le Carré. Its urgency comes not from its pace, but from the fact that this is going on in the real world: the Russian state really does seem to think that publicly poisoning some of its opponents is a good idea.
Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness
by Stephen Fleming
Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness by cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Fleming looks set to be one of the must-reads of 2021. Scientific, philosophical, and practical, it sheds lights on 'metacognition'—our thoughts about thoughts and the importance of self-awareness to almost anything we embark on.
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth Kolbert won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2014 bestselling book, The Sixth Extinction, and her 2006 book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, has also been recommended on Five Books, so it's no surprise that Under a White Sky is one of the most anticipated environment/climate change books of 2021. It's a look at what scientists are doing to save the planet, which can be scary at times.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
by George Saunders
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, the latest book by George Saunders, is the ultimate writing class. He goes through short stories by four Russian writers—Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy and Turgenev—paragraph by paragraph or page by page to understand how they work, how they keep our interest, how they surprise us and what they tell us. He breaks them down to their skeletons and then shows how they are built up again. The book is an amazing journey into the mechanics/engineering/physics of stories, and why it is they do what they do.
Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis
by Serhii Plokhy
In Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy turns his attention to events in the 1960s which nearly led to nuclear armageddon between the US and the USSR. Plokhy's last book, on the Chernobyl disaster, was so brilliant that it won the UK's Baillie Gifford Prize, awarded for the best nonfiction book of the entire year. There are a number of books on the Cuban Missile Crisis told from the American side—starting with Robert F Kennedy's own memoir of that scary period—Thirteen Days—but Plokhy, who is a historian of the Ukraine, offers a more international perspective, including previously classified KGB documents.
We spoke to Serhii in December 2020 about the best books on Russia, selected annually by the judges of the Pushkin House Book Prize.
Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders
by Dennis Rasmussen
In Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders, political theorist Dennis Rasmussen—whose research focuses on the virtues and shortcomings of liberal democracy and market capitalism—looks at the fears the Founding Fathers of the United States had about the future of democracy.
We spoke to Dennis about the best Adam Smith books and his previous book, The Infidel and the Professor, was one of our best philosophy books of 2017.
Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
by Andrea Pitzer
In Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World Andrea Pitzer takes on the terrible story of the 16th century Dutch explorer and navigator William Barents, after whom the sea is named.
We previously spoke to Andrea about the best books on concentration camps.
The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
by Tim Harford
***One of the best books on critical thinking, recommended by Nigel Warburton***
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics," said Benjamin Disraeli (according to Mark Twain, anyway), in what has become one of the most well-known quotations in the English language, and certainly the only one most of us know about statistics. And yet...in practice many of us continue to be misled by them on a daily basis. In The Data Detective (called How to Make the World Add Up in the UK), British economist Tim Harford tries to equip us with tools to take on the latest misinformation.
We've also interviewed Tim, a Financial Times columnist and BBC Radio and TV presenter, about books on two topics: Unexpected Economics (including a comic book) and the best Introductions to Economics.
Philosophy through Science Fiction Stories: Exploring the Boundaries of the Possible
by Helen De Cruz, Johan De Smedt and Eric Schwitzgebel (editors)
Can you learn philosophy through science fiction? The authors of this book, Helen De Cruz, Johan De Smedt and Eric Schwitzgebel, think so. Eric also spoke to us about the best books on sci-fi and philosophy.
Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang
by James Millward
It's hard not to be aware of what is going in Xinjiang (literally 'new province') in western China where concentration camps are making a comeback. It's where the Uyghurs live, a generally Muslim ethnic minority who have never appreciated being ruled from Beijing. Historically, relations between the Uyghurs and Beijing have tended to go downhill when the centre is too controlling, and the last two decades have been a disaster. In this updated edition of Eurasian Crossroads James Millward, a leading American historian of the region, explains the historical context of a situation we all have a responsibility to be aware of.
The Light Ages: A Medieval Journey of Discovery
by Seb Falk
The Light Ages: A Medieval Journey of Discovery, by Cambridge historian Seb Falk, is about science and technology in medieval times and, as the title suggests, argues that this period does not deserve to be written off as 'the Dark Ages.' The tale is told through the eyes of John of Westwyk, an interesting figure who was, among other things, a monk, a crusader and an astronomer.
Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy
by Ben Macintyre
Agent Sonya is the latest book by Ben Macintyre, who has made an art of writing nonfiction books about spies that read like thrillers (If you haven't read The Spy and the Traitor yet, you must). Agent Sonya was the codename of Ursula Kuczynski, a German Jew who ended up living in an English village and spying for the Russians.
Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor (narrator)
*** Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021 ***
“I really think of Piranesi as a fantasy book because it’s about this man who’s living in a maze. He is talking to statues and interacting with them and he has someone that comes and visits him once or twice a week. He’s also on a journey of self-discovery…It just really makes you sit and listen. It’s a seven-hour book, and it was hard for me to walk away from it, because I was trying to figure out what was going on, to peel back the layers of the onion, and work out the maze. It really sucked me in.” Read more...
The Best Audiobooks: the 2021 Audie Awards
Michele Cobb, Publisher
“As the title indicates, it’s ‘all’ the sonnets of Shakespeare — not just the 154 from the 1609 quarto. This includes excerpts from the plays that are literal sonnets, as well as characters discussing the practice of ‘sonneting…Separately, they’ve speculated about the possible order of composition of those poems.” Read more...
The best books on Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Scott Newstok, Literary Scholar
Naturalist: A Graphic Adaptation
by C.M.Butzer, Edward O. Wilson & Jim Ottaviani
This book is a wonderful graphic adaptation of biologist EO Wilson's memoirs. It's touching and enlightening and leaves you feeling excited about the natural world. It's also interesting for the light it sheds on what makes someone a great scientist. Wilson, born in 1929, won two Pulitzer Prizes for nonfiction for his books, one in 1979 for On Human Nature, and one in 1991 for The Ants, co-authored with German biologist Bert Hölldobler. EO Wilson's books—he wrote many—have also been frequently recommended on Five Books.
“It’s absolutely stunning as a listening experience, and I think his style of writing and presentation suit the format beautifully. As he’s said in interviews he’s done about the memoir, he wants to speak directly to listeners and in particular to young people.” Read more...
Presidential memoirs (and biographies) as audiobooks
Robin Whitten, Journalist
Twilight of Democracy
by Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum's latest book, Twilight of Democracy, is part polemic, part memoir, and tracks how and why so many people she knew (eg Viktor Orban, who has been prime minister of Hungary for the past decade) abandoned liberal democracy and became far right populists. Applebaum was a foreign correspondent in eastern Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and continued to cover the region for many years.
We interviewed Anne Applebaum on the best Memoirs of Communism.
Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture
by Sudhir Hazareesingh
***Winner of the 2021 Wolfson History Prize***
Black Spartacus tells the extraordinary story of Toussaint Louverture, general and leader of a successful slave revolt in what is now Haiti. He was fighting—at various times—the Spanish, the British and the French. But beyond that, the book goes into detail about his worldview and how he drew on European Enlightenment ideas, but was also strongly influenced by Christianity and beliefs and cultural practices from Africa.
The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers
by Eric Weiner
"‘Socrates’ is a stand-in for the kind of philosophy that I was interested in, that I write about, which is a practical, therapeutic, accessible philosophy. It was Cicero who famously said of him that he called philosophy down from the heavens and introduced it into people’s homes. That’s what I’m trying to do."
Bestselling author Eric Weiner talked to our philosophy editor, Nigel Warburton, about 'Life-Changing Philosophy Books'
The Philosopher Queens: The lives and legacies of philosophy's unsung women
by Lisa Whiting & Rebecca Buxton
"The book aims to challenge the notion of the well-defined canon, which typically doesn’t have many women in it. We were also really keen to make a book that was written by women who are working in philosophy."
We spoke to Lisa Whiting and Rebecca Buxton about their favourite philosophy books by women.
Monkey King: Journey to the West
Wu Cheng'en and Julia Lovell (translator)
Monkey King or Journey to the West is one of the classics of Chinese literature, written at the end of the 16th century. The story is based on a real historical figure, Tripitaka, who in the late 620s travelled to India, bringing back Buddhist manuscripts to China. The 16th century, fantastical version of the story, attributed to Wu Cheng'en, may not correspond with historical reality, but offers a wonderful snapshot of imperial China and its very distinctive worldview.
This is a new, abridged translation by Julia Lovell, one of the West's leading Sinologists. As well as ensuring the book is very funny in modern English, she also gives us a very neat introduction to the book and what it tells us about Ming-era China. "Belying the old cliché of imperial China as self-sufficient, isolationist and xenophobic, Journey to the West—an odyssey out of China, to attain the wisdom of Indian Buddhist civilization—tells a different story: one of Chinese fascination with foreign exotica."
Editor's note: the Penguin clothbound edition of this book is beautiful.
The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad
by Emily Thomas
"This topic brings two things I really love together. I’ve spent years of my life backpacking and I’ve always been a bit obsessed with travel. Having spent my entire adult life as a professional philosopher, I was suddenly gripped with the obsessional idea of writing something about philosophy and travel. When I started, I wasn’t sure if I would find anything. It’s not a topic that’s talked about anywhere. I thought it was possible I would begin research and find that philosophers are just not interested in travel and that philosophy and travel have never interacted. Yet to my delight I found they’ve interacted a lot and there’s plenty to look at."
Emily Thomas also spoke to our philosophy editor, Nigel Warburton, about the best books on the philosophy of travel.
The End of October: A Novel
by Lawrence Wright
Lawrence Wright is a journalist whose account of Al Qaeda and the run-up to 9/11, The Looming Tower, has been recommended an astonishing 7 times in our interviews with experts (the other books to be reach this number of recommendations are Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Evelyn Waugh's Scoop). The End of October is a novel, but it's about a virus that starts in Asia and turns into a global pandemic. Though "eerily prescient" is one of those clichés that are too often applied to books, it does seem The End of October is indeed, um, eerily prescient.
Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time
by Gaia Vince
***Shortlisted for the 2020 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize***
"I wrote this book to answer what, for me, is the biggest question: how did we become so different from all the other animals—able to alter our own destiny and that of the rest of life on earth?" —Gaia Vince.
Read our interview with Gaia Vince—whose last book, Adventures in the Anthropocene, won the 2015 Royal Society Science Book Prize—on the best books on the Anthropocene.
How to Live a Good Life: A Guide to Choosing Your Personal Philosophy
by Daniel Kaufman, Massimo Pigliucci & Skye C Cleary
The ancient philosophers spent a lot of their time thinking about the best way to live. Modern philosophy is often more esoteric, but in many popular philosophy books coming out now, that ancient tradition is making a comeback. There are modern practitioners embracing Stoicism, Epicureanism, secular Buddhism and more. In How to Live a Good Life: A Guide to Choosing Your Personal Philosophy, philosophers Skye Cleary, Massimo Pigliucci and Dan Kaufman gather together essays by 15 thinkers, with each presenting the philosophy they've chosen to guide their lives.
The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans
by David Abulafia
***Winner of the 2020 Wolfson History Prize***
The Boundless Sea is a fascinating book which tells the human story through our relation to the oceans—from the early settlement of the Polynesian islands of the Pacific 3,000 years ago to the present day. Extraordinary in its scope and fascinating in its detail, Abulafia ends with a plea for the sea to be protected as a UNESCO World Heritage site. According to Paul Lay, editor of History Today, “David Abulafia is a remarkable historian and this is, I think, his masterpiece."
Editor's note: due to its size, it may be worth getting The Boundless Sea as an ebook, especially if you use an iPad or other tablet, and can still see the book's photos (many of sea-faring vessels) in full-colour.
Troubled Blood
by Robert Galbraith
***Shortlisted for the 2021 CWA Gold Dagger***
Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling) is the 5th book in a series featuring Cormoran Strike, a British war veteran who sets up a detective agency in London after losing his leg in a roadside explosion in Afghanistan. The series is one of the most intelligent out there for fans of crime fiction. If you're new to the books, we recommend reading the series in order, as it's a lot about the evolution of the relationship between the two main characters.
