New Books

“It starts as an autobiography of his life: how he grew up, the various military towns he lived in, where he spent his summers in Ukraine, and what the best time he had was. He then goes through his political evolution in Russia, and then the most dramatic pages of the book and most transformative reading is when Navalny writes from prison. It’s his prison diaries. Then, that prison diary turns into his testament, the last words of a person who knows where this is going.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Political Scientist

“There’s a connection with The Narrow Road to the Deep North because that book was also concerned with his father’s experience of being a slave laborer in the Second World War: he was an Australian captured by the Japanese…what holds this part memoir, part science, part history together is the personal thread. The book begins and ends with a kayaking accident the author, Richard Flanagan, has in a river in Tasmania. He is rescued, but only just. He describes this moment when he is floating above the river, looking down at himself. Is that death?” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist

Isabel Hilton, Journalist

“According to Nigel Warburton, it’s “a clear, accessible and enlightening guide to the tools of thinking that make science work. It’s a really enjoyable read and a great book for anyone who wants to think more clearly about evidence, argument, reason and the need for a degree of intellectual humility.” “ Read more...

Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in Early 2024

Sophie Roell, Journalist

“It’s a very poetic book. Samantha Harvey creates beautiful imagery. It gets into the lives of six astronauts from different countries: Russia, Britain, America, Japan, Italy. They are all reflecting upon their own lives through the prism of looking at the Earth from above. It’s very powerful in how it gives this beautiful overview. It’s meditative in lots of ways, but gives us insight into the lives of these very different characters that is very believable and interesting.” Read more...

The Best Novels of 2024: The Booker Prize Shortlist

Nitin Sawhney, Musicians, Music Critics & Scholar

“Morris’s point, first of all, is that tribalism is innate. Going back to the Neanderthals, he spends quite a lot of time explaining how Homo sapiens has developed these tribal instincts and how they have not only protected but also advanced humankind. There is no getting round tribal instincts…What he’s arguing for is that there are real opportunities for positive change, if leaders…can harness this tribal instinct.” Read more...

The Best Business Books of 2024: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award

Andrew Hill, Journalist

“This book is a scenario for what would happen if North Korea were to launch a missile at the United States…it is a scenario that is entirely based on documents, many of which have very recently been declassified, and on 10 years of interviews with people who were deeply engaged in the whole question of deterrence and of thinking about nuclear war and trying to prevent it…It’s a completely gripping but utterly terrifying scenario…You may wish you’d never read it, but you can’t put it down while you are reading it.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist

Isabel Hilton, Journalist

“With no preamble, he presents us with an informal, chatty Syracuse of 412 BC. He can see the place and hear the tone so clearly in his head that the reader, whilst knowing perfectly well that both tone and story are fiction, never doubts him. That’s quite a feat.” Read more...

The Best Historical Fiction of 2025

Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist

“Paul Vidich is so good. That’s what I enjoy most about doing the Spybrary podcast. People write to me and say, ‘I would never have discovered Paul Vidich if it wasn’t for you and now I can’t get enough of it.’ I picked it this book up at Heathrow airport. I had been planning to watch movies on the flight but I inhaled this book instead. I just couldn’t put it down. It’s a thought-provoking and intense spy novel and I just wanted to finish it. The book is set during the Israeli-Hezbollah war in 2006. The events depicted are fictional but revolve around historical incidents, including the tragic murder of the CIA station chief, William Buckley, in Lebanon in 1985. “ Read more...

The Best Spy Thrillers of 2023

Shane Whaley,

“Also in military history and getting good reviews is The Vietnam War by Geoffrey Wawro. Wawro’s argument is that it was not a fear of the domino effect in Asia or geopolitical calculations that led (and kept) America in Vietnam, but domestic politics: successive leaders did not want to appear weak on Communism. This is what made for a complete lack of strategy and half-heartedness in how the US pursued the war .” Read more...

Notable Nonfiction Books of Fall 2024

Sophie Roell, Journalist

“This book has speed, it has humour, it has great characters. And it’s a great concept. It would be fantastic to go live in other people’s houses. After I read it, I found myself wandering around Holland Park in London, looking at all the houses, dreaming that I could do the same thing. It’s a brilliant book. Funny and original.” Read more...

The Funniest Books of 2024

Justin Albert,

“The story unfolds around a disturbing affair between a 19-year-old student and a 53-year-old married writer in East Berlin. Initially there is intense attraction. They both love music and art. He is a kind of mentor to her. They meet in secret, it’s very dramatic. It starts with love and passion, but it’s at least as much about power, art and culture—a different kind of obsession. The discussions of music, poetry and theatre take place alongside the political upheavals. It’s a novel about the weight of history, how it impinges on our lives.” Read more...

The Best Novels in Translation: The 2024 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Eleanor Wachtel, Broadcaster

“Ramakrishnan puts together all the evidence we have about the molecular and cellular biology of ageing and of cancer—and how this relates to mortality, and makes a very interesting point that I had never thought about, which is that there is a tension in the way our cells work in holding off ageing, but also holding off cancer. The two work at loggerheads; you don’t want to get cancer, but also you don’t want your cells to grow too old and to get too damaged to function. Preventing one can enable the other.” Read more...

The Best Popular Science Books of 2024

John Hutchinson,

“It’s certainly a thriller. It’s tense, tense, tense. But the big thing in this novel is not just the tension, it’s the voices. Joseph O’Connor gives a masterclass in the different voices of the people gathered around the priest Hugh O’Flaherty to help him organise and run the Escape Line—the escape routes out of Italy for POWs and others being pursued by the Nazis. If you feel you know Rome, you’ll find much to enjoy in the twists and turns of the streets, the hidden alleys, the sudden expanses and that ever-present ‘seethe of black water’, the Tiber. It’s full Rome immersion.” Read more...

The Best Historical Fiction of 2024

Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist

“James is obviously connected to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It is not a retelling of that story, but in a way it’s the same universe. Percival has said himself that it’s not a correction. But is it a revisionist book? Yes, I guess it is. It’s from the perspective of Jim, or James, and we look at slavery from his perspective. We look at his incredible struggle, how his family is affected, how he has been separated from them and his struggle to reach them again. It has a revenge theme, kind of. But I guess I look at it as there being some historical catharsis, reading this book in relation to historical racism and slavery. It’s more of a cathartic narrative than a derivative one.” Read more...

The Best Novels of 2024: The Booker Prize Shortlist

Nitin Sawhney, Musicians, Music Critics & Scholar

“it’s about and written from the point of view of Mary Read, and involves her relationship and pirating with Anne Bonny. It tells the story of Mary’s life, which is amazing. It’s almost like she lives several lives, and each of her lives is an adventure…I haven’t read a true account of Mary Read’s life, but there’s quite a lot of historical fact in Saltblood and I suspect it is accurate. One of the things I found incredibly skillful about this novel is that the author makes a real person’s life into a page-turning story. That’s difficult to do. As judges, we all loved Mary Read. One of the judges described her as ‘the badass central character.'” Read more...

The Best Adventure Novels: The 2024 Wilbur Smith Prize

Emma Styles,

“This is a literary entry on the list….There’s plenty of hard science in here, but it’s used not so much for boisterous adventure, as for a meditation on the wonder and strangeness of biological life…In space, Leigh’s role is the provision of fresh growing plants on board for the small crew to eat. Space itself is of secondary interested to her – in her own words, ‘Life is already alien, is already rich and strange…We don’t need to say it arrived seeded on a meteor to make it more so.'” Read more...

Award-Winning Sci Fi Novels of 2024

Sylvia Bishop,

“Earth has been destroyed, and we follow a young woman from the space station housing human survivors. They’re wronged, they’re angry, and they’re clearly being run as a tiny illiberal personal empire by their idolised leader. Valkyr only begins to wake up to this when she’s assigned to ‘nursery’ – child-bearing – instead of the soldierly posting she’d been expecting. From there, the unravelling of her world begins. You think you’ve got the measure of the book, and then you meet the central AI and its capabilities, and a whole new sci fi element is introduced that re-opens the game.” Read more...

The Best Sci Fi Novels of the Past Decade

Sylvia Bishop,

“It makes the case for India as a major driver of cultural change from about 250 BCE to 1200 CE. It tracks two things: the spread of Buddhism and the spread of Indian mathematics across the region and around the world…while I was familiar with the broad outlines of the story told in The Golden Road, most of the details I was not. Once I got past the introduction, I found the book hard to put down.” Read more...

Notable Nonfiction Books of Fall 2024

Sophie Roell, Journalist

” This is easily the book I’ve recommended to friends most often this past year – I think it’s one of those rare books that will please fantasy readers while also winning over non-fantasy readers. A real pleasure. Fetter is the son of a god. His mother wants him to commit patricide. He is not so keen. After an introductory look at his childhood, we meet adult Fetter, who wants to live in the nearest cosmopolitan city, go to a support group for the children of deities, and move on with his life.” Read more...

The Best Fantasy Novels of the Past Decade

Sylvia Bishop,

“Once you’ve read this book, you’re never going to forget it. It’s absolutely searing, deeply moving. And it’s an utterly compelling piece of storytelling. There have been quite a few novels recently that have looked at the Sri Lankan civil war. This novel is unique in the way that it centres women’s experience of the war. She uses that lens of women’s experience to examine the impact on families, on the war of values that can tear families apart as much as the violence. And she’s unflinching in her commitment to complexity and nuanced and clear-eyed moral scrutiny of all sides of the conflict…It’s a novel that rewards multiple readings as well, because it’s packed with historical detail. It ranges in scale from the intimate to the epic.” Read more...

Recent Fiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist

Monica Ali, Novelist

“This is such an interesting book. It starts from the experience of the author being mistaken repeatedly for the writer Naomi Wolf, and her indignation about that. Because here are two women who have gone on very different directions, politically speaking. She uses that as a jumping off point to think about the way in which we all have digital doubles – thinking about our social media presences, and the way we recreate ourselves digitally. It becomes this incredibly clever, acutely observed, often funny meditation on the moment in history in which we are living.” Read more...

Recent Nonfiction Highlights: The 2024 Women’s Prize Shortlist

Suzannah Lipscomb, Historian

“The whole of Britain is divided up into Ordnance Survey maps, so I bought the local map of where I live. It covers 20 kilometers by 20 kilometers. Once a week I went out to a place I chose at random on the map. That randomness was really important to me, because otherwise I would just have gravitated to the sorts of places I always like going to. So I’d use an online random number generator to pick where on the map I had to go. Then I’d go there, usually on foot, but occasionally by bike, with my camera. Having a camera was also quite important to me, because that forced me to slow down and be observant. My challenge was quite a conceited one, which was to see everything in that square, every street, every footpath, every bit of woodland.” Read more...

The best books on Local Adventures

Alastair Humphreys, Travel Writer

“Pétain had been the hero of Verdun, a great figure, but he was being tried for treason for signing the armistice with the Nazi regime and being the leader of the Vichy regime in France. He was on trial for his life, accused of collusion with Nazi Germany, and the verdict wasn’t much in doubt. It’s about more than the fate of a particular person—it’s a judgment on these four years of French history. It was newly liberated France’s first opportunity to look back on what it had done and how it had come to this. It’s a terrible account of moral ambivalence, and what you should do when faced with a conquering army. France is asking itself what it could have done, faced with total defeat by Hitler.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Duff Cooper Prize

Susan Brigden, Historian

“The Booker Prize is the biggest fiction award in the UK and Ireland. Paul Lynch won the £50,000 prize in 2023 for Prophet Song, a darkly prophetic novel set in a near-future Ireland that the New York Times described as ‘an unsettling dystopian parable.’ In it, a biologist and mother of four must cope alone after the secret police take her husband into custody and the country descends into civil war. It’s earned comparisons with The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984, but Lynch has downplayed the ideological elements of the book” Read more...

Award-Winning Novels of 2023

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

“It’s about a voyage on an 18^th-century British ship, the H.M.S. Wager, which ended with shipwreck and mutiny on a remote island, and about the betrayals and feuds among the survivors. It is tremendous. You learn so much: about maritime history, the world of the sea, the workings of Empire. It’s a fantastic, dark adventure story with heroes and villains.” Read more...

The Best Historical Nonfiction Books

Kate Summerscale, Journalist

“The subtitle is ‘seeking refuge on the world’s deadliest migration route’—that being the route from North Africa, across the Mediterranean, to Europe. All the books on the shortlist have a topicality and the ways in which they are topical are very varied and interesting. This is a book about events that are unfolding right now, as we’re speaking. We know they’re happening, but somehow we manage to push them away and not think about them. But migration is one of the huge issues of our time and this book really makes you feel it.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist

Caroline Sanderson, Journalist