Cal Flyn, Deputy Editor

The award-winning Cameroonian novelist Mutt-Lon selects five of the best recent novels from Francophone Africa, including Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s Prix Goncourt-winning La plus secrète mémoire des hommes. These novels, he notes—as with many others from West and Central Africa—are united by a common search for identity in post-colonial Africa.

Novelists, non-fiction writers and poets all attempt to create immersive and atmospheric settings in their books—what is called a ‘sense of place’ in literary terms. Here, the British journalist Patrick Galbraith selects five books that explore and evoke a sense of place—including works by Joan Didion, Mark Kurlansky and John McPhee.

If you’re about to jet off for a relaxing vacation, you might be looking for a page-turning detective story to keep you enthralled on your sun-lounger. Here, Caroline Crampton—creator of the popular podcast Shedunnit—recommends five classic murder mysteries set in glamorous summer holiday locations.

The International Booker Prize celebrates the best fiction in translation published over the previous year. Frank Wynne, acclaimed translator and chair of the 2022 judging panel, tells Five Books about the six novels that made the shortlist, and reminds readers that world literature need not be tough, consumed only in the interests of self-improvement—but is often joyful, surprising and full of feeling.

Every year, the Walter Scott Prize highlights the best new historical novels. In 2022, the shortlist comprises four fantastic works of historical fiction that immerse the reader in the past—from 16th-century Scotland to 1920s Trinidad—while confronting universal human dramas we still struggle with today. Elizabeth Laird, one of the judges, talks us through their choices this year.

Natural history can offer a “portal into wonder and astonishment,” says David George Haskell, the biologist and award-winning author of nonfiction works including Sounds Wild and Broken and The Forest Unseen. But natural history books, in the past, have also been guilty of reinforcing prejudices. Here he recommends five natural history books that celebrate the diversity of life.

Books featuring dystopian or post-apocalyptic themes offer us an opportunity to study human nature outside of the normal structure of society, says Rosa Rankin-Gee, author of the acclaimed novel Dreamland. Here, she recommends five other books featuring a near-future dystopia, all of which explore a societal or cultural unraveling through beautiful prose.

The most unnerving and disturbing novels are often those books that leave room for interpretation and uncertainty. Here, the acclaimed Irish novelist Sue Rainsford selects five frightening works of literary horror, by authors who are masters of the unsettling implication—because nothing is quite so scary as what you dream up to fill the voids.

With all eyes on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s a good time to educate yourself on the role of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in post-war Europe. Here, University of Birmingham political scientist Mark Webber offers five book recommendations on the history, aims and ideals of NATO.

The Nobel laureate William Golding is best known for his novel Lord of the Flies, in which a group of schoolboys marooned on a desert island revert to savagery. But he was a prolific writer who produced eleven further novels, including the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage. Here, his daughter and manager of his literary estate Judy Golding selects five of William Golding’s key texts, including The Inheritors—the book he felt to be his best work.