Sophie Roell, Editor

Sophie Roell is co-founder and editor of Five Books. Previously she worked as a journalist in London, Beijing, Shanghai and New York. As a financial reporter, she covered the early years of the Chinese stock markets and the transition of its economy after Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 tour of the south. She wrote about the North Korean economy from Pyongyang in 2001.

She studied modern history as an undergraduate at Oxford and, after travelling the world as a reporter for five years, took the Master’s in Regional Studies-East Asia at Harvard University.  This wonderfully flexible program insists on at least one East Asian language and some courses on East Asia, but leaves plenty of room to roam about the university taking courses on random subjects. Five Books, set up in 2009, is an attempt to continue that experience.

Below, you’ll find Sophie’s Five Books interviews with experts. Her own recommendations, normally nonfiction, are here. She also reads a lot of mysteries.

Interviews by Sophie Roell

Five Mysteries Set in Russia, recommended by Boris Akunin

The golden age of mystery largely passed Russia by, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t some great crime novels produced over the last 150 years. Bestselling crime novelist Boris Akunin, who was born Grigory Chkhartishvili in Soviet Georgia and now lives in exile in London, recommends five Russian mysteries—great works of literature that happen to also have a crime at their heart.

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Duff Cooper Prize, recommended by Susan Brigden

If you’re looking for nonfiction with a literary sensibility and a historical bent, the books highlighted by the annual Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize are a great place to start. British historian Susan Brigden, author of Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest and one of the prize’s judges, talks us through the 2024 shortlist — from war and revolution to the splendours of Mughal India and Monet’s garden at Giverny.

The best books on Machine Learning, recommended by Eric Siegel

Machine learning uses data to predict outcomes, explains Eric Siegel, a former professor at Columbia who now advises companies on deploying it in their business. Unlike artificial intelligence, it’s a real technology with a proven track record, he says. He recommends practical books on machine learning that are accessible to the layperson and useful to anyone looking to use it in their business or organization.

The Best Crime Novels Set in Oxford, recommended by Cara Hunter

The city of Oxford has been a popular location for fictional murders for nearly a century, the ancient university and its beautiful buildings also lending themselves to wonderful screen adaptations. Bestselling British novelist Cara Hunter—author of the DI Fawley series and Murder in the Family—talks us through some of her favourite crime novels set in the city of dreaming spires.

The Best Audiobooks of 2023, recommended by Laura Sackton

AudioFile magazine is one of the best places on the web for audiobook reviews. At the end of every year, its editors compile lists that highlight the best audiobooks across a range of genres, including fiction, nonfiction, biography and mystery. Laura Sackton, a contributor at AudioFile, talks us through some of her favourites from their best of 2023 lists—and explains how she got the bug for listening to books as well as reading them.

The best books on Artificial Intelligence, recommended by ChatGPT

Normally at Five Books we ask experts to recommend the best books in their field and talk to us about them in an interview, either in person, by phone or via Zoom. In January 2023, we asked the AI bot, ChatGPT, to recommend books to us on the topic of AI. Being an AI doesn’t necessarily make the chatbot an expert on AI books, but we thought it might have some ideas. This week we caught up with ChatGPT to find out if there were any new AI books it wanted to recommend in the year since we spoke. Read more nonfiction book recommendations on Five Books

The best books on Xi Jinping, recommended by Olivia Cheung

Despite his own and his family’s suffering under Maoism, China’s president, Xi Jinping, has turned his back on some of the reforms of the past four decades, dismantling safeguards designed to ensure that some of the disasters of that era never happen again. Olivia Cheung, a research fellow at SOAS and co-author of The Political Thought of Xi Jinping, recommends books to better understand China’s leader and his quest to build a new world order—led by China and admired by all.