Books

Oathbringer Brandon Sanderson Dalinar Kholin confronts the past he has spent a lifetime not remembering, just as the Everstorm breaks and humanity's coalition begins to fracture. Obvious in Hindsight Bradley Tusk A novel about flying cars, written by the venture capitalist who spent years fighting regulators. Old as Stone, Hard as Rock: of Humans and War Alessandro Sanna An Italian illustrator set out to draw wartime poets, could not shake the images, and made a wordless book in which colour and sequence carry what language dropped. 1 recommender Old Filth Jane Gardam A retired judge, raised as a Raj orphan and shipped to Wales at five, reckons late in life with everything he never said. 1 recommender Olive, Again Elizabeth Strout Elizabeth Strout returns to the prickly, unforgettable Olive Kitteridge in linked stories of a small Maine town. 1 recommender Omaha Beach and Beyond John Robert Slaughter Nineteen years old in the first wave at Omaha, and still going months later in Germany 1 recommender On Becoming a Person Carl R. Rogers The 1961 papers where client-centred therapy began, arguing that people change when met with unconditional regard rather than diagnosis. Includes his lecture on listening. 1 recommender On Becoming Fearless Arianna Huffington Written partly for her daughters, Huffington maps the fears that hold women back, from the body to money to speaking up, and how to move past them. On Consolation Michael Ignatieff Job, Cicero, Primo Levi and Akhmatova, all read for what consolation used to mean before grief became something to be managed. 1 recommender On Dublin Street Samantha Young An American with a buried past rents a room in Edinburgh from the wrong man's sister. 1 recommender On Getting Better Adam Phillips A psychoanalyst asks whether the modern demand to improve yourself has quietly become a way of declining to live at all. 1 recommender On Immunity Eula Biss An essayist becomes a mother, meets the fear around vaccination, and traces what immunity means to us as a metaphor. 1 recommender On Looking Lia Purpura A poet treats looking as a moral discipline, turning it on a dead deer, a body on a slab, a heap of coal. Unsettling in the best way. 1 recommender On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us Partha Dasgupta The economist who put a price on nature, on why leaving it out of the accounts guarantees we spend it. 1 recommender On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays Emily Ogden Essays that begin in ordinary confusion about love, parenting and ambition, then refuse the tidy resolution, treating uncertainty as a position rather than a failure of nerve. 1 recommender On the Calculation of Volume Solvej Balle Tara Selter wakes every morning on the eighteenth of November. Balle takes a premise that could be a joke and follows its physics and its marriage entirely seriously. 2 recommenders On the Road Jack Kerouac The book that taught American prose to move at the speed of a car with nowhere particular to be. 1 recommender On the Rooftop Margaret Wilkerson Sexton A mother drills her three daughters toward stardom in 1950s San Francisco, as their Black neighbourhood is razed. 1 recommender On Writing Stephen King Half autobiography, half toolkit, written either side of the van that nearly killed him. 1 recommender On Writing Well William Zinsser In print since 1976, and still one instruction above all others: cut every word doing no work. 1 recommender One Day in December Josie Silver She locks eyes with a stranger through a bus window; a year later, her best friend introduces him as her boyfriend. 1 recommender One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez Garcia Marquez traces seven generations of the Buendia family in the town of Macondo, in the novel that defined magical realism. 2 recommenders One Lonely Night Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer at full throttle, answering his critics by shooting his way through them. 1 recommender One Long Night Andrea Pitzer The camp as an invention, traced from 1890s Cuba to the present, country by country. 1 recommender One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder Brian Doyle Hummingbird hearts, a son faulty one, and long sentences written by a man who knew he was running out of time to stop. 1 recommender One to Many Jason Fladlien The webinar operator's playbook for selling to a room of hundreds as persuasively as selling to one. 1 recommender Only the Paranoid Survive Andrew S. Grove Intel's Andrew Grove explains how to spot the strategic inflection points that can remake or destroy a company, drawing on his own hard calls. 1 recommender Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration Bryan Caplan An economist argues for open borders in comic-book form, working through wages, culture and crime with the citations left visible in the margins. Open House Elizabeth Berg Elizabeth Berg's novel follows a newly divorced woman who takes in boarders and slowly rebuilds a life of her own. 1 recommender Orbital Samantha Harvey Almost nothing happens across sixteen orbits of the Earth, and the novel won the Booker Prize anyway, on sustained attention alone. 1 recommender Orientalism Edward Said Western scholarship on the East read as a system for managing it rather than knowing it. Origins Neil deGrasse Tyson The whole story of everything, from the first second after the Big Bang to the chemistry that made life Orwell’s Revenge Peter W. Huber A rewrite of 1984 arguing Orwell had the technology backwards, and that networks scatter power rather than concentrate it. 1 recommender Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood A man who may be the last human alive pieces together how corporate bioengineering and one friend's genius ended the world Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis Gregor Craigie Canada's housing shortage explained by a broadcaster who went and looked at what other countries do. 1 recommender Our Missing Hearts Celeste Ng In a near-future America that removes children from disloyal parents, a boy goes looking for his exiled poet mother. 1 recommender