Books

North Sun Ethan Rutherford The whaleship voyage rewritten as literature: labour, endurance, and a small wooden world adrift on an indifferent sea. 1 recommender Northern Spy Flynn Berry A Belfast news producer sees her own sister in footage of an IRA robbery, and has to decide what she owes her. 1 recommender Not a River Selva Almada Selva Almada's novel about three men on a fishing trip at a river where an accident happened years earlier, translated by Annie McDermott. 1 recommender Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions Philip K. Howard Public sector unions negotiate with officials they help elect, which Howard argues is the whole problem. 1 recommender Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire Emma Southon Southon writes Rome from the position of the enslaved rather than the owners, arguing the institution was not incidental to the empire but the thing holding it up. 1 recommender Not in God’s Name Jonathan Sacks A rabbi reads the Abrahamic faiths for the roots of religious violence, and for the case against it. 1 recommender Not in Your Genes Oliver James A psychologist's case that parenting, not DNA, explains most of why children turn out like their parents. Not on Our Watch Don Cheadle, John Prendergast Actor Don Cheadle and activist John Prendergast turn outrage over Darfur into a practical handbook for ordinary citizens who want to help stop genocide. Not the End of the World: How We Can be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet Hannah Ritchie A data scientist's case that environmental despair is understandable and, on the numbers, wrong. 1 recommender Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won’t Even Save the Planet) Ross Clark A sceptical case against net zero targets that stops well short of denying the science. 1 recommender Notes on the State of Virginia Thomas Jefferson A questionnaire from a French diplomat produced the only book Jefferson ever wrote, and the most revealing. 1 recommender Notes on Thought and Vision H. D. Written on Scilly in 1919 after a near-fatal pregnancy, this short prose meditation proposes a jellyfish-like over-mind through which vision arrives. Unclassifiable, and unlike anything else. 1 recommender Nothing to See Here Kevin Wilson The children catch fire when upset, and the novel is deadpan about everything except who cares for them. 1 recommender Noughts & Crosses Malorie Blackman A society split between ruling dark-skinned Crosses and oppressed light-skinned noughts, and two young people on the wrong sides of it. 2 recommenders Nox Anne Carson Anne Carson's New Directions volume of 2010, a poet's mourning for her brother. 1 recommender Nudge Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein How the design of a choice shapes the choice, and the case for arranging defaults to help people. 1 recommender O Pioneers! Willa Cather 1 recommender 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. Obliquity John Kay Why the most profitable companies do not aim at profit, and other lessons in reaching goals indirectly. Obvious in Hindsight Bradley Tusk A novel about flying cars, written by the venture capitalist who spent years fighting regulators. Odd Girl Out Rachel Simmons Why aggression between girls so often takes the form of gossip and exclusion, and what adults can do about it. 1 recommender Oedipus Rex Sophocles 1 recommender Of Human Bondage W. Somerset Maugham Maugham's 1915 novel of an orphan with a club foot who tries art, then medicine, and loves a woman who does not love him. 1 recommender Of Woman Born Adrienne Rich The poet separates motherhood as lived experience from motherhood as an institution shaped by men. 1 recommender Office Politics Oliver James How to recognise the manipulators at work and hold your own without becoming one of them. 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 Old Maid Suzanne Finnamore She gets engaged and panics, and narrates the whole thing in a voice dry enough to quote aloud. 1 recommender Olive Kitteridge Elizabeth Strout Thirteen linked stories set in a small Maine town, with a difficult, perceptive retired schoolteacher at their heart. 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 Anxiety Renata Salecl What our anxieties reveal about modern life, in a brief book by a Slovene philosopher. 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 Being Ill Virginia Woolf, Julia Stephen Virginia Woolf asks why illness, as common as love or war, has so rarely been a subject for literature, and what it does to the mind. 1 recommender 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