Books

Britt-Marie Was Here Fredrik Backman Leaving her marriage at 63, a fussy, lonely woman takes a job in a struggling town and ends up coaching its children's soccer team. Broken Country Clare Leslie Hall A trial, a shooting, and a first love returning to a Dorset village where a woman had settled for a quieter life. 1 recommender Broken Open Elizabeth Lesser The co-founder of the Omega Institute on how loss, illness and other hard times can open a person up rather than break them. 1 recommender Brooklyn Colm Tóibín 1 recommender Buckeye Patrick Ryan One unrecorded moment in the celebration after the war, still shaping two Ohio families generations later. 1 recommender Build the Life You Want Arthur C. Brooks, Oprah Winfrey Oprah and social scientist Arthur Brooks lay out research-based habits for building greater happiness and emotional control. Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation Bryan Caplan Housing regulation as the largest self-inflicted wound in the rich world, argued in pictures, on the economics first and then squarely on the ethics. Building a Second Brain Tiago Forte A method for capturing and organising the flood of information we consume, so ideas compound instead of getting lost. 1 recommender Built to Last Jim Collins, Jerry I. Porras A study of what separates enduring, visionary companies from their rivals over the long run. 1 recommender Built to Sell John Warrillow A business fable about turning a service firm that depends on its founder into a company a buyer would actually want to own. Bull’s-Eye Brian Tracy A short book on the one habit Tracy returns to most: aiming at a clear target and refusing to be pulled off it. Burmese Days George Orwell Drawing on his years as a colonial policeman, Orwell's first novel exposes the racism and rot of British rule in Burma. Burn-In P.W. Singer, August Cole A techno-thriller following an FBI agent partnered with an advanced robot, built on real near-future AI and automation research. 1 recommender Business Adventures John Brooks John Brooks's twelve New Yorker tales of corporate triumph and disaster, from the Ford Edsel to a famous Wall Street panic. 2 recommenders Business Stripped Bare Richard Branson Virgin's real wins and costly flops, mined for lessons on brand, people, and finance by a founder who treats failure as tuition. Busy Betty Reese Witherspoon Witherspoon's first picture book, about a small girl with enormous plans and a dog badly in need of a bath. Busy Betty & the Circus Surprise Reese Witherspoon Betty takes her outsized ambitions to the circus, in the second outing for Witherspoon's irrepressible young problem-solver. Busy Betty & the Perfect Christmas Present Reese Witherspoon The Christmas instalment, in which Betty sets out to find a present equal to the size of her own enthusiasm. Butterfly Yusra Mardini The Syrian swimmer who pushed a sinking dinghy through the Aegean, then swam at the Olympics. 1 recommender By Way of Deception Victor Ostrovsky, Claire Hoy A former Mossad case officer's account of how Israel's spy agency recruits, trains and runs its operations, and the book Israel went to court to stop. 1 recommender Bye Bye Baby Caroline Sullivan An American teenager's obsessive fandom, followed further than most, and written up years later without flinching. 1 recommender The Bands of Mourning Brandon Sanderson A treasure hunt for the Lord Ruler's mythical metalminds turns into something much larger when evidence surfaces that the Bands are real. The Battle for Paradise Naomi Klein After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans and wealthy newcomers fight over how to rebuild the island, in Klein's short report on disaster capitalism. The Beast Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström's first novel together, in the Abacus paperback of Anna Paterson's English translation. The Beauty Myth Naomi Wolf Wolf argues that beauty standards tightened precisely as women gained power, functioning as a political weapon. 1 recommender The Bee Sting Paul Murray One Irish family, four private catastrophes, and years of everyone misreading everyone else. 1 recommender The Beginning of Infinity David Deutsch Physicist David Deutsch argues that good explanations have unlimited reach and drive endless human progress. 1 recommender The Beginning of Spring Penelope Fitzgerald Moscow, 1913: a printer's English wife leaves him, and nobody quite explains anything. 1 recommender The Belly Art Project Sara Blakely Spanx founder Sara Blakely's photo collection turns pregnant bellies into painted canvases, celebrating motherhood with warmth, humor, and a movement-builder's eye. The Best of all Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days Michael Kempe Seven particular days, taking in binary arithmetic, the calculus dispute, epidemic-control proposals and mining engineering, instead of one continuous Leibniz life. 1 recommender The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker Pinker marshals sweeping data to argue that violence has fallen dramatically across human history. 4 recommenders The Big Change Frederick Lewis Allen How America transformed itself between 1900 and 1950, told by a historian who lived through it. 1 recommender The Big Short Michael Lewis The few investors who saw the mortgage collapse coming, and what it cost them to be right before anyone believed it. 2 recommenders The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract Bill James The book that made statistics readable: a century of baseball, decade by decade, ranked and endlessly argued over. 1 recommender The Birth of Plenty William J. Bernstein Why the world suddenly began to grow rich around 1820, and what it took. 1 recommender The Bitch Pilar Quintana Pilar Quintana's novel La perra, translated by Lisa Dillman and shortlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature.