Books

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 Fire Naomi Klein A decade of Klein's climate essays, gathered to argue that a Green New Deal is the scale of response the crisis now demands. 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 Human Nature Edward O. Wilson Wilson turns sociobiology on our own species, asking what in human behaviour is inherited. 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 Lighthouses Jazmina Barrera Jazmina Barrera's essays on lighthouses, translated by Christina MacSweeney for Two Lines Press. 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 Materialism Sebastiano Timpanaro An Italian Marxist's case that biology and the body shape human life as much as culture does. 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 Press Matthew Pressman How America's leading newspapers remade their values in the 1960s and 1970s, and why those choices still shape the news. 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. 3 recommenders On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin One long argument, built from pigeons and barnacles, for descent with modification and against the need for a designer. 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. 2 recommenders 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 Once Meghan O'Rourke Poems of violence, loss and recovery that move between a daughter mourning her mother and a citizen reckoning with her country. Once They Moved Like the Wind David Roberts The Apache Wars told through first-person accounts, with Cochise, Geronimo and General Crook at the center. 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. 5 recommenders One Jama’at, One Ameer Imran N. Hosein On how a Muslim community should organise itself in an age of trials. 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 Man’s Bible Gao Xingjian A novel by Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, set during the Cultural Revolution, in Mabel Lee's English translation. 1 recommender One Shot Lee Child A sniper kills five people in a small Indiana city, and the accused man asks the police for one person by name: Jack Reacher. One Step Behind Henning Mankell Henning Mankell's seventh Kurt Wallander novel, in the Vintage paperback, about a triple murder on Midsummer's Eve. 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 One Two Three . . . Infinity George Gamow A physicist's tour of large numbers, dimensions and relativity, illustrated by the author. 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 Only Yesterday S Y Agnon 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 Open Veins of Latin America Eduardo Galeano Eduardo Galeano's furious, lyrical history of how Latin America's wealth was carried off by empire, from the Spanish conquest to the twentieth century. 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