Books

The Black Echo Michael Connelly Michael Connelly's debut introduces LAPD detective Harry Bosch, whose look into a fellow veteran's death uncovers a plan to rob a bank from below. 1 recommender The Black Stallion Walter Farley A shipwrecked boy and an untamed Arabian survive a desert island together, then have to survive coming home. 1 recommender The Black Swan Nassim Nicholas Taleb Taleb's influential examination of rare, high-impact events and our blindness to them. 2 recommenders The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England Jonathan Healey Seventeenth-century England executed its king, abolished the monarchy, and then quietly invited it all back. 1 recommender The Blind Assassin Margaret Atwood A novel inside a novel inside a scandal: an old woman unspools her sister's death and the story they hid. Booker winner The Blind Owl Sadegh Hedayat Sadegh Hedayat's Persian novella of an isolated narrator's obsessive love and psychological collapse, in a Grove Press paperback of 2010. 1 recommender The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642 Jonathan Healey The months in which England stopped arguing and started killing, reconstructed almost day by day. 1 recommender The Bloodless Revolution Tristram Stuart How Europeans discovered vegetarianism, and argued about meat, from the 1600s onward. The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison Toni Morrison's first novel follows a young Black girl in 1940s Ohio who longs for blue eyes, believing they would make her loved. 4 recommenders The Body Farm Patricia Cornwell The murder of a young girl in North Carolina points Kay Scarpetta back toward an old enemy, in the fifth Scarpetta novel. The Bomber Mafia Malcolm Gladwell A circle of airmen believed precision bombing could make war humane. Tokyo, March 1945, answered them. The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe Tom Wolfe's satire of ambition, race, class and greed in 1980s New York, seen through a bond trader, a prosecutor and a journalist. 1 recommender The Book Against Death Elias Canetti Canetti spent fifty years refusing to accept mortality as wisdom, and the fragments assembled after his own death are furious, funny and entirely unreconciled. 1 recommender The Book Nobody Read Owen Gingerich 1 recommender The Book of a Naturalist W. H. Hudson Raised on the Argentine pampas, Hudson observed with a scientist precision and wrote with a poet attachment. This 1919 collection ranges across birds, snakes and memory. 1 recommender The Book of Beautiful Questions Warren Berger Warren Berger makes the case that better questions lead to better decisions, and offers a toolkit of them for thinking, creating, and leading. 1 recommender The Book of Disquiet Fernando Pessoa A trunk of fragments left by a Lisbon bookkeeper who never existed, assembled after Pessoa died into a book with no plot that is somehow impossible to put down. 1 recommender The Book of Elsewhere Keanu Reeves, China Miéville Keanu Reeves and China Miéville's novel of an 80,000-year-old immortal warrior who longs to die, pulp action lifted into meditative literary fantasy. The Book of Five Rings Miyamoto Musashi The legendary undefeated samurai’s treatise on strategy, combat, and mastery, read for centuries as a guide to excellence in any discipline. 2 recommenders The Book of Hope Jane Goodall Jane Goodall's reflections on hope, in a Celadon Books hardcover from 2021. 1 recommender The Book of Imaginary Beings Jorge Luis Borges Borges's bestiary of creatures dreamed up across world literature and myth, catalogued with deadpan erudition. 1 recommender The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera Seven linked parts on memory and erasure in occupied Czechoslovakia, where forgetting is something a state can organise. 1 recommender The Book of Memory Mary Carruthers The standard study of what memory meant in the Middle Ages, when it was a discipline rather than a faculty. 1 recommender The Book of Ruth Jane Hamilton Jane Hamilton's debut narrates the hard life of a young woman in a small Illinois town, building toward a shattering act of violence. 1 recommender The Book of Three Lloyd Alexander An assistant pig-keeper is swept into a war for Prydain in the opening book of Lloyd Alexander's beloved fantasy series. 1 recommender The Books of Earthsea Ursula K. Le Guin 1 recommender The Books of Jacob Olga Tokarczuk Olga Tokarczuk's epic historical novel about Jacob Frank, a Polish Jew who claimed to be the messiah, translated by Jennifer Croft. The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History Jose Donoso A novelist's memoir of the moment Latin American fiction took over the world, written from inside it. 1 recommender The Box Man Kobo Abe Kobo Abe's 1973 novel about a man who lives in a cardboard box and watches the world outside, translated by E. Dale Saunders. 1 recommender The Boy with the Topknot Sathnam Sanghera A journalist learns as an adult that his father has schizophrenia, and pieces together the family story nobody told him. 1 recommender The Broken Sword Poul Anderson A stolen child raised by elves, a changeling raised by humans, and a sword that guarantees they meet. 1 recommender The Brothers Grimm: A Biography Ann Schmiesing The Grimms collected their fairy tales mostly as a by-product of inventing modern German philology. 1 recommender The Brothers Lionheart Astrid Lindgren Astrid Lindgren's children's fantasy about two brothers reunited in a magical land after death, and the courage it takes to face tyranny and loss. 1 recommender The Buffalo Hunter Hunter Stephen Graham Jones A pastor's journal, a Blackfeet vampire's confession, and the history of the American West doing the haunting. 2 recommenders The Bully Pulpit Doris Kearns Goodwin Roosevelt, Taft, and the muckraking journalists who together drove the Progressive era. 1 recommender The Burhān Mohammed Hijab A step-by-step argument for a necessary being, drawing on Islamic thought.