All Books

A selection of Cheryl Strayed's advice columns written under the pseudonym 'Sugar' for The Rumpus. Honest to the point of pain, these essays — part advice, part memoir — have become one of the most loved pieces of American non-fiction writing of recent decades.

Charles Portis's beloved Western. Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross sets out to avenge her murdered father, hiring the drunken, one-eyed U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn to hunt the killer into Indian Territory — a tale told in Mattie's unforgettable, flinty voice.

A prequel and counter-narrative to Jane Eyre that reclaims the voice of Bertha Mason — Rochester's 'mad wife' — reimagined as Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole heiress in post-Emancipation Jamaica caught between two worlds and belonging to neither.

A transformative programme for achieving financial independence by fundamentally rethinking your relationship with money and the time you trade for it.

The second Wayfarers novel — Sidra, the AI who used to run a starship, now lives inside a human body kit. Alongside her human companion Pepper, she must learn what it means to be one small, embodied person in a vast universe.

Philip Caputo's classic Vietnam memoir. As one of the first U.S. Marines sent to Vietnam in 1965, Caputo arrived full of idealism and left transformed by combat, moral injury, and the murder charges he faced. A searing, honest account of how war corrupts the men who fight it.

Vikram Seth's vast novel of postcolonial India. As a mother searches for a 'suitable boy' for her daughter Lata in the newly independent India of the early 1950s, Seth weaves the lives of four extended families into an immense, intimate panorama of a nation finding itself.

Soyinka's memoir of his childhood in the Yoruba town of Aké in colonial Nigeria—the parsonage compound where he grew up, his early encounter with spirits and schooling, his mother's role in a women's tax revolt, his father's dignity as a colonial schoolteacher. The most beautifully written African memoir.

Computer science algorithms offer surprisingly practical guidance for everyday human decisions — from optimal stopping to the explore-exploit tradeoff to how to sort your email.

Oliver Sacks's collection of seven 'paradoxical tales' of neurological difference. From a colorblind painter to a surgeon with Tourette's to the autistic scientist Temple Grandin, Sacks explores how the brain's variations reshape entire worlds — and finds richness rather than mere deficit.

Antigone defies King Creon's decree forbidding the burial of her brother Polynices, a rebel who died attacking Thebes. Creon represents the state's authority; Antigone represents divine law and family obligation. The conflict between them destroys both.

Young Fitz, the royal bastard of the Six Duchies, is brought to the court of his grandfather King Shrewd and apprenticed to the royal assassin — learning to navigate palace politics, a forbidden magical bond with animals, and the profound isolation of being useful but never truly belonging.

W. G. Sebald's haunting final novel. Over years of chance encounters, an unnamed narrator pieces together the story of Jacques Austerlitz, who came to Wales on a Kindertransport in 1939 and spent a lifetime estranged from his own past — until memory, and the Holocaust's long shadow, finally return.

In the late 1960s, Sacks treated a group of patients who had been encephalitic 'sleeping sickness' survivors since the 1920s. He administered the new drug L-DOPA and watched them awaken — often dramatically — after decades of stasis. Then, as the drug's effects became erratic, he watched them struggle.

Captain Charles Ryder, quartered in a stately home during the Second World War, recalls his long entanglement with the Flyte family — the beautiful, dissolute Sebastian; his magnetic sister Julia; and the great house of Brideshead itself — and how Catholicism shaped and ultimately claimed them all.

In 1843 Scotland, a Church of Scotland minister is sent to a remote Hebridean island to tell its last remaining inhabitant — a man who speaks only Gaelic and has lived alone since his community was cleared — that the island has been sold and he must leave. Neither man speaks the other's language.

Lima in the 1950s under the Odría dictatorship. Santiago Zavala and Ambrosio, his father's former driver, talk for four hours in a bar called the Cathedral. Their conversation reconstructs the corruption of an entire society—told in multiple simultaneous timelines that interlace without warning. Vargas Llosa's most ambitious novel, which he called his best.

In 1988, Modiano found a newspaper notice from 1941: a missing girl, Dora Bruder, fifteen years old, gone from her parents' home in Paris. He spent eight years tracing her—through the bureaucratic records of occupied Paris, the transit camp at Drancy, and eventually to Auschwitz. His investigation of her life becomes a meditation on memory, disappearance, and what the city keeps.

Steven Pinker's comprehensive argument that the Enlightenment values of reason, science, humanism, and progress have dramatically improved the human condition — and why we should defend them.

The landmark study of the state of optimal experience — deep concentration and complete involvement that makes an activity intrinsically rewarding.

The second Fitz and the Fool novel. Reunited with the broken, tortured Fool and driven by grief and the loss of his daughter, FitzChivalry Farseer returns to the deadly arts of his past and the dangerous heart of the Six Duchies court.

Private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to investigate the disappearance of a four-year-old girl from a Boston neighbourhood. The case pulls them into drug trafficking, police corruption, and a moral dilemma at the end that has no right answer.

New Yorker editor Bill Buford quits his job to apprentice in Mario Batali's chaotic Babbo kitchen, then traces Italian cooking to its source — apprenticing with a Tuscan butcher and a pasta master in Emilia-Romagna.

A marine biologist named Leigh discovers strange biological activity at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean — then finds herself selected for a mission that will take her far further than any ocean. A novel about life, origin, and what it means to ascend toward something beyond human comprehension.