While fiction often takes center stage in summer reading lists, non-fiction offers a refreshing alternative that can be just as engaging and enlightening. This summer, why not explore narratives that challenge your thinking and broaden your horizons?
From memoirs that offer intimate glimpses into extraordinary lives to guides on how to live in a more fulfilling, creative way, these non-fiction paperbacks are perfect companions for the summer months ahead.
Our lives can feel defined by the struggle with overwhelm, endless decisions and striving to be productive. Wouldn’t it be good to stop doing all that? What if this summer we could find freedom – and get more of the important things done – by embracing our limitations, and by letting things happen instead of forcing them?
Meditations for Mortals is a profound and liberating crash course in living more fully. It overturns much familiar advice and opens a gateway to a saner, freer and more enchantment-filled life, one day at a time.
From one kiss comes a chain reaction.
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair, through 1930s nuclear physics, to Flanagan’s father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima, these linked events culminate in a young man finding himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river, not knowing if he is to live or to die…
This masterpiece memoir from Richard Flanagan, winner of the Baillie Gifford and the Booker prize, is unlike anything you’ve ever read before.
Shortlisted for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, this is a must-read before the winners are announced on 12 June.
Top of the Pops, December 1988. The world sat up as a young woman made her debut: gold bra, gold bomber jacket, and proudly, gloriously, seven months pregnant. This was no ordinary artist. This was Neneh Cherry.
But navigating fame and family wasn't always simple. In this beautiful and deeply personal memoir, Cherry remembers the collaborations, the highs and lows, the friendships and loves that have shaped her as a woman and an artist. At the heart of it, always, is family: the extraordinary three generations of artists and musicians that are her inheritance and her legacy.
Salman Rushdie shares for the first time his experience and the aftermath of 12 August 2022. But more than this, Knife is an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art – and finding the strength to stand up again. For any artist in search of inspiration on how to continue creating when the world is in turmoil – this is the pick for you.
Patriot is the unforgettable life story of one of the most fearless and inspiring figures of our time.
Alexei Navalny was a beacon to millions and became the sole political threat to Vladimir Putin. This is his life in his own words: his political awakening, his marriage and beloved family, his total commitment to taking on a corrupt regime and his enduring love of Russia and its people.
Why would anyone in their right mind choose to be a psychiatrist? Are the solutions to people’s messy lives really within medical school textbooks? And how can vulnerable patients receive the care they need when psychiatry lacks staff, hospital beds and any actual cures?
Unlocking the doors to the psych ward, NHS psychiatrist Dr Benji Waterhouse provides a fly-on-the-padded-wall account of medicine’s most mysterious and controversial specialty.
Bored of 1970s suburban life, Maurice and Maralyn plan their escape: sell the house, build a boat, set sail for New Zealand. Then, halfway around the world, their beloved boat is struck by a whale and the pair are cast adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Alone on a tiny raft, their love is put to the test.
Winner of the Nero Awards Gold Prize Book of the Year 2024, this is a book about human connection and the human condition; about how we survive – not just at sea, but in life.
