Set during the 1944–45 siege of Budapest, the book follows the city’s descent from a vibrant, multicultural capital into chaos as front lines close in. Using diaries and archives, it follows a cross-section of residents — aristocrats, soldiers, a teenage Jewish student, a popular entertainer, and a housewife — as they face scarcity, violence, and moral uncertainty while trying to survive.

Peak Human examines seven historical golden ages—ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, Abbasid Baghdad, Song China, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Republic and the Anglosphere—to identify the cultural, scientific, technological and economic factors that enabled their flourishing. Johan Norberg explores common patterns and vulnerabilities in these societies and draws lessons about how progress can be sustained and why prosperous eras eventually falter.

The Third Reich of Dreams is a collection of hundreds of dreams Charlotte Beradt gathered from people living in 1930s Germany. The book shows how Nazi terror and persecution seeped into private imagination, with recurring images of fear, loss, surveillance and displacement, offering an intimate, unsettling portrait of life under the regime without revealing specific historical events.

A narrative-driven account that follows the twenty-four hours around a Roman games to illuminate the lives of gladiators and the society that made them central. Through the perspectives of combatants and observers — from slaves to emperors — it explores spectacle, power, servitude, sex, courage and attitudes to death in Roman life, giving a vivid, spoiler-free picture of what a match day really looked like.

The Traitors Circle tells the little-known true story of a secret group in Berlin—army officers, officials, and socialites—who risked everything to hide and help Jewish people and to oppose the Nazi regime. Working in the shadows, their small network carried out rescues and plotted for a different Germany, until a betrayal within the group forced them to confront the risks and moral costs of resistance.

Arctic Passages examines how rapid warming is opening the Arctic—creating new shipping routes and access to seabed resources—and triggering geopolitical competition among major powers. Drawing on historical exploration and contemporary reporting, Kieran Mulvaney explores the consequences of that scramble for Arctic communities, wildlife, and the global climate, and asks how decisions beyond the region will shape its future.

The Highest Exam examines China’s gaokao, the high-stakes national college entrance exam that determines admission for millions each year. Drawing on research and the authors’ personal experiences, it shows how the exam shapes family decisions, schooling, social mobility, and public policy in China, and how expectations tied to the gaokao are influencing debates about assessment and admissions among Chinese-American communities in the United States.

A concise biography of Xi Zhongxun, father of Xi Jinping, tracing his seven-decade career in the Chinese Communist Party—from revolutionary years and senior roles alongside leaders like Zhou Enlai to his work initiating early reform policies. Drawing on documents and interviews, the book examines how he balanced personal convictions with the Party’s demands and how his experiences illuminate the CCP’s organizational power and its human consequences, while outlining the political legacy that influenced his son.

Righting Wrongs recounts Kenneth Roth’s three decades leading Human Rights Watch, chronicling investigations and campaigns to expose abuses and pressure governments worldwide. Drawing on his personal background and cases from Rwanda, Kuwait, Israel-Palestine, China, Myanmar, Russia-Ukraine and the U.S., Roth explains the strategies—most notably the use of international “shaming”—used to pursue accountability. The book reflects on successes, setbacks, and the ongoing effort to defend human rights globally.

An investigative account of Viktor Bout, the alleged international arms trafficker known as the "Merchant of Death." Scott-Clark traces his global smuggling operations, the long US pursuit that led to his arrest, extradition and 25-year sentence, and his 2022 prisoner exchange and return to Russia. Drawing on interviews with investigators and Bout himself, the book examines his networks and the geopolitical implications of his release.

This book explains the idea of common knowledge—how people form layered beliefs about what others know and what others know they know—and shows how that shared awareness shapes coordination, social rituals, politics, markets, and everyday interactions. Using clear examples from humor, art, and real-world events, it explores the signals that create or mask common knowledge and how those dynamics produce phenomena like panic buying, viral outrage, diplomatic posturing, and awkward personal moments.

A concise biography of physicist Luis W. Alvarez that follows his wide-ranging career—from wartime research and work on the Manhattan Project to innovations in particle physics, archaeological probing, and the development of the asteroid-impact theory for the dinosaurs’ extinction. The book also examines his forceful personality, mentorship, and the scientific controversies and collaborations that shaped his life.

An inside account of how vaccines have been developed and delivered worldwide. Drawing on his experience leading global vaccination efforts — including co‑creating COVAX during COVID‑19 — Seth Berkley explains the scientific, political, and logistical challenges of getting vaccines to people and outlines ideas for improving equity and preparedness for future pandemics.

Food Intelligence explores the biological reasons we eat and explains how different diets affect the body over the short and long term. It examines popular plans (keto, vegan, pescatarian), the roles of calories, micronutrients, and the microbiome, and clarifies that calorie balance drives weight change while overall health depends on more than just calories. The book presents these findings in clear, accessible language without technical jargon.

In 1818 a rare orchid root shipped from Brazil to England ignited an era of "orchid mania" and a decades-long international hunt for Cattleya labiata. The book follows the collectors, nurserymen, plant hunters, South American workers, and botanists whose ambitions and curiosity drove expeditions, and examines the social and environmental damage their pursuit caused. It’s a study of scientific fascination, consumer desire, and the colonial forces behind the scramble for a single extraordinary flower.

Samanth Subramanian explores the hidden network of undersea fiber‑optic cables that carry the world’s internet. Traveling from remote islands to cable‑laying ships, he looks at the technical work of installing and repairing cables, the geopolitical and corporate battles over them, environmental risks, and incidents—like volcanic damage—that can cut a nation off. The book shows how fragile and strategically important this unseen infrastructure is and who controls the global connection.

At the grand Rosecliff estate, Phoenix, a hardworking gardener, finds herself drawn into the private world of Marguerite Gray, a famously influential designer, and her reserved husband. An unexpected incident brings Phoenix closer to the couple, stirring jealousy and putting her career and reputation at risk. When a sudden tragedy triggers an investigation, Phoenix’s hidden past and the tensions around Rosecliff threaten to upend everything she’s worked for.

Ro Shariff is hired to tutor Matt “Freddy” Fredderic, a star hockey player who masks academic struggles and learning differences behind a confident persona. As late-night study sessions turn into friendship, both confront vulnerabilities and quiet longing, learning what real connection looks like without losing themselves.

In early-2000s Seattle, AJ moves across the country to explore his identity and finds an unexpected chosen family: a tight-knit group of gay Asian friends whose personalities and lives collide in funny, tender, and complicated ways. The novel follows their friendships, romances, and struggles as they navigate belonging, desire, and community against the backdrop of a changing city.

Abe Jacobs, 43, facing a dire medical diagnosis, returns to the Ahkwesáhsne reservation hoping for a last‑chance healing from his great‑uncle Budge Billings. Reluctant and skeptical, Abe confronts the reasons he left, the family and cultural ties he abandoned, and what it will take to reclaim hope and identity. The novel is narrated with lively, often humorous voice through Abe’s alter ego, Dominick Deer Woods.

Engineer and space mercenary Caro Ogunyemi infiltrates a prison planet run by the ruthless Pierce family and discovers Leviathan, a super soldier controlled by a brain chip. A single touch frees him, setting off a dangerous scramble to restore his autonomy, protect Caro’s crew, and stage an escape — all while they navigate the unexpected bond forming between them.

Set in an empire consumed by all-out war, Engines of War follows rival guilds and a cast of characters as magic-powered machines and political intrigue reshape the battlefield. Tense and fast-paced, it explores shifting loyalties, conspiracies, and the personal costs of conflict as the trilogy reaches its conclusion.

Set in a small shtetl in the 1930s, Sons and Daughters follows Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen and his children as they confront the pressures of modernity, secularism, and Zionism. As family members pursue differing paths—business, nursing, philosophy, marriage, and emigration—the novel explores the tensions between religious duty and new freedoms and offers a compassionate portrait of a vanishing Jewish way of life.

After a decade on the LAPD, Sonny Rush relocates with her mother to the seaside town of Haven to work in her godfather’s private‑investigation office. A routine missing‑dog case quickly entangles her with old relationships, local tensions and the discovery of a teenager’s body, forcing Sonny to peel back the town’s idyllic façade and confront secrets that threaten her safety.

Joonie, a devoted romance-reader, is obsessed with Ryke, the merman hero from her favorite series. When she discovers he’s modeled on a real person, she sets off on a road trip to find him—bringing her brother’s irritating but attractive best friend along—and discovers that turning fantasy into reality comes with unexpected complications. A playful, steamy romantic comedy that also explores fandom and the tropes of the genre.

When her daughter Sana is arrested for the murder of a neighborhood landlord, widowed Kausar Khan returns to Toronto and refuses to accept the charges. Relying on sharp observation, old friends and her plucky granddaughter, Kausar digs into local secrets and a string of unsolved crimes to find the truth in this cozy, twisty whodunnit.

In 1952 Penelope Fitzgerald, coping with a difficult marriage and young children, travels to northern Mexico with her son after learning of a possible inheritance from distant Delaney relatives. What follows is an unpredictable three‑month stay in the town of Fonseca—between rival claimants, eccentric locals, and encounters with artists—during which she must manage fragile finances, a chaotic household, and her son’s safety. The novel is a fictionalized, intimate portrait of that season in her life.

After a public breakup, Ramin impulsively travels to Italy to reinvent himself. There he unexpectedly reunites with Noah, a former classmate now navigating divorce and a reluctant family trip. Old crushes resurface and the two begin a passionate, second‑chance relationship, but both must reckon with insecurities and whether what they’ve found will survive beyond their holiday.

Muriel “Mrs. Blossom,” a middle‑aged widow who once assisted a private investigator, takes a French river cruise after an unexpected change in her circumstances. When a man she met on the trip turns up dead in Paris, she finds herself drawn into a compact mystery aboard the MS Solitaire involving a possible stolen artwork and a persistent, enigmatic companion. As she questions who to trust, Mrs. Blossom uses her quiet instincts and curiosity to peel back layers of deception without leaving the cruise.

When Lukan Gardova arrives in the spired city of Korslakov to claim his father’s legacy in the Blackfire Bank, his vault key is stolen by a mysterious thief called the Rook. Chasing the thief with his companions draws them into a tangle of murder and deception, and into an uneasy alliance with Lady Marni Volkova, who has her own secrets and an agenda that will lead them into Korslakov’s dangerous past and a long‑lost alchemical formula that could change the city forever.

Atavists is a linked collection of short stories set in a near post‑pandemic America, following families, couples, and loners as their lives intersect across suburban lawns, beauty salons, tech‑bro mansions, assisted‑living facilities, college campuses and medieval role‑playing festivals. Populated by various “-ists” (futurists, insurrectionists, cosmetologists, and more), the stories examine obsessions, surveillance, class and generational tensions through vivid, character‑driven scenes—kept spoiler‑free and focused on mood and relationships rather than plot resolution.

Evensong follows the Humpty Dumpty Club, a circle of older women in Pittsburgh who rally to care for their injured leader and for one another. Told through the perspectives of the group’s core members, the novel quietly explores aging, friendship, caregiving, and the small, resilient acts that hold chosen family together.

Tam, who has spent years suppressing her dangerous supernatural side, is pulled back into a violent magical world when her estranged Aunt Tigress is murdered. Inheriting an undead fox and a host of old enemies, she must face creatures drawn from Chinese and Siksiká Nation–inspired folklore while navigating guilt, a budding sapphic romance, and the question of whether monsters can have happy endings.

Years after ending her engagement for her family’s sake, Naila Darwish returns to England and unexpectedly reunites with Basil Trevelyn, who has since inherited an earldom. Old regrets and pride keep them at odds even as their attraction rekindles, forcing both to confront past mistakes and decide whether to risk love again.

Set at a small Massachusetts college in 1992, the novel follows a women’s cross-country team as they train for the New England Division Three championships. Told through the perspectives of the six fastest runners, it centers on star Kristin’s sudden struggles and team captain Danielle’s efforts to keep the team together while facing her own past. The story examines the pressures the young women place on their bodies and friendships and how they learn to support one another.

After decades of obscurity, mystery novelist Duncan Torrens draws sudden interest when a blogger and publishing figures start probing who controls the rights to his backlist. Told through five unreliable narrators—the Librarian, the Reader, the Publisher, the Editor and the Writer—the race to claim those rights uncovers secrets, rivalries and increasingly dangerous consequences. A darkly comic, twisty crime novel that plays with perspective without revealing the outcome.

Hendrix Barry has a successful life and big ambitions, but caring for an aging parent and past disappointments have left her wary of romance. At a high‑profile party she meets Maverick Bell, a charismatic tech mogul who sees and pursues her in a way no one has before. Their chemistry forces Hendrix to confront her boundaries and decide whether to risk her carefully planned path for a relationship that feels both irresistible and complicated.

Curtis Wilson is a classical music prodigy who has risen from inner‑city Washington, D.C., to international acclaim. When his father gets entangled with a ruthless cartel, Curtis, his father Zippy, and Larissa enter witness protection and abandon his career. With law enforcement unable to stop the threat, the family must take matters into their own hands, forcing Curtis to choose between his music and protecting the people he loves.

In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, four ICU nurses in San Bernardino—Larette Embers, Cherrise Martinez, and traveling nurses Pam Ott and Marisol Manalang—live in RVs beside the hospital and form a makeshift household. Facing extreme heat, family strains, and the relentless demands of caring for dying patients, they forge a fragile community of solidarity, care, and survival.

In a Britain shaped by living stories, witch Simran and knight Vina are bound to repeat the tragic tale of the Knight and the Witch across centuries. As the two women fall in love, they must decide whether to follow their desires when doing so seems to doom them both. When a mysterious assassin begins targeting tales like theirs, they seek a way to break the cycle by creating a story strong enough to change their fate.

Thrilled to Death is a selection of Lynne Tillman’s short stories from across her career. The pieces are playful and formally inventive, following wry, ambivalent characters as they grapple with sex, death, memory, anxiety, and questions about art and culture. The collection emphasizes voice, intellectual wit, and reflective, often paradoxical perspectives rather than conventional plot.

In Regency England, Gothic novelist Lady Georgiana Cleeve suspects a rival of lifting her plots and is shocked to discover the author is Cat Lacey, the butler’s daughter and an old secret crush. When both women become trapped in an eerie manor while working on their next books, rivalries and ghostly happenings give way to a complicated, growing attraction.

Set in the summer of 1986 in New York, the novel follows Nina Jacobs as she navigates her volatile home life and tries to fit into the privileged Upper East Side scene. Determined to lose her virginity and find connection, she turns to alcohol, prescription drugs and cocaine while pursuing the charismatic Gardner Reed, with consequences that force her to confront the risks of that world.

To Lose a War compiles Jon Lee Anderson’s on-the-ground reporting from Afghanistan — spanning his first coverage in the late 1980s through the post‑9/11 invasion and the Taliban’s return in 2021. Using previously published dispatches and new material, the book offers a chronological, eyewitness account of the hopes, strategic missteps, and long-term consequences of the U.S.-led intervention, presented without revealing key plot details.

Adam Becker critiques Silicon Valley’s fixation on space colonization, digital immortality, and superintelligent AI, arguing these visions lack strong scientific grounding and often serve power-seeking interests. He shows how such fantasies distract attention from urgent social and environmental problems and rest on shallow futurism and harmful assumptions.

A practical, research-informed handbook for conducting better conversations and interviews, blending storytelling from reporting with cognitive science and concrete techniques to help readers ask more effective questions, build rapid rapport, and elicit honest, revealing answers; it emphasizes preparation, curiosity, active listening, managing power dynamics and cultural differences, using silence and follow-ups, and ethical responsibility, offering actionable frameworks and real-world examples to disarm subjects and get beyond surface responses.

Flashes of Brilliance traces the experiments and eccentric figures who shaped photography from the 1830s to the early 20th century. It covers daring technical breakthroughs and projects—from underground and night photography to underwater, aerial, and microscopic imaging—and profiles innovators such as Anna Atkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and Étienne-Jules Marey. The book also looks at early challenges that endure today, including image manipulation, surveillance of suffragists, and how Black figures like Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass used self-portraiture to claim identity. A compact, spoiler-free survey of how early photographic experiments changed the way we see the world.

A collection of essays in which Lawrence Burney examines his Baltimore upbringing, Black diasporic music, and family traditions. Blending personal memoir with cultural criticism, he writes about trips to Lagos and Johannesburg, a childhood memory of his mother opening for Gil Scott-Heron, and family gatherings in Maryland to reflect on identity, belonging, and how art shapes self-understanding.

Shadow Cell is a firsthand memoir by married CIA officers Andrew and Jihi Bustamante about being deployed after a mole compromised the agency’s source network in a rival country codenamed 'Falcon.' Considered expendable because they lacked local experience, the couple build a covert cell, recruit sources, and use unconventional tradecraft to uncover the insider threat. The book recounts their covert operations, the techniques they used in the field, and the personal risks of life in intelligence, without revealing key outcomes.

A behind-the-scenes account of the making of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, offering inside access to Springsteen and his band and detailing the writing and recording of each song while exploring the album’s creative process in a concise, spoiler-free way.

A searing collection of essays and reportage that traces the contours of Black life and American democracy, blending historical analysis, keen political commentary, and personal reflection to explore protest, policing, institutions, and the persistent fight for racial justice. Through examinations of moments from the civil rights era to contemporary movements, the book interrogates how power is wielded and contested, how narratives are shaped by media and politicians, and how everyday acts of resistance reveal the stakes of citizenship. Crisp, erudite, and morally urgent, the pieces illuminate both the structural forces that constrain Black lives and the improvisational strategies communities use to resist, persist, and imagine a more democratic future.

David Denby profiles Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer, showing how their Jewish heritage and American freedom shaped their work and reshaped mid‑20th‑century U.S. culture. Operating in music, comedy, feminism, and literature, they altered public tastes and debates while revealing ambition, contradictions, and intense personalities. The book examines their influence and character without revealing personal spoilers.

American Scare by Robert W. Fieseler examines how a mid-20th-century Florida legislative investigation, the Johns Committee, targeted Black and queer citizens. Using newly available primary documents and focusing on cases such as Art Copleston’s coercive interrogation, the book details how the committee—led by politician Charley Johns—used legal and extra-legal means to intimidate NAACP members, professors, and students, and shows the personal and community harms that resulted while drawing connections to present-day issues.

A lively culinary memoir that weaves together memories of living in the American West with recipes, folk stories, and meditations on hunger, survival, and identity; the narrator recounts episodes of childhood, relationships, farm and ranch life, and encounters with landscape and animals, using food as a lens to explore cultural history, personal loss, sexuality, creativity, and resilience, blending practical cookery with wry, lyrical observation.

After losing his corporate job and facing health challenges, Steve Grant becomes a rural letter carrier in his Appalachian hometown. As he delivers mail and supplies, he reconnects with neighbors, confronts family and identity issues, and finds renewed purpose, community, and meaning through the routine and relationships of daily postal work.

Aflame recounts Pico Iyer’s decades of silent retreats at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur and how those periods of stillness brought clarity and joy to his life. Facing personal upheavals—fires, loss, a daughter’s illness—he reflects on silence, inwardness, and how solitude can strengthen our capacity for companionship. The book blends memoir and observation of monastic practice to explore how quiet can reshape how we live and love.

Splendid Liberators is a narrative history of the 1898 Spanish–American War and its aftermath, exploring how the conflict expanded U.S. influence and affected Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Through portraits of central figures—Teddy Roosevelt, José Martí, Emilio Aguinaldo, Clara Barton, Mark Twain, and others—and scenes from battlefields, disease-ridden camps, and political debates, the book examines the human costs, resistance, and lasting consequences of America’s first major overseas intervention from American, Cuban, and Filipino perspectives.

Dinner with King Tut follows experimental archaeologists who recreate ancient foods, tools, technologies, and rituals to recover the sensory details of past lives. Sam Kean joins their hands-on experiments—firing catapults, building Roman-style roads, trying ancient surgery and tattooing, and sailing reconstructed boats—to evoke how people looked, sounded, and tasted across eras and cultures. The book offers a lively, research-based tour of everyday experience in history without revealing specific plot details.

Goliath’s Curse surveys five millennia of societal collapse, drawing on archaeology and anthropology to examine patterns across more than 440 past societies—from early Egypt to the modern era. Luke Kemp identifies recurring causes and systemic risks (including environmental stress and high interdependence), explores what collapse can look like, and highlights how resilience often depends on social and political choices.

Built in Sweden in 1979 and known by many names, one barge serves as troop barracks, a floating jail, and temporary factory housing as it moves through shifting jurisdictions. Following the Vessel’s changing roles and registrations, Empty Vessel uses this single object to explore offshore flags, modular shipping, and market-driven policies that reshape labor, law, and everyday lives across borders—offering a compact, spoiler-free look at globalization’s human and legal effects.

After spending a solitary night in the Secret Annex where Anne Frank hid, Lola Lafon reflects on memory, the construction of Anne Frank’s public image, and the experience of writing under confinement. Interweaving personal losses — relatives taken in the Holocaust and a childhood friend lost to the Khmer Rouge — the book is a concise, reflective meditation on how we remember tragedy and why women write in the face of danger.

How to Be Well is a journalistic investigation of the modern wellness industry and its impact on how people think about health and self-care. Amy Larocca explores popular trends and communities, assesses the science behind common practices, and examines how wellness is shaped by gender, class, race, commerce, and long-standing beauty and fashion marketing—showing why alternative remedies persist and how the industry profits from health anxieties.

Historian Danielle Leavitt, an American who grew up in Ukraine, uses online diaries and reporting to follow a diverse group of Ukrainians through the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Through intimate, character-focused portraits—a would-be café owner, a young woman whose plans and relationships are upended, and a fashion insider who returns to help—Leavitt reveals how war reshapes everyday life, community, and national identity without focusing on battlefield rhetoric.

Part memoir and part conceptual art project, Lana Lin’s The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam retells her partner Lan Thao’s life from Việt Nam during the war alongside Lin’s own experiences as a gender-queer Taiwanese American. Using an experimental, dialogic approach inspired by Gertrude Stein, the book examines queer love and artistic collaboration while probing race, gender, memory, and everyday subjects like photography, illness, food, and life in New York in an intimate, reflective voice.

Art Work is Sally Mann’s reflective exploration of creativity and artistic practice. Using personal stories, photographs, journal entries, and letters, she offers candid lessons on work, risk-taking, rejection, luck, and the persistence required to make art, all delivered in a direct, personal voice.

A concise global history that traces money from ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets through trade routes and marketplaces to modern cryptocurrencies. McWilliams explores how monetary systems have shaped politics, commerce, culture and human behavior, using anecdotes and portraits of innovators, rulers, fraudsters and speculators to show money’s influence on society.

An engrossing study that interweaves a biography of a singular Southern poet with close readings of his work, tracing how his rural roots, personal mythmaking, and turbulent inner life shaped a distinctive, visionary voice. The book reconstructs his life—family, travels, influences—and situates his major long poem and lyric sequences within themes of landscape, memory, violence, and longing, while examining stylistic innovations, narrative lyricism, and religious and folkloric echoes. It also addresses the circumstances and impact of his early death, the cultivation of his posthumous reputation, and the ways his work challenges and enriches American poetic traditions.

A lyrical, month-by-month chronicle of life among coastal seal colonies that blends close natural history observation, personal anecdote and evocative photography to trace the animals’ seasonal rhythms—from mating and pupping through molting and migration—while highlighting individual personalities, social bonds and the practical challenges of survival. The narrative pairs intimate encounters with broader conservation context, showing how changing habitats and human activity shape the seals’ lives over the course of a year.

This Unruly Witness gathers essays, poems, letters, and interviews that explore poet-activist June Jordan’s life, work, and influence. Contributors reflect on her roles as poet, healer, and organizer, showing how her writing continues to inspire community, love, and resistance.

A sharp, historically grounded critique of American policing that traces how beliefs about safety, property and race shaped the police’s expansion and distorted their role, arguing that contemporary reforms often entrench harm by treating symptoms rather than causes. Weaving legal and social history with reporting, the book shows how slavery-era patrols, labor control, and twentieth-century professionalization remade public order, and how police increasingly became the default responders to homelessness, mental illness and domestic crises. From this foundation it challenges familiar reformist fixes and advances a practical, justice-oriented case for shrinking police functions, redirecting resources to community institutions and reimagining public safety around prevention, care and democratic accountability.

Adam Plunkett combines close readings of Robert Frost’s poems with biographical investigation to reassess Frost’s life and key relationships—particularly his fraught friendship with biographer Lawrance Thompson. The book traces how Frost’s tensions between privacy and intimacy shaped his poetry, offering a fresh, concise interpretation without revealing plot details.

Between 1921 and 1944, roughly one million ethnic Mexicans living in the United States—many U.S. citizens, especially women and children—were forcibly removed to Mexico. Drawing on oral histories and archival research, Marla A. Ramírez traces the effects of these removals across three generations, focusing on women’s efforts to reclaim citizenship, the loss of generational wealth, and long-term legal, social, and economic consequences. The book highlights how policies on both sides of the border enabled the expulsions and how descendants continue to resist and remember this overlooked chapter of U.S. immigration history.

In the French Alps, a solitary mountain climber and gym teacher named Cédric brings home a Bernese Mountain Dog puppy called Ubac. The two form a close bond as they hike and explore the outdoors, and over the years their household grows to include Cédric’s partner and more dogs. Ubac and Me is a quiet, moving reflection on companionship, the rhythms of a life lived outdoors, and the deep affection people share with their pets.

A deeply reported, photo-rich portrait of Afghanistan that combines on-the-ground reportage and striking images to chronicle the lives, traditions, and struggles of ordinary Afghans amid decades of conflict; it captures the country's cultural diversity, the resilience and hardships of women and families, the imprint of war and foreign intervention, and the tensions between modernity and tradition through intimate interviews, vivid scenes, and documentary photography.

Selby’s memoir recounts a decade working as a wildland firefighter, from novice crew member to elite hotshot teams. It blends firsthand accounts of the physical and emotional demands of frontline firefighting and the complicated camaraderie and sexism encountered on crews with broader reflections on fire science, federal policy, and land stewardship.

Taking Manhattan tells how, in 1664, English forces moved to take Dutch New Amsterdam and how negotiations between Richard Nicolls and Peter Stuyvesant reshaped the settlement. The book follows the fusion of Dutch multiethnic commercial life with rising English power that laid the foundations of modern New York, while also tracing the violent dispossession of Native peoples and the emergence of slavery—capturing the city’s early mix of opportunity and oppression.

A critical legal history that traces how judges, prosecutors, and other courtroom actors actively shaped and sustained racialized systems of punishment and disenfranchisement from the era of slavery through Jim Crow to the modern carceral state. The book argues that courts and legal doctrines were not neutral arbiters but complicit architects of policies—through rulings, sentencing practices, and procedural decisions—that expanded state power over Black communities. By combining historical narrative, case studies, and legal analysis, it reveals the judiciary’s central role in producing mass incarceration and calls for rethinking the role of legal institutions in achieving racial justice.

Lindsey Stewart traces the history of conjure women—healers, midwives, and spiritual practitioners—whose herbal remedies, rituals, and crafts shaped African American life from slavery through Jim Crow. Working in secrecy, they preserved ancestral knowledge and created practical responses to oppression, influencing everyday health remedies, music, textiles, and foodways. The book explores how these hidden practices helped communities survive and resist and how their legacy is woven into American culture.

Nicholas Thompson traces how running has shaped his life—from a childhood mile shared with his father, through a medical scare and the grief after his father’s death, to an intense period of later-life training for the Chicago Marathon. Over seven years he transforms his body and outlook, using the discipline of distance running to explore ambition, aging, family relationships, and resilience.

In 1975, as violence escalates in Northern Ireland, a threatening letter and bullet arrive in Philadelphia, linking the city’s Irish community to the conflict. The book chronicles a small group of U.S.-based Irish nationalists known as the Philadelphia Five who secretly smuggled weapons to the IRA, and follows the investigative and personal consequences that followed—without revealing outcomes or twists.

A brilliant, damaged hacker lies in hospital and faces psychiatric scrutiny and criminal charges while a covert network inside the security services moves to bury her past; her journalist ally pursues a dangerous investigation into corruption, cover-ups and long-buried abuses tied to her violent history, using reporting and digital sleuthing to expose powerful officials, protect her in court, and force a high-stakes legal and moral reckoning that reshapes the lives of everyone involved.

When Satnam returns to his ancestral village for his grandmother’s funeral, he finds water in a long-dry well — a discovery that sparks plans to unearth the legendary Saraswati and build a new city. As Satnam becomes drawn into the project and its rising nationalist fervor, the river’s reappearance connects him to six relatives around the world and prompts reckonings with history, land, family and identity.

Tara, a successful Delhi lawyer, and her friend Lila face family conflicts when their fathers’ decisions and brothers’ claims put their independence at risk. The novel follows their struggles with sibling rivalry, patriarchal expectations and contested inheritances against a backdrop of ecological strain and political unrest in contemporary Delhi.

Jules works behind the bar at a rundown student nightclub in Brighton, where she watches life pass by while her ex-husband runs the place. When a new, enigmatic young coworker arrives, their developing connection unsettles Jules and pushes her to rethink love, desire, and what family can become. Gunk is an intimate, atmospheric novel about unexpected bonds and the uncertain shape of the future.

A middle-aged woman and her teenage sister take a whisky-fuelled campervan road trip across Scotland to celebrate a birthday. As they travel, old tensions, secrets and complicated relationships resurface. Sharp, funny and emotionally honest, the novel explores sisterhood, friendship and the lingering pull of youth—without giving away key plot points.

In the late 18th century, Angel Kelly sails from Liverpool intending to found a utopian commune but a mutiny leaves him and his crew stranded on the coast of a Spanish colony. Rescued by a young Amerindian named Esa, the group's actions soon threaten her community, and years later Esa is drawn into a dangerous struggle between local resistance and competing colonial powers.

Three very different mothers — glamorous Frankie, recently bereaved Miriam, and charity CEO Bronagh — find their lives entangled when their 18-year-old sons are accused of sexually assaulting Misty Johnston, a young woman from a less privileged family. As they use their influence to shield their children, the novel examines class, power and the moral complexities of parenthood in contemporary Northern Ireland.

Set over a year in a remote village in northern England, Open, Heaven follows sixteen-year-old James as he discovers his sexuality and meets Luke, an older, charismatic and troubled boy sent to live with relatives. Their growing connection challenges James’s ties to family and community and reveals both boys’ deep longings for intimacy, belonging, and stability. The novel is a spare, lyrical exploration of first love, desire, and the risks of becoming who you are.

Three friends—Rach, Kel, and Shaz—come of age in a gritty Yorkshire town in the 1990s, sharing mischief, first loves, and risky choices. As they move toward different futures, a long-buried secret threatens the bond that has held them together. Told in a local Yorkshire voice, the novel follows their lives over years and across places, exploring friendship, loyalty, and the hard truths of growing up.

In her final year of university, a young woman drifts through lectures, art exhibitions and study groups while struggling to find her place and understand what it means to be a person. As she becomes drawn to a fellow student, Luke, she wonders whether connection will clarify reality or deepen her confusion. The novel follows her unraveling sense of self and engagement with the physical world, told in a wry, observant voice.

This book is a biographical account of three generations of women in China, spanning the years 1909 to 1991. The narrative follows the lives of the author's grandmother, a warlord's concubine; her mother, a high-ranking official in the Communist Party; and the author herself, who grew up during the Cultural Revolution before moving to the West. The book presents a vivid portrayal of the political and social changes in China during the 20th century, as seen through the eyes of these three women.

Vagabond is Tim Curry’s memoir, tracing his journey from childhood and early stage experiences to a long career across theatre, film, television and voice work. He offers candid, behind-the-scenes stories about creating memorable characters, moving between stage and screen, and the personal moments that shaped his life and craft—presented in an engaging, spoiler-free recollection.

A candid memoir that traces the singer’s journey from a modest upbringing in Alabama through early success with a breakthrough band to a chart‑topping solo career, blending behind‑the‑scenes anecdotes about songwriting and touring with frank reflections on relationships, family, loss, and the pressures of fame, ultimately revealing the personal resilience and creative drive behind a celebrated musical life.