Non-fiction

Twenty years ago, in a series of mysterious, incandescent writings, David Seabrook told of the places he knew best: the declining resort towns of t...

Beginning with the election of Donald Trump ("The Loneliest Man in the World") and expanding back and forth into American history, surveillance, vi...

Every year, air pollution prematurely kills seven million people around the world, in rich countries and poor ones. It is strongly linked to stroke...

Lynsey Hanley was born and raised just outside of Birmingham on what was then the largest council estate in Europe, and she has lived for years on ...

David Foster Wallace is to contemporary literature what Kurt Cobain is to music. He died young enough for his promise and his achievements to solid...

Hiking with Nietzsche is a tale of two philosophical journeys in the Swiss Alps: one made by John Kaag as an introspective teenager, the other seve...

All cultures are different, and have different ways of thinking. In How the World Thinks, Julian Baggini travels the globe to provide a hugely wide...

The destiny I put down in my novel has become mine. I am now under arrest like the hero I created years ago. I await the decision that will determi...

In an Antique Land is a subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale. When the author stumbles across a slave narrative in the margins of ...

The Hebrides hold a remarkable place in the imaginations of Scotland and England. On the outer edge of the British Isles and facing the Atlantic Oc...

A profound exploration of the oceanic depths of longing and obsession, Make It Scream, Make It Burn is a book about why and how we tell stories. It...

Rebecca Solnit's essay 'Men Explain Things to Me' has become a touchstone of the feminist movement, inspired the term 'mansplaining', and establish...

It is where Castro raised the money to overthrow Batista. It is where generations of Castro's enemies raised armies to overthrow him, without succe...

The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago's black elite. She calls ...

In the remote mountains of Scotland, in high-tech bunkers in South Dakota and in the lush valleys of New Zealand, small groups of determined men an...

North Korea is Orwell's 1984 made reality: it is the only country in the world not connected to the internet; Gone with the Wind is a dangerous, ba...

Michael Jackson: provocateur, icon, enigma. Who was he really? And how does his spectacular rise, his catastrophic fall, reflect upon those who mad...

Edward Said experienced both British and American imperialism as the old Arab order crumbled in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This account of his...

While Obama's triumphant 'Yes we can' continued to reverberate, it was tempting to believe that a new era of opportunity had dawned. But for severa...

In 1981, Rebecca Solnit rented a studio apartment in San Francisco that would be her home for the next twenty-five years. There, she began to come ...

El Salvador, 1982, is at the height of a ghastly civil war. Joan Didion travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, con...

Every few months there's a shocking news story about the sustained, and often fatal, abuse of a disabled person. It's easy to write off such cases ...

In the critically acclaimed Desert Divers and Exterminate All the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist travelled through Africa's deserts and unearthed the cruel...

translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty Welcome to the favela, welcome to the rainforest, welcome to the real Brazil. This is the Brazil where a fact...

Gifts come in many guises. One summer, Rebecca Solnit was bequeathed three boxes of ripening apricots, which lay, mountainous, on her bedroom floor...

The rooms we live in are always more than just four walls. As we decorate these spaces and fill them with objects and friends, they shape our lives...

Following on from the success of Men Explain Things to Me comes a new collection of essays in which Rebecca Solnit opens up a feminism for all of u...

As a young man, Sven Lindqvist was fascinated by the myth of Wu Tao-tzu, and by the possibility of entering a work of art and making it a way of li...

Is it ever possible to know 'the truth' about Sylvia Plath and her marriage to Ted Hughes, which ended with her suicide? In The Silent Woman, Janet...

From clay tablets to the printing press. From the pencil to the internet. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter. This is the true story of lit...

What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? In this first general...

Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle over that foundational power. Women, people of colour and non-straight...