Non-fiction

The Evin Prison Bakers' Club by Sepideh Gholian

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The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club

Baking for the sisterhood

A unique and intriguing concept, The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club by Sepideh Gholian is both a prison memoir and recipe collection; a celebration of baking, as resistance, therapy, and heartfelt tribute to fellow detainees. Gholian, a human rights activist, is to date, still incarcerated in one of Iran’s infamously brutal prisons. Beaten and tortured, she remains unbowed, having smuggled out the contents of this book in order to tell the world about Iranian repression and to raise a beacon of hope.

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Birds as Individuals by Len Howard

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Birds as Individuals

Flights of joy

A delightful read for fans of nature writing, bird life, and old-school English eccentrics, the 1952 book, Birds as Individuals by Len Howard has been deservedly reprinted as a Vintage Classic. The author, Gwendolen (Len) Howard left her life as an orchestral musician in London in the late 1930’s, to pursue her calling as a naturalist in the Sussex countryside. Here, she built a small house, Bird Cottage, threw the doors and windows open to the birds of her garden, and lived the rest of her days in intimate observation of her avian housemates and (literal) bedfellows.

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The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke

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The Story of a Heart

The ultimate gift

A testament to love, altruism, and modern medicine, The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke is one of sixteen titles unveiled on the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction Longlist. In this compelling account of one child’s gift of life to another, Clarke introduces us to Max, a nine-year-old with a failing heart, and Keira, a girl whose heart will sustain him after her death in a car crash. With unfailing warmth and sensitivity, Clarke relays the story of two families during the bleakest moments of their lives, and the aftermath of their decisions. Alongside this, we learn the medical and cultural history of the heart transplant and the philosophical significance of ‘the chief mansion of the soul’.

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The Book Lover's European Bucket List by Caroline Taggart

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The Book Lover’s European Bucket List

Inspiration for your very own literary grand tour

How better to while away the lazy days of Twixmas than planning adventures for the coming year? The Book Lover’s European Bucket List by Caroline Taggart is a wonderful gift for wandering bibliophiles, a combination of practical guide and paean to European literature. One hundred literary landmarks are explored, from the heart of Shelley’s Rome to the contemporary Stockholm of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. Meticulously researched and littered with writers’ quotes, Taggart whisks us away to a continental idyll, where you can ‘linger over a coffee or a cognac and imagine you are waiting for Simone de Beauvoir’.

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Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

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Entangled Life

A fungus for every occasion

If thoughts about fungi ever flit through your mind, chances are it’s in reference to last night’s truffle risotto dinner, or perhaps, less fortunately, a bout of Athlete’s Foot or spreading spores on your bathroom ceiling. The splendid Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is here to bedazzle your uninformed brain, as both a scientific exploration and all-round appreciation of fungi as ‘regenerators, recyclers, and networkers that stitch worlds together’. From medicinal aides to mind-controlling zombie types, there’s a fungus for every occasion; they are sophisticated, problem-solving survivors and our world would collapse without them.

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Broken Threads by Mishal Husain

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Broken Threads

An illuminating and compulsive read

I confess to being a complete ignoramus on the history of the partition of India. Luckily, the brilliant Broken Threads by Mishal Husain has come along to change that. Husain – fiercely intelligent BBC Radio 4 news presenter, feared by British politicians for her razor-sharp interviews – has written the memoirs of her grandparents and parents. In Broken Threads, she weaves together the political and the personal to create an insightful and moving account of their lives as well as India and Pakistan’s fraught shared history.

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All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley

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All the Beauty in the World

Life, death, and the art of seeing

A stand-out read of the year to date, All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley is a finely understated combination of memoir, lessons on the art of seeing, and a  glorious and very personal tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Capturing a transformative period in Bringley’s life, the book focuses on the months and years after his brother Tom’s untimely death, when poleaxed by grief, Bringley drops out of his relentless New York life and takes a job as a museum guard at the Met. Here, with a broken heart, he gets to just stand still awhile and let the art and life of the museum work its healing magic.

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Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Bringing order to the wilderness inside our heads

Curiously beautiful and unique, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig is that rare thing, a book you didn’t know you needed but one destined to bag a lifelong space on your bookshelf. A dictionary in six parts, Koenig’s labour of love is a compendium of new words for emotions. Woven from fragments of a hundred different languages, these are words that give expression to those thoughts and feelings that hover ‘on the cusp of language.’ In the vein of established words like schadenfreude and hygge, they convey the universal experiences that we cannot adequately articulate alone.

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Being Mortal

Surprisingly reassuring on a grim subject

I’m not sure how I’m going to convince you to read this book. Most of you will, understandably, want to look the other way. There are details about dying in Being Mortal by Atul Gawande that will make you shudder and stories about elderly people’s lives that will make you want to cry. But, for me, this book was an eye-opener and surprisingly reassuring, despite it’s grim subject matter. Gawande is an Indian/American surgeon, health-care researcher, a Harvard professor, author, journalist, in short: a brilliant man whose books on health care issues regularly climb to the top of non-fiction bestseller lists.

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Inheritance by Dani Shapiro

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Inheritance

Finding your genes

At the age of 54, author Dani Shapiro discovers that her father is not the man who raised her. The Ancestry.com genealogy test results show that not only is she fathered by someone else, but she also has a lot less Jewish DNA than she thought. Having been raised in an orthodox Jewish family, this raises all kinds of questions about identity and belonging. I was enthralled by Shapiro’s detective work as I joined her emotional rollercoaster to find out why, how and who. Inheritance by Dani Shapiro is a human story which raises some compelling ethical dilemmas and is well worth your time.

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