All Books

Harvard paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman traces six million years of human evolution to explain how the bodies we inhabit were shaped for a world that no longer exists, and why the mismatch between our evolved biology and modern life is the root cause of many of today's most common chronic diseases. The book is both a natural history of the human body and a provocative argument for rethinking how we treat it.

Five Lisbon sisters in a Michigan suburb in the 1970s. Told from the collective perspective of neighbourhood boys who were obsessed with the sisters — narrated twenty years after the girls all killed themselves in one calendar year. A mystery about the inner lives of girls the boys never understood and never will.

1890s Brazil: a messianic prophet leads the poor and desperate to the remote community of Canudos. The new Brazilian republic sends four military expeditions to destroy them. Based on the real Canudos War (documented by Euclides da Cunha), this is Vargas Llosa's most epic novel—a portrait of religious fervor, political incomprehension, and mass violence.

Former World Series of Poker champion Annie Duke argues that all decisions are bets — commitments made under uncertainty — and that the key skill in life and business is separating the quality of a decision from the quality of its outcome.

1845. A German explorer named Johann Ulrich Voss leads an expedition across the Australian continent that no European has crossed. In Sydney, he exchanges letters with a young woman, Laura Trevelyan, who comes to know him more truly than any member of his party. Based on the real explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, Voss is White's masterpiece—and Australia's greatest novel.

Sebastian Junger spent a year embedded with a US Army platoon at a small outpost in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan — one of the most violent postings of the entire war. The book is an account of what those men found there: the fear, the boredom, the violence, and the specific form of belonging that combat produces.

The Mulvaney family of upstate New York — prosperous, beloved, the kind of family other families point to — disintegrates after Marianne, the eldest daughter, is raped at her high school prom. Her rapist faces no consequences. Her family falls apart.

Mungo Hamilton, fifteen, grows up in a Glasgow housing estate in the early 1990s — caught between his Protestant gang community and a secret relationship with a Catholic boy named James.

Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan (1979-1989) returned home in zinc coffins or with wounds that could not be named. Alexievich interviews the survivors, the mothers, and the widows—recording a war that the Soviet state refused to acknowledge. 'Zinky boys' was soldiers' slang for the zinc-lined coffins the bodies came home in.

An intellectual writer goes to Crete to manage a mine and encounters Zorba — a broad-chested, life-devouring man who teaches him what it means to live fully and without fear.

A series of linked essays on the value of getting lost — geographically, psychologically, historically. Solnit ranges across landscape, memory, art, and personal experience to argue that losing one's way is not a failure but a condition for discovery.

Marian Forrester, wife of a retired railroad pioneer in Nebraska, is observed across years by Niel Herbert — first as a boy who worships her, later as a young man who watches her adapt to reduced circumstances after her husband's financial ruin. A novel about idealism and its loss.

After her father's death, Ernaux wrote the book about him she had always been afraid to write: an account of a working-class Norman man who crossed from peasant to petit-bourgeois in one generation, and whose daughter crossed further still, into the educated bourgeoisie—and away from him forever.

A man walks into the forest and loses his way — a short prose work that moves between the literal and the spiritual as he encounters a presence in the darkness and finds his way back.

An American photographer in France narrates — and partly invents — the affair between Philip Dean, a young American, and Anne-Marie Costallat, a French shop girl. The narrator is unreliable; the affair may be partly or wholly imagined. The prose is among the most beautiful in American fiction.

Brighton, the 1930s. Pinkie Brown is a seventeen-year-old gang leader, a Catholic who believes in damnation and acts accordingly. After a murder, he marries Rose, a waitress who could testify against him, intending to kill her after she can no longer be called as a witness. Ida Arnold, a cheerful hedonist, pursues him. Greene's darkest and most theologically exact novel.

Rosa Burger is the daughter of Lionel Burger, a white South African Communist who died in prison for the anti-apartheid cause. What does it mean to be a martyr's daughter? To inherit a political identity you did not choose? To leave, as Rosa does, for Europe? Gordimer's most personal and most psychological novel, banned in South Africa upon publication.

A Soviet cancer ward in 1955, two years after Stalin's death. Oleg Kostoglotov, a former political prisoner with cancer, argues about history, morality, and medicine with his fellow patients—Communist functionaries, doctors, nurses—in a hospital that becomes a miniature of the Soviet state. The novel Solzhenitsyn was prevented from publishing in the USSR.

Bette Fischer, a poor seamstress humiliated by her beautiful cousin Adeline's superior life, quietly engineers the destruction of Adeline's family — through the Hulot family's weakness for women, and through her own secret alliance with the courtesan Valérie Marneffe. Balzac's greatest study of revenge and female power.

A Moroccan sociologist's memoir of growing up in a traditional domestic harem in Fez in the 1940s — a world of courtyard gardens, female solidarity, strict boundaries, and the constant negotiation between tradition and the desire for freedom.

Effi Briest, seventeen, marries the older Baron von Instetten and follows him to a posting in Pomerania. Lonely and frightened, she has a brief affair with Major Crampas. Years later, her husband discovers the letters, challenges Crampas to a duel, kills him, divorces Effi, and separates her from her daughter. Effi dies of illness and grief.

In a bare room, Hamm—blind and unable to stand—commands his servant Clov, while his legless parents Nagg and Nell sit in ashcans. Outside: nothing. Endgame is Beckett's most claustrophobic and arguably most profound play, a single act in which the end of the world seems to have already happened and all that remains is the habit of continuing.

Fourteen-year-old Gyuri Köves is deported from Budapest to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, narrating his experience in a tone of bewildered, almost clinical detachment that refuses the expected moral outrage — one of the most formally radical choices in all of Holocaust literature.

Seven interconnected stories spanning a century of the McCaslin family, both its white and Black branches, culminating in 'The Bear'—one of the greatest long stories in American fiction—in which Ike McCaslin confronts the ledgers of his grandfather's crimes against enslaved people and repudiates his inheritance.