The people we love transform us. Through their lives. And through their deaths.

In 2005, Hannah Richell, a successful novelist, and her publisher husband Matt, moved from the UK to Sydney. They had two children, and embraced their new lives in Australia. But in July 2014, Matt was killed in a surfing accident, leaving Hannah poleaxed by grief and suddenly raising her young family alone. Ten years later, on the anniversary of Matt’s death, Hannah returned to the beach where he died, and found herself contemplating all she had lived and learned during the preceding decade.

I have read many so-called ‘grief memoirs’, and in the wake of my father’s death from cancer, even written a remembrance memoir of my own. “An Ocean and a Day” is one of the most memorable I’ve read, and not just because of the suddenness with which Matt Richell’s life was cut short. Rather it made me think a great deal about the perspective we gain when we contemplate a bereavement, not just amid the early storms of grief but years later, when the perspective of time allows us to consider how we have been changed by the experience.

Hannah’s beautifully articulated memoir primarily charts the first two years following her devastating loss, but written more than ten years on, it also provides a valuable reflection on how time and distance serve to transmute loss into a reality we can weave more steadily into our daily lives. She also gives us a sustaining account of motherhood, the healing power of creative endeavour, and of learning to live and even grow with loss.

Published 27 August 2026 by Bedford Square

In January this year, I was having an email conversation about forthcoming non-fiction with a publisher I have known and respected for years. Though we were mostly talking about another book entirely, he then added a postscript, tipping me off about one he planned to publish in August. “It’s very special”, he said.

That book was Jason Arday’s “Great and Unfortunate Things”. I was able to read it myself in April, and I wholeheartedly agreed that it was something special. I made it my Book of the Month in my preview of non-fiction coming out in August which ran in The Bookseller in early May. I called it an “astonishing story of grit and resilience and love”, and “a book about how it shouldn’t be so very hard for a talented Black, working-class child with autism to shine”. It was abundantly clear to me from the book that making it less hard had become Professor Arday’s life mission.

In June I interviewed Jason Arday for the magazine in-person at his publisher’s offices in London. We spent an hour together and I found him to be delightful company - warm, self-effacing, generous with his time, and thoughtful in reflecting on his life journey. He characterised the two-year process of writing his memoir with co-writer Eve Claxton as an extremely tough one, and was full of praise for how the Simon & Schuster teams in the US & UK had supported and nurtured him through it “I don’t think many race scholars would describe their work as fun right now given the dominant rhetoric of these turbulent times. When you’re up against the zeitgeist you feel highly exposed and vulnerable”, he told me. In “Great and Unfortunate Things”, he writes that “the suggestion that I somehow wasn’t worthy of my success would be levied against me time and again….To this day, everything I do is scrutinised and challenged in a way that almost never happens to my white colleagues”.

Fast forward to August and I found myself struggling to square what was being written about Jason Arday with the person I had met. In the midst of the media furore I was moved to compose a comment piece for The Bookseller because I was at that point one of the few people who had read “Great and Unfortunate Things”. I wrote the following:

Though it hasn’t stopped others doing so, there’s so much I’m not qualified to comment on, including the allegations of plagiarism, the scrupulousness of Arday’s academic appointments and the number of marathons he might actually have run and in how many days. What I am qualified to comment on is the book itself. And strikingly neglected amid the acres of coverage is the story of what this Black, working-class, neurodivergent man had to overcome in getting any kind of education, let alone making it to university. My teacher husband can testify to the increasing number of students also contending with special educational needs, and struggling in mainstream education as a consequence. Whether you judge Arday worthy or not worthy of his Cambridge professorship, his is a story we still urgently need to hear and to reflect on.

For the record, when I met him, Arday was at pains to say that he believed that the fanfare surrounding his Cambridge appointment was reflective of nothing apart from how unequal a system can be. He told me: “One individual navigating a system does not cultivate the collective change that we all need”.

I concluded my comment piece thus:

If you are as disturbed as I am by the unrelenting and frankly inhumane media coverage that has been focused on Jason Arday in recent days, then at least read his book. You can then make up your own mind, something non-fiction books are better equipped to help us do than almost anything else.

One of the subsequent comments on this piece took me to task for using the word ‘inhumane’ to describe what was going on. Four days later came the appalling news of Jason Arday’s tragic death, an event I - along with so many others - am still trying and failing to make sense of.

Now, with the publication of “Great and Unfortunate Things” a week away, all I can do is to encourage people to disengage with the horrifyingly polarised coverage that is still going on, and instead to read Jason Arday’s book, and decide for themselves about what he has to say. I took his words on trust when I first read the book, and still do now. Following his death, his UK publisher issued a statement in which he writes that “based on the evidence I have seen, both in the public domain and otherwise, I am proud of “Great and Unfortunate Things” and I stand by it”. That is good enough for me.

I have turned down several national media interviews out of respect for Jason Arday’s bereaved family and friends. It seemed only decent not to add further to the incessant media coverage. And as a mother myself, my heart goes out to his mother Giff, whose unshaking belief in her son shines from the book like a beacon. He writes of her: “I was very lucky to grow up with a mother who instinctively rejected the kind of narrow definitions that others imposed on me”.

Reading “Great and Unfortunate Things” has only added to my firm belief that non-fiction books can help us see beyond those kind of narrow definitions too.

Published 27 August 2026 by Simon & Schuster

My late father always preferred cold temperatures to warm ones, a preference my son has inherited. To chime with his preference, Dad also had an abiding interest in polar exploration and I inherited the small library of books he collected on the subject. It includes such chilling classics of the genre as “The Worst Journey in the World” by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, “Alone” by Admiral Richard E Byrd, and “South” by Ernest Shackleton.

With the ongoing heatwave and parlous news of raging fires, I have found myself returning to Dad’s icy library and wondering which Non-Fiction books from my own might have the potential to cool us down, and transport us to frostier worlds as the mercury rises again.

Here are a few suggestions, pulled from the chillier reaches of my bookshelves, along with one forthcoming gem of a snowy read. My selection is pretty penguin-heavy….but is that ever a bad thing?

“Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica” by Sara Wheeler

The Ancient Greeks sensed the presence of Antarctica as a place to balance out the white bit at the top of the globe but even today, few people have ever been there. This classic of contemporary travel writing charts the seven months Wheeler spent in Antarctica and provides a rich and riveting meditation on the mythology, landscape and history of the continent, as well as the characterful cast of modern-day residents who call it home.

“The Little Book of Snowflakes” by Kenneth Libbrecht

I was sent this wondrous gem of an illustrated book by a publisher about twenty years ago and have dipped into it occasionally ever since. It contains magnified photographs of freshly fallen snowflakes, captured using a special photo-microscope in all their rich, crystalline beauty. The US physics professor author grew up on a farm near Fargo, North Dakota where his childhood experience of cold winters led to a lifelong fascination with snowflakes.

“Frostlines” by Neil Shea

National Geographic writer Neil Shea has been reporting from the Arctic for twenty years. His magical debut book was sparked not by an assignment however, but by an otherworldy encounter with a family of wolves on Ellesmere Island in northern Canada and with one white wolf in particular which stared him down. From dwindling herds of caribou to rising tensions along the border between Norway and Russia, it’s a beautiful yet concerning portrait of a transforming region of the world everyone in more southern latitudes must urgently wake up to.

“The Ghost of the Mountains: Unravelling the Secrets of the Snow Leopard” by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi

(out in August 2026 - photo to come)

For more than twenty years, Indian scientist, conservationist and mountaineer Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi has studied snow leopards across the highest reaches of the Himalaya. These rarely seen and exquisitely beautiful creatures face increasing challenges, their survival dependent on a delicate balance of landscape, climate and people. Charting the author’s fascinating field work and weaving elements of memoir throughout, this enchanting book sheds thrilling light on these charismatic and vulnerable animals, making a compelling and urgent case for their conservation.

“Emperor Antarctica: Ice, Silence and Emperor Penguins” by Gavin Francis

Having spent years yearning to go the remotest place on earth, Gavin Francis jumped at the opportunity to spend 14 months as the base-camp doctor at Halley, an isolated British research station on the Caird Coast of Antarctica. In this wonderfully engaging travelogue he eloquently portrays the strange moods and manners of Antarctic living; the silence, the solitude and the consolations of being neighbour to a community of emperor penguins.

I’m so looking forward to seeing Christopher Nolan’s film version of “The Odyssey”. It’s a very long time since I read Homer’s original text and on the principle that you should always read the book first, I want to re-visit at least some of it before heading to the movies.

Amid a plethora (to coin a word with Ancient Greek origins) of Homer-themed books being published to coincide with the release of the new film, I found this one by English Literature professor Henry Power particularly fascinating because it examines the myriad (another Ancient Greek word) ways in which Homer’s works have continued to capture the imagination of writers across millennia. Travelling to places where the stories in “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad” have taken root - from the Greek islands to the Scottish Highlands, the Devon coast and suburban Los Angeles, Power traces the journeys of people for whom Homer’s mythical heroes and monsters have perennially resonated.

Taking in writers including George Chapman, Alexander Pope, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Derek Walcott, Alice Oswald and Michael Longley (whose phrase “I have been Homer-haunted for fifty years” gives the book its title), Power explores how and why Homer’s stories have shaped the way poets read, write and think, ever since they were first sung thousands of years ago….by a poet who may never have actually existed and was more likely thousands of people.

This is not just a book about the influence of Homer on poets however. It is also about how echoes of “The Odyssey” resonate through all our modern-day lives. Returning home after seeing protesting students camped outside his office window and conjuring to himself images of Hector and his troops camped out on the plain, Power finds himself scraping burnt fish fingers from a grill pan and thinking of the “shipwrecked Odysseus, clinging to jagged rocks like an octopus and leaving shreds of his skin behind”.

Published 16 July 2026 by Bloomsbury Continuum

(photo shows proof copy)

“In 2013 my little brother was in prison for armed robbery. My mum was marching the streets with the English Defence League, belting out, ‘I’m England till I die’. At the time I was in an edit suite, making a documentary about the housing crisis, and thinking to myself: How did we get here? As a family, as a class, as a country?”

This is how TV producer and writer, Nicola Wilding describes the catalyst circumstances that led her to write her unforgettable memoir, “These Wild English: A Family, a Class, a Country on Fire”. A study in working-class alienation, it’s a heart-rending debut about how the post-war trajectory of our nation affected some of society’s most exposed and vulnerable. But it’s also a story full of feistiness, tenderness and love, in which Wilding vividly tells her own family story with all its pains and glories. And she skilfully sets it against the wider political, economic and social history of Britain since the 1960s; from the welfare state, the Winter of Discontent and the Right to Buy, to promises that ‘things can only get better’, and the resurgence of the far right

Spanning three generations, from her grandparents’ life of labour on a farm in Cumbria’s Eden Valley, to her mother’s peripatetic, debt-ridden existence in Kent, Cyprus and Northern Ireland, and Wilding’s own often chaotic childhood, it contains a host of ‘White Working Class’ tick box clichés: riotous drunken behaviour, absconding spouses, serial single parenthood, unemployment, debt, benefit fraud, domestic violence, imprisonment. “How easy it would be”, Wilding writes, “to stick a label on my own family and make them fit a ready-made story. But would it be the truth?”.

The great achievement of “These Wild English” is to compel us to jettison all labels and clichés, and show us the truth of just how challenging it could be to hold a family together in the rapidly-changing Britain of the 1970s and 80s which moved fast and broke things, crushing aspirations in the process. From there, it’s not hard to see how we arrived in these present times of fracture and division.

Published 9 July 2026 by Profile

If you asked me to recommend a book about the experience of being adopted, I would immediately be able to think of several. “My Name is Why” by Lemn Sissay; “Red Dust Road” by Jackie Kay and “Ootlin” by Jenni Fagan - which is more broadly about the UK care system - are all superb; in fact you should read all of them on the basis that they are brilliant memoirs, not just because they are about adoption.

Until I read Carol Atherton’s “So Many Ways to Belong” however, I would have been stumped as to any parallel book I could name about the experience of being an adoptive parent. Published in the centenary year of the Children’s Adoption Act, Atherton’s memoir is a candid account of her journey to becoming an adoptive parent which culminated on the day when she and her husband met the red-headed toddler who would become part of the fabric of their lives. Always careful to tell her own story rather than that of her now adult son, Atherton beautifully captures the doubt and uncertainty which accompanied the many months of meetings with social workers, judges, foster carers and others. She also considers the wider history, mythology, and social and political context of adoption; and our very human needs for belonging and identity. “The issues raised by adoption”, she writes, “sit right at the heart of what makes us who we are”.

Atherton closes her book by stating of her son “He will always be absolutely and completely himself, and that’s what matters”. Quoting Kahlil Gibran’ assertation that your children are not your children but the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself, Atherton urges us, rather than focusing on nature vs nurture both when it comes to adoption and more widely, to remember that not everything can be explained by something in the past. I found that very profound.

Published on 9 July 2026 by Fig Tree

As tomorrow is Father’s Day in the UK, just this once I’m going to highlight a book of my own.

When I was 4, I fell in love with the music of Mozart. My Dad was delighted.

When I was 8, I fell still more in love with the music of Davie Bowie, T-Rex and Slade. My Dad couldn’t understand it at all.

For the rest of his life, he tried to help me to rekindle my early childhood love of classical music, but I was too busy to notice and I never got around to playing the CDs he gave me. Then much too soon, my logical, kind, cricket-loving, chess-playing Dad died. And then there was mourning, and for a time, no more music.

But once the early storm of grief had passed, I became preoccupied with this question. How do we act to remember those we have loved and lost in a way that ensures their memory stays comfortingly close?

I found my own answer as I drove up the M5 motorway early one morning, listening to a CD of Dad’s beloved Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E Flat. It was the piece I had fallen in love with at the age of four when I heard it playing on Dad’s reel-to-reel tape recorder. I don’t know why I chose to listen to it again that particular day, more than 40 years later. But its exquisite, galvanic energy had me turning the volume up loud like some baroque boy racer.

Suddenly Dad was beside me again. Not alive of course, but somehow spirited back from wherever he had been since prostate cancer took him away as I kept vigil by his bedside. He was so powerfully present it made me sob. But as my crying subsided, I began to observe how the music was giving tone to my mourning. I felt its pulse as it resounded through my head, and then how it earthed me as the notes glided away.

The act of listening to that piece of Mozart opened up a longed-for path to remembrance. And so I made a resolution that day. I would choose eight pieces of music Dad loved – one for each decade of his life - and listen to them with great care and attention. To try to find out what it was he so appreciated about classical music, as I should have done while he was alive.

The result of that musical journey is “Listen With Father”, a requiem for my beloved Dad, evoked through the classical music he cherished. Blending memoir with biography, history and travel writing, it takes in the music of Mozart, Stravinsky, Brahms, Robert & Clara Schumann, Sibelius, Chopin and Richard Strauss, as well as such performers as Kathleen Ferrier, Murray Perahia, Isata Kanneh-Mason and Annie Fisher.

On the trail of the music that Dad most loved, I write about my trip to Salzburg where I learned to think of Mozart not just as a genius but also a diligent, prolific composer who worked his stockings off. I relive a childhood trip to the cinema with Dad to see Walt Disney’s “Fantasia”, my introduction to the “prehistoric jazz” of Stravinsky (as Leonard Bernstein once dubbed “The Rite of Spring”). I investigate why listening to Kathleen Ferrier singing “Blow the Wind Southerly” always made my Dad cry. I grow to love the music of Brahms; and I have my first piano lesson in decades while learning to play Träumerei by Robert Schumann. I travel to Finland on a pilgrimage to the home of Jean Sibelius, fascinated by this towering talent, plagued by self-doubt and fears of not being good enough. And I try to decide why, when terminally ill, my Dad reached for the music of Chopin.

I hope “Listen With Father” will provide an idiosyncratic listening guide, and an intro to classical music for anyone who finds it a little intimidating – as I once did. And I would love to think that reading my book might also provide solace for anyone else lost in grief – as I once was.

And I think it’s also a nice Father’s Day present.

Published by Wilton Square, 2025

This is the coast of Britain. The place where, on certain stumbling, cash-strapped days, many of its inhabitants feel like they are falling.

I’ve been to Cornwall on holiday almost every year of my life. And it is in so many ways and for so many reasons, one of my happiest places. But it was only after reading Natasha Carthew’s 2023 book “Undercurrent” that I realised what a privilege I have enjoyed all these years.

Carthew - who is also the author of fiction for both adults and young adults as well as Founder and Artistic Director of the Common Ground literature festival - grew up working-class on the Cornish coast and her sometimes shocking, but always proudly resilient memoir “Undercurrent” charts her experiences and how they continue to drive her writing and activism today. Though we middle-class emmets who visit Cornwall on holiday can revel in her glorious descriptions of its natural wonders, Carthew also confronts us with the consequences of our blissful Cornish holidays, including the prevalence of second homes which means she can no longer afford to live in the land where she was brought up.

Now in her second non-fiction book, “Rough Edges”, Carthew embarks on a mission to “give voice to those who have been hit by a tidal wave of misfortune” in unravelling coastal locations right around the UK. On a journey through the seasons and from Dover to Blackpool, she meets people living on the edge in every sense as they contend with everything from the curse of ubiquitous Airbnbs to unstable seasonal jobs and the ongoing pains of austerity. What she discovered on her travels, she writes, has given her a new understanding of her “coastal cousins”; and the fact that “we’re all fighting for a fair and decent life, no matter where we live”.

“Rough Edges” may not be your idea of summer reading. But if you rarely scratch beneath the picture postcard images of your favourite seaside places then may I suggest you add it to your reading list for a clearer-eyed holiday.

Published by Sceptre, 4 June 2026

Only the other day I was thinking that I should write something about my abiding love of graphic non-fiction. Then came awful news - that one of the greatest of graphic non-fiction writers and artists, Marjane Satrapi had died at the age of only 56.

I can’t remember when I first read “Persepolis”, Satrapi’s graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, first published in the UK in 2003. But it feels like I have loved it for ever, and I’ve re-read it several times since. If you have yet to encounter it, then I envy you. In powerful black and white comic strip images, it charts the story of Satrapi’s life in Tehran, from the ages of 6 to 14, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s retime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of the war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists, Satrapi bears witness to a childhood that was uniquely entwined with the history of her country. “Persepolis” is both intensely personal and deeply political, and opening it again now feels doubly poignant given the current US-Iran conflict.

Such was my passion for “Persepolis”, I even bought a copy in the original French, and slowly worked my way through it, revising the language I studied at university in the process. When I opened that copy again after hearing of Satrapi’s untimely death, a comic strip cutting by Satrapi fell out - a page I’d clipped from a copy of French Vogue. In it, Satrapi reminisces in words and images about seeing “Belle de Jour” at the cinema in Tehran with her parents. While too young to make sense of the film at the time, she nevertheless took away the idea that its star, Catherine Deneuve was some kind of great mythical figure who didn’t sleep, wash or use the toilet like ordinary mortals. Then one day, years later and living in Paris, she had a call from French Vogue to say that Catherine Deneuve loved her work.

The idea that Deneuve not only loved her work, but also read comic strips was a revelation to Satrapi. She wrote (my translation): “I deduce that since Catherine Deneuve reads comic strips, she also must go to the toilet”.

There is so much subversive humour in Satrapi’s work, but it is also an immensely powerful form of activism. While she latterly worked more often as a film-maker, in 2024, she edited “Woman, Life, Freedom”, a collective book by 17 Iranian and international comic book artists working with Iranian academics and researchers. They came together to chart the story of the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22 year old Kurdish-Iranian woman detailed for allegedly not wearing her headscarf properly. Her death led to widespread popular unrest in Iran. In an interview published when the book came out, Satrapi said “Never forget all the dictatorships are the same. A night before they fall everyone says: they are so solid, it’s impossible they can fall. Then they fall, and everyone asks: how could they have held so long?”

Tragically both the regime and the unrest continues. But the legacy of Marjane Satrapi’s extraordinary work endures too.

I was a teenager when Wham’s debut single “Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do)” was released in 1982. It’s a very long time ago now, but George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s exuberant first appearance on “Top of the Pops” that year is lodged in my memory almost as if it were yesterday. Still, memorable though it was, there was little hint of the extraordinary, trail-blazing George Michael story that was to follow.

Having spent years ‘in the trenches of the culture wars’ while writing and promoting his excellent books on the British Empire; years he admits had taken their toll, Sathnam Sanghera resolved to embark on a book project that would spark joy. The result is this elegiac yet also poptastically enjoyable personal exploration of the life, times and extraordinary singer-songwriting creativity of George Michael, an artist he has revered all his music-listening life.

Capturing Michael in all his musical glories and contradictions, Sanghera also beautifully and movingly evokes the 80s and 90s in a wider story of tabloids, homophobia, addiction, obsessive fans and the - sometimes terrible - price of fame. And, in a link with his previous books, Sanghera points out that both Michael and Andrew Ridgeley of Wham! were - as he is himself - the children of migrants from countries formerly part of the British Empire.

Music is a marvellous lens through which to write about wider issues, but I also know from first-hand experience how hard it is to do well. Sanghera does it brilliantly, and “Tonight the Music Seemed So Loud” is a fitting tribute to Michael, who died 10 years ago this December.

Published by Picador, 4 June 2026

We live in an age where web pages disappear, where a single politically aligned billionaire can spike a news story or delete a viral video. But once a book miraculously makes it out into the world – onto a shelf, into a library, into a home – it cannot be disappeared. With analogue tenacity a book endures.

These are the words of Sarah Wynn-Williams at this year’s British Book Awards which I attended last week. On stage to accept the Freedom to Publish Award, jointly awarded to her book, “Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work” and to the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre for “Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice”, Wynn-Williams was prevented from speaking publicly about her own book because of an injunction obtained last year by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, whose greed and power-driven machinations she exposes so vividly within it. In fact ahead of the event, The Bookseller which organises the awards was asked to blur any displayed images of her book’s cover, because in a hardening of the original order, she is now unable to even be seen in the presence of her book.

So instead Wynn Williams did something remarkable. She chose to speak about a different book and author; about “Nobody’s Girl” by Virginia Roberts Giuffre. And in doing so, she articulated brilliantly why non-fiction books like hers, like Virginia’s, are so important right now. Because they speak truth to power.

Be in no doubt, Wynn-Williams emphasised, that such books can also cost everything to write. Virginia Roberts Giuffre spent years exhausted by a battle she should never have had to fight and did not get the ending her story deserves. And yet, she added, “there is something the powerful have never been able to destroy. Not princes, not presidents, not lawyers, not the grinding machinery of institutional silence. The power of a book”.

She continued: “This is what the greatest acts of witness always do. They do not close a story. They open it outward – into all the other stories that were never told, all the voices that were silenced before they found a page”.

Sarah Wynn-Williams’ speech was the most rousing rallying cry for the crucial importance of physical books I have heard in a long time. And yet, with a few exceptions, sales of serious Non-Fiction books are dwindling right now. I am under no illusion that the typical book buyer always wants to spend their hard-earned cash on books about difficult issues that can be hard to read. Or indeed spend their valuable, concentrated time on them, particularly with the proliferation of podcasts you can listen to while doing other things.

But without the Non-Fiction books that voice the things we’d rather not know, but urgently need to, the world would be an even more deeply worrying place. As one reader of a Substack post of mine commented a few weeks ago, “Non-Fiction books matter more than ever in today’s splintering world”.

They matter not only because of the issues they force a reckoning with, but because of the voices they enable to be heard. Victoria Roberts’ Giuffre’s voice. Alexei Navalny’s. Gisèle Pelicot’s. Those names are now globally known, but Non-Fiction books also resound with lesser-known but nevertheless significant voices, testifying to some of the most pressing issues of our times. To mention a few recently published examples: “The Lifeboat at the End of the World” by volunteer lifeboat crew member Dominic Gregory which brings home the horror of the so-called “small boats crisis” in the English Channel; “Rough Edges: Where Land Meets Water, The Untold Stories of Coastline Communities” by working-class advocate Natasha Carthew; and “My Body is a Meadow: Finding Freedom in the Outdoors” by Bethany Handley which is about ableism, climate justice and access to nature for all of us.

And in “This is Also a Love Story: Searching for Good in a Divided World”, Orwell-Prize winning author and journalist Sally Hayden tells human stories from behind the headlines of the world’s most turbulent places, stories which remind us of the courage and altruism that can still prevail amid a ton of pain and suffering. In her Prologue Hayden writes: “Journalism is the first draft of history, but it only offers fragments of a wider truth. What can go missing in that initial retelling is a much fuller tapestry of human behaviour, interactions and the connections that drive them”. A stellar argument for Non-Fiction books right there.

Monday night’s British Book Awards made me proud to be part of the book industry. Although I wish I could engender better Non-Fiction sales by advocacy alone, I realised we can’t not have these books. In courageously and meticulously reckoning with the stories that truly need to be told, they have more than proved their immense value to us all.

Language diversity is one of most potent weapons against the diminishment of deep knowledge, the homogenization of culture, the erasure of history, and even some of our health crises . And yet it has never been more imperilled.

Since I was little, other languages besides my own have always fascinated me; the remarkable phenomenon by which other people chat away, communicating similar things, but using entirely different-sounding words to do so. I studied French and Spanish at university and also speak small amounts of German, Greek and Italian. As a native English speaker this makes me relatively unusual, but in truth all these languages are spoken by millions of others too.

This illuminating, rousing book is about languages less spoken, the many that are in danger of dying out altogether over the next century. Some will leave behind dictionaries, novels, and radio recordings. Others will leave nothing save for a relative’s turn of phrase that someone still remembers with affection.

Such a language is Emigliän, an endangered Gallo-Italic language spoken in the Emilia region of northern Italy, and by journalist and writer Sophia Smith Galer’s late grandmother. As her beloved Nonna lay dying, her granddaughter realised that she was about to lose this dialët from her life. This language she couldn’t speak herself, and yet which had always been alive in her hearing was about to fall silent.

Her grandmother’s death, and the discovery that her Nonna’s mother tongue was only one of many such endangered languages around the world, spurred Smith Galer to research and write this account of ten of the estimated 7000 languages which are predicted to be extinct by the end of this century, due to war, climate breakdown, migration, nationalism or simple neglect. From Ukrainian and Ladino to Kichwa, Hebrew and Dagbani, it’s also about the culture and knowledge that we lose for good when a language is killed off.

And the emotional impact too. Smith Galer adds: “As a granddaughter and daughter, listening to what could be the last months and even days of a language that has formed the soundtrack to my life, I hope also to show you linguicide’s great cruelty, and the broken hearts it leaves in its wake”.

Published by William Collins, 7 May 2026

“The least disabling factor in my life is that I can’t walk. The most disabling factor is people’s attitudes”. Last year I had the inspiring experience of interviewing gifted poet, non-fiction author and devotee of the great outdoors, Bethany Handley. She is most definitely a writer to watch.

Handley grew up hiking in the Black Mountains of Wales, caving, climbing and surfing. Then in 2023 when she was in her early 20s, she was struck by an acute virus which led to her losing the use of her legs and any sensation from the waist down. Given her active lifestyle, acquiring this impairment was initially devastating. But then it led to an extraordinary creative flowering, and a debut poetry pamphlet, “Cling Film” in which her witty, fiery and defiant poems invite us to travel in her skin as a young, Disabled woman, exposing the barriers - both physical and systemic - which she now faces.

In “My Body is a Meadow”, Handley’s debut non-fiction work, she delivers a rallying cry, both passionate and political for us to rethink how we live among nature and with each other. Once again, she invites us to roll with her as she explores ableism, climate justice and what nature means to her. Unearthing parallels between land ownership and privatised healthcare, loss of biodiversity and social marginalisation, she calls for us to stop gatekeeping nature and work together to help open it to everyone. It’s all beautifully articulated, and also, for a non-disabled reader like myself, profoundly perspective-prodding.

When we spoke last year, it was marvellous to hear all the ways in which Handley has returned to her active life, and to the mountains and beaches she has always loved. “It feels defiant going back to my favourite places because nobody expects me to be there”, she told me. The fact the nobody expects it is the reason this wonderful, life-enhancing book urgently needs to exist.

Published by Headline Press, 7 May 2026

My 91 year old mother has been in a care home since January, her health and mobility having taken a marked downturn since she had a stroke on New Year’s Eve. Visiting her there has brought me into daily contact with the multi-national team of carers she now relies on to look after her round the clock; as well as the on-call nurses who ensure she takes her medication and discuss her increasingly complex needs with me. The experience has been a salutary reminder of the people we rely on at these challenging times in our lives and those of our loved ones.

It’s only natural that we live our days as if we have all the time in the world. But we should never forget those who care for us when that time starts to run out. So here are three exceptional books by three exceptional people who have chosen to care, in professions which require so much more of them than to simply do their jobs. At first sight these reading choices might seem depressing in subject matter. But I love them for celebrating common decency and kindness, and in so doing providing a humane counterbalance to depressing headlines about the state of our world.

“The Courage to Care: A Call for Compassion” by Christie Watson

Compassion for others is how we will be judged. And is how we should be judged.

From a community mental health nurse marshalling support for a man suffering from severe depression to nurses who work in the military, this second non-fiction book by nurse Christie Watson brings us utterly remarkable stories about the magnificent, beyond-the-call work nurses do, and the exceptional bravery of the patients and families they care for. Published in 2020 at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, it felt timely then, and continues to resonate strongly now, reminding us that we are all deserving of compassion, and that we can all find the courage to care.

“Dear Life: A Doctor’s Story of Love and Loss” by Rachel Clarke

It takes courage to love the things of this world when all of them, without fail, are fleeting, fading, now more than a spark against the darkness of deep time.

Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor, won the 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction for her most recent book “The Story of a Heart”. I love anything Rachel writes but this book remains closest to my own heart. It describes how, having grown up riveted by her father’s stories of practising medicine, she eventually fulfilled her deep-seated desire to become a doctor herself. As a palliative care specialist, she tries to bring care and comfort to those reaching the end of their lives. Then when her beloved father receives a terminal diagnosis, she has to relive all her training in the most personal way possible. This book is a love letter to her doctor father, but also to a profession and to life itself.

“Every Kind of People: A Journey Into the Heart of Care Work” by Kathryn Faulke

Come with me and feel how it is to be in this place that is valued so little but is so vital

Kathryn Faulke never expected to become a home care worker, but after quitting her senior NHS role due to burnout, she hoped it might prove a simpler, less demanding job. However, working long hours for a pittance, she is soon bearing witness to the extraordinary dramas of ordinary lives; from Beryl who screams whenever she is washed but is also ticklish, to bawdy Mr Radbert who promises to give her his car when he can remember where he left it. This marvellously life-affirming and utterly humbling book is a tribute to the life-changing labour of care workers; a window on the neglected lives of the housebound and infirm; and ultimately a celebration of humanity, in all its forms.

I don’t write about health and self-help books very often. Every month brings a raft of new ones and so many of them seem to cover the same topics, and so few of them appear to be published with any consideration of where the true gaps in the market lie. Or in other words, what books people are truly crying out for in this area.

This book however, is a winner. Full disclosure: I’ve known Penny Parkes - a successful author of sparky romantic novels - for over a decade. During that time, I’ve unfortunately witnessed her own chronic health conditions worsen to the point where her life has become dominated by hospital appointments and a gruelling search for medical professionals who can help her. No one I know knows more about navigating our healthcare system than she does because unfortunately she has had to become an ‘expert patient’.

All the more admirable therefore that she has channelled her experiences into this gently galvanising, hand-holding guide which will provide anyone who needs them with the words, prompts, and confidence to advocate for yourself and help the doctor to help you. From preparing for appointments, to keeping your own healthcare records, and addressing serious issues such as racial bias and medical gaslighting, it’s a superbly comprehensive companion for anyone who has ever come away from a doctor’s appointment feeling frustrated, confused, or overwhelmed.

Every household should have one, for as recent experience of needing to advocate for my elderly mother after a stroke this past New Year’s Eve taught me, you never know when you might suddenly need it.

Published by Short Books, 23 April 2026

One night in 2019, London teenager Zac Brettler mysteriously fell to his death from the balcony of a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames. His grieving parents discovered that Zac had been leading a fantasy double life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch. But this youthful desire to move in an elevated world of riches and privilege drew him down into a terrifying underworld of property speculation, insidious corruption and rapacious greed.

“London Falling” investigates what brought Zac to the balcony that night, charting both a devastating family tragedy, and the distortions and skulduggery created by excessive wealth at the heart of one of the world’s great cities. Never sensationalised but told in measured prose that is also as propelling as any thriller, the story is both riveting and horrifying, and was aptly described by Sathnam Sanghera as “more addictive than any box set”.

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and one of the best non-fiction authors writing today. I first read one of his books after he won the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty”, a shocking and impeccably-paced account of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the opioid crisis. I had just been appointed Chair of Judges for the 2022 Prize and reading “Empire of Pain” made me realise just how high the bar was set for our own winner. Also outstanding is his book “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland” which was recently dramatized in a mesmerising series for TV.

“London Falling” is a masterclass in how to hook readers into a story, and moreover an urgent true story that merits a wide audience. I so admire Radden Keefe’s ability to employ his investigative journalist skills, and transmute them in a way that gives us a full-fat, full-length book, rather than an unnecessarily stretched-out long-form article (which is what you often encounter with such books). “London Falling” is also a seminal example of non-fiction’s ability to do all the thrilling, compelling things people much more often associate with novels.

Published by Picador, 7th April 2026

“She was the twentieth century. Who wouldn’t want to write her biography?”.

When Jan Morris – then James Morris - joined the 1953 Everest expedition and became the first correspondent to get news of the successful first ascent back to London she became the most famous journalist in the world. Thus began a glittering career covering such landmark events as the trial of Adolf Eichmann, interviewing the likes of Che Guevara and scooping the story of Suez collusion. Morris gender transitioned in the early 1970s and documented the experience in her book, “Conundrum”. And she was the author of many other books too, including “Venice”, the “Pax Britannica” trilogy and finally, “Think Again”, a volume of diaries published in 2020, the year of her death at the age of 94.

I read a lot of memoir for my non-fiction previews in The Bookseller but these days far fewer biographies. Which is a shame because the art of biography is a fascinating - and often neglected one. Personally I love immersing myself in well-told accounts of the well-lived lives of others.

Including this enthralling, impeccably-balanced and authorised biography of the remarkable Jan Morris. Published by her own long-time publisher Faber, and written by renowned historian and fellow travel writer Sara Wheeler, it charts her long and prolific writing and travelling life. Wheeler deftly captures the complexity of Morris’s character with its mosaic of contradictions: whether it be the Welsh nationalist who wasn’t Welsh, or the ‘preacher of kindness with a cruel side’. Wheeler also handles the story of Morris’s gender transition from James to Jan with sensitivity but also clear-eyed detachment. The result is a scintillating story of travel, of longing, and of a woman who never quite arrived at the person she wanted to be.

I’m ashamed to say that I have read comparatively little of Morris’s work, but it’s a measure of how good this biography is that it has made me want to read more of it as soon as possible. I think Wheeler’s other great achievement is in managing to combine a deep interest in, and admiration for her subject, with a willingness to show that Morris could also be difficult, contrary, incorrigibly self-centred, and downright dislikeable. Appropriate then that Wheeler concludes this wonderfully rounded portrait of a remarkable woman with the following thought about Morris. “Do you like her? is the question I am most often asked. But it’s not like that. I am human. So was she”.

Published by Faber, 9th April 2026

A book about the nuts and bolts of translating Shakespeare into different world languages? If you think that sounds a bit nerdy, then you’re right; it is. But in a very illuminating way and also an extremely thought-provoking one.

Firstly, this books reminds us that it is thanks to translators that the works of Shakespeare (not to mention those of Jane Austen and Franz Kafka and many, many other outstanding authors) are revered all around the world. Without the graft and ingenuity of translators, only those who read and understand the language of the author’s original work would have access to it. Translators rock, and at a time when we must advocate with all our might and main for human creativity in books, I’m a huge supporter of the #TranslatorsOnTheCover campaign which calls on publishers to properly credit translators. Many now do, but some are still shamefully neglectful.

Secondly, translation - especially literary translation - is an extraordinary creative endeavour which we should all - whether we know any other languages beside our first acquired one or not - better appreciate. As Daniel Hahn writes in the opening chapter of this book, as a literary translator, he is daily faced with the task of "replacing all the words in a book - all of them - in such a way that when I’m done, it is nonetheless still itself”

So what does it mean then to replace all the words of a writer as supremely gifted as William Shakespeare? If we change all the poetry, all the wordplay, all the syntax - all the words! - is it still Shakespeare? And if we do, is it still any good? From the reasons why Hamlet might be even longer in Japanese and how you rebuild a 400-year-old joke into a new culture and with none of the same words; to why Lady Macbeth’s pronouns are a problem, this is a scintillating inside account of the questions translators routinely grapple with.

If you’ve ever wondered not what is lost in translation but what is found in it, then this is a book for you.

Published by Canongate, 9 April 2026.

After moving to Dungeness in Kent, and inspired partly by his worn and tattered childhood Ladybird book entitled “The Life-Boat Men”, Dominic Gregory plucked up the courage to volunteer at his local RNLI lifeboat station. It is the starting point for this extraordinary, at times harrowing, but always quietly staggering debut memoir of being part of a lifeboat crew, composed almost entirely of doughty volunteers. Many of them from families who have crewed the lifeboat for generations, they give up their time, livelihoods and dry-land safety to rescue anyone in distress at sea.

Evoking the strange liminality of Dungeness, its migrating birds and landscapes, and touching on the lives of notable residents including Joseph Conrad and Derek Jarman, Gregory beautifully portrays this strange place where things and people wash up on the shores. And he takes us on board with him and his crew, pitching us into the heart-in-mouth experience of launching a lifeboat on a stormy coal-black night to rescue those in distress, while ‘surrounded by a sea that wishes me ill’ .

In the book’s opening chapter, Gregory tells of encountering a journalist on the shore as the crew return to land, exhausted from a long night of rescue missions. ‘What do you think about them?”, the journalist enquires of Gregory, as he trudges back up the beach. And then in a last attempt to ‘prise some copy’, the journalist asks him: “Do you really think all lives are worth saving?”.

The ‘them’ of the journalist’s first question are the desperate people who risk it all to try and reach our southern shores in inflatable dinghies which quickly become death traps. The searing passages where Gregory describes responding to such mayday calls brought home the horror of the so-called ‘small boats crisis’ like nothing else I have read. Rescuing those in peril at sea is a legal requirement but it is also, shows Gregory, a moral imperative. This book bottles the extraordinary heroism of those we depend on to do it.

In a recent Substack post, I highlighted my belief that Debut awards and newspapers features should also be celebrating outstanding first works of non-fiction. “Lifeboat at the End of the World” is such a work. It’s a true tour de force and one of those deeply altruistic books it feels like a privilege to read.

Published by William Collins, 26 March 202

Hannah Spencer’s recent by-election victory in Gorton & Denton re-focused attention not only on the resurgent Green Party, but on grass roots campaigning, and the trust ordinary people place - or don’t place - in their constituency MP. Her journey into politics was anything but conventional too. and a boost to the principle that we need representation in parliament by people from all backgrounds, all trades and all walks of life.

Although very different, Naz Shah’s story of political awakening is also a hugely inspiring one. Shah has been Labour MP for Bradford West since 2015 when she won the seat from George Galloway’s Respect Party. Born in Bradford, she was sent to Pakistan at the age of 12 to escape the attentions of her mother’s abusive partner, and at 15 was forced into an arranged marriage. When she was 20, her mother was convicted of murdering her abusive partner, and Shah was instrumental in securing her release from prison. In this remarkable memoir, she relates how she found her voice and political calling against almost impossible odds and without a shred of privilege.

Whatever your politics, Shah’s is an compelling and admirable story. Not least for her deep sense of political calling and conviction. Once elected to parliament in 2015, Shah refused to feel like a fish out of water in a building full of ‘gilded young men and women….that might have inspired Hogwarts itself’. Instead she holds fast to the task of representing the interests of the people she had grown up with. In her conclusion she writes: “My own community of Bradford has given me the inner strength and inspiration to build a global vision of a future where we nurture and nourish rather than compete and control……Make no mistake: this movement is growing all over the world”.

Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 5 March 2026