The Listener’s Best 101 Books for 2020
❄
3:05 PM, 20 November 2020
FICTION
AMERICAN DIRT by Jeanine Cummins (Tinder Press)
Gripping, vividly imagined, compassionate, controversial story of a mother and son escaping a drug cartel to cross the Mexican border into the US.
THE ANIMALS IN THAT COUNTRY by Laura Jean Mackay (Scribe)
Narrated by a hard-drinking, hard-living grandmother called Jean, this funny, horrifying, poetic novel imagines an Australia where a flu pandemic leaves humans able to communicate with animals.
APEIROGON: A NOVEL by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury)
Ambitious, big-hearted, Booker-longlisted novel, partly based on fact, in which two men, one Israeli and one Palestinian, who both lost a daughter in the conflict, become friends.
BUG WEEK by Airini Beautrais (VUP)
Sharp, psychologically acute collection of stories that simmer with female outrage and defiance, yet are not without humour, employing the author’s background in poetry and ecological science.
BURNT SUGAR by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton)
“I am grieving, but it’s too early to burn the body.” Unsettling, sharply written Booker-shortlisted debut set in west India of a daughter forced to look after the rapidly fading mother who neglected her in childhood.
DADDY: STORIES by Emma Cline (Vintage)
A collection of sharply observed, beautifully crafted stories from the author of the bestselling The Girls that delve into the darker, complicated corners of relationships and human experience.
FAKE BABY by Amy McDaid (Penguin Random House)
Three characters, by turns bereaved, baffled and unbalanced, criss-cross this insightful and at times drily funny debut novel, and the city of Auckland itself, in search of a kind of redemption.
A GHOST IN THE THROAT by Dorieann Ní Ghríofa (Tramp Press)
Genre-busting, ambitious prose debut from an Irish writer that combines honest autofiction and literary essay in the story of a young mother who becomes obsessed with an 18th-century poem.
THE GLASS HOTEL by Emily St John Mandel (Picador)
The author of Station Eleven returns with the layered tale of a disastrous Ponzi scheme run by a New York financier and the repercussions among its large cast of its victims, in this unusual, deeply imagined, absorbing novel.
HAMNET, by Maggie O’Farrell (Hachette)
In lush, immersive prose, endless invention and a deep knowledge of the period that won her the Women's Prize for Fiction, O'Farrell explores the brief life of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet and its aftermath of grief.
HOMELAND ELEGIES, by Ayad Akhtar (Hachette)
The Pulitzer-winning novelist and playwright’s novel is a beautifully written fusion of fiction, memoir and deep cultural probing of American identity through the eyes of a native-born son and his Pakistani immigrant father post-9/11.
INSIDE STORY: A novel by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape)
Perhaps the last long “novel” he will ever write, Amis here blends intimate autofiction and elegy to lost friends with flashes of pure invention and philosophical and historical query.
JUST LIKE YOU by Nick Hornby (Viking)
Hornby returns with a London love story of opposites – age, race, class – full of humour, zinging dialogue and great warmth along with his usual pinpoint social observation.
LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam (Bloomsbury)
Compelling literary thriller, a beautifully written audit of race and class, about two families thrown together on a long weekend when the world might be coming to an end. A starry film is already planned.
THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS by Elena Ferrante (Europa Editions)
Propulsive coming of age novel set in a divided Naples packed with familiar themes: lust, betrayal, religion, confusion, disgust, delivered in Ferrante’s hypnotic prose – with the strong hint of sequels.
MAYFLIES by Andrew O’Hagan (Faber)
Inventive, vigorous and affectionate tribute to friendship, contrasting the joyful japes of young pals in a small Scottish town with soulful contemplations of mortality 30 years on.
THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
She might not have a third Booker prize on the shelf, but Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy may well be the best novels ever written about politics.
PIRANESI by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
The bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell returns 14 years later with a mysterious, beguiling, hugely imaginative (shorter) tale of a character who lives in an impossibly large mansion that’s washed by waves and visited by wild animals.
RED PILL by Hari Kunzru (Scribner)
In this cool but quietly menacing novel, a writer leaves his loving family in New York for a short residency in Berlin hoping for a quiet period of creation, but ends up in existential crisis about a world that seems headed for doom.
REMOTE SYMPATHY by Catherine Chidgey (VUP)
The author returns to Nazi Germany with the dark tale of an overseer at Buchenwald, his wife and a part-Jewish doctor that’s meticulously researched and skilfully written, and demonstrates a deep understanding of time and place.
SHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas Stuart (Picador)
Intense Booker-shortlisted debut, full of heart and humanity and dark humour, set in Glasgow during Margaret Thatcher’s time, in which a boy tries to save his alcoholic mother.
THE SILENCE OF SNOW by Eileen Merriman (Black Swan)
Merriman, a consultant haemotologist by day, deploys her inside knowledge to great advantage in this closely observed tale of Jodi, a first-year doctor, and Rory, an anaesthetist who falls prey to his product.
STATE HIGHWAY ONE by Sam Coley (Hachette)
Impressive debut from Australia-based expat follows 20-year-old twin siblings on a careless booze- and grief-soaked road trip from north to south to attend their parent's funeral.
SUMMER by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
The final of Smith’s extraordinary quartet of novels, which start with Brexit and end with Covid, is funny and political, uplifting and compassionate.
SUMMERWATER by Sarah Moss (Picador)
At an old Scottish loch-side holiday park at the height of summer a disparate group of people watch the endless rain come down and something terrible is going to happen, in this haunting, complex novel.
THE TALLY STICK by Carl Nixon (RHNZ Vintage)
In Nixon’s atmospheric literary mystery novel, a family newly arrived from London in the 1970s runs off the road in heavy rain in remote New Zealand. In 2010 the mother’s sister gets a call saying remains have been discovered.
THAT OLD COUNTRY MUSIC by Kevin Barry (Canongate)
Third collection from Barry is full of his damaged Irish characters, dark humour and melancholic lyricism in these poignant and economically crafted tales.
TRIO by William Boyd (Penguin)
Wry and rollicking tale of three people – all with secrets to keep – involved in making a jolly British movie in Brighton in the summer of 1968.
WEATHER by Jenny Offill (Granta)
From the writer of Dept of Speculation comes this splendidly written, tragicomic meditation on love and existential despair via a librarian with a young son who begins to obsess about the end of the world.
WHAT SORT OF MAN: Stories by Breton Dukes (VUP)
Third collection of sharp short stories largely from the point of view of men exploring masculinity, vulnerability and precarity set mostly in a vividly rendered Dunedin.
CRIME & THRILLER
BLACKTOP WASTELAND by SA Cosby (Headline)
Melds heist thriller, rural noir and an exploration of race relations in rural America as peerless getaway driver Bug Montage battles himself and others when a diamond score goes wrong.
CONSOLATION by Garry Disher (Text Publishing)
The outback noir master returns to Tiverton and its only cop, Constable Paul “Hirsch” Hirschhausen, who must deal with several problems including a thief of women’s underwear and a father on the rampage.
DARKNESS FOR LIGHT by Emma Viskic (Bonnier Echo)
Further stylish misadventures of deaf Melbourne private eye Caleb Zelic in which a potential client is murdered, a girl kidnapped and the cops may be as corrupt as the criminals.
THE DEVIL AND THE DARK WATER by Stuart Turton (Bloomsbury)
A great detective is imprisoned and sailing to Amsterdam for trial in this inventive, twisty 17th century tale. Peculiar events threaten all on board, and his trusty bodyguard must solve the mystery.
HINTON HOLLOW DEATH TRIP by Will Carver (Orenda Books)
High-concept literary chiller of five days in a small English village involving Detective Sargeant Pace and narrated by Evil itself.
IN THE CLEARING by JP Pomare (Hachette)
Menacing novel from Kiwi author told from the perspective of teenager Amy, who lives in a rural cult led by a messianic woman, and paranoid single mother Freya, who fears her past and what lies beyond her property.
OUR LITTLE CRUELTIES by Liz Nugent (Penguin)
Riveting psychological thriller about three Irish brothers who take sibling rivalry to toxic levels. Nugent has an uncanny knack for nuanced tales of horrendous people.
THE SECRETS OF STRANGERS by Charity Norman (Allen & Unwin)
Tense thriller that takes a hostage drama set-up, five diverse Londoners trapped by a gunman in a café, then layers in character depth and emotional impact.
SNOW by John Banville (Faber & Faber)
Banville’s first literary thriller under his own name finds a parish priest murdered in the home of a secretive aristocratic protestant family, giving rise to a splendidly written, atmospheric, close study of class and religion.
THE SURVIVORS by Jane Harper (Pan Macmillan)
Latest from Australian crime star set in a coastal community in Tasmania where a body is discovered on the beach and long-held secrets threaten to emerge.
THREE-FIFTHS by John Vercher (Pushkin Vertigo)
Taut, compulsive urban tale of a young biracial man in Pittsburgh who “passes for white” but must confront his own identity and bigotry after he becomes an accomplice to a savage hate crime.
MODERN LIFE & POLITICS
CASTE: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (Allen Lane)
It’s not about biology but structural power, argues the Pulitzer-winning author in this elegant and persuasive study of racism and institutionalised inequality that compares America’s social hierarchies with those of India and Nazi Germany.
CULTURE WARLORDS: MY JOURNEY INTO THE DARK WEB OF WHITE SUPREMACY by Talia Lavin (Hachette)
Lavin, a Jewish journalist, assumed online identities to unmask the real people behind white supremacist, incel and other extremist groups in this necessarily angry book.
DARK SALT CLEAR: LIFE IN A CORNISH FISHING TOWN by Lamorna Ash (Bloomsbury)
Captivating debut memoir-anthropological inquiry, written with lyricism and real sense of place, giving remarkable insight into the picturesque but often hardscrabble lives of the coast.
DIFFICULT WOMEN: A HISTORY OF FEMINISM IN 11 FIGHTS by Helen Lewis (Jonathan Cape)
The British journalist examines past and current feminist battles through the lives of individual women, and argues that it was their complicated, imperfect natures that helped them make history.
HUMAN KIND: A HOPEFUL HISTORY by Rutger Bregman (Bloomsbury)
Is it radical to argue that most people are basically decent? Perhaps not, but believing in a fundamental human kindness and altruism allows us to think and act in a way that may achieve real societal change, argues Bregman, offering a wide range of examples.
MANTEL PIECES by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
The novelist’s critical writings from the London Review of Books are gathered here in their fineness, from her infamous lecture on the royals to James Bulger to Marie-Antoinette.
MORE THAN A WOMAN by Caitlin Moran (Ebury Press)
Moran’s wise and witty, honest and exuberant guide to the lovely bits, and the difficult bits, of being a woman in middle age – for her, a mother, partner, friend and feminist.
NOTES FROM AN APOCALYPSE: A PERSONAL JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE WORLD AND BACK by Mark O’Connell (Granta)
The Irish journalist goes, thoughtfully and amusingly, in search of those preparing for the end of days, which takes him to the bunkers of South Dakota and the South Island, among the evangelicals, and even pondering life on Mars.
THE PRECIPICE: EXISTENTIAL RISK AND THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY by Toby Ord (Bloomsbury)
An alarming, if hopeful, account from the Oxford moral philosopher of the greatest risks to our future, from climate disaster to pandemics, nuclear war and threat of artificial intelligence.
SURVIVING AUTOCRACY by Masha Gessen (Allen & Unwin)
Gessen, who reported on Putin in Russia for two decades, turned her attention to how Donald Trump’s breaking of countless norms chimed with the actions of autocratic governments – and her insight remains relevant for those who might come after Joe Biden.
THE TYRANNY OF MERIT: WHAT’S BECOME OF THE COMMON GOOD? by Michael J Sandel (Allen Lane)
Bracing take from the Harvard political philosopher which argues for an alternative approach to gauging societal success from supposedly meritocratic processes that are too ready to salute winners and dismiss those who don’t make the grade.
WHY THE GERMANS DO IT BETTER: NOTES FROM A GROWN-UP COUNTRY by John Kampfner (Atlantic)
Kampfner, a one-time foreign correspondent and former editor at the New Statesman, eulogises and analyses in highly readable style the stability, industrial might and consensual political culture of Germany, to hardly mention its deft handling of the coronavirus.
HISTORY
BURNING THE BOOKS: A HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE UNDER ATTACK by Richard Ovenden (John Murray)
Ovenden, director of the Bodleian Library, fascinatingly draws together three millennia of attacks on and defences of knowledge, from Alexandria’s library, to Nazi book-burning to the destruction of famous diaries to the preservation of Trump’s tweets.
EAT THE BUDDHA: THE STORY OF MODERN TIBET THROUGH THE PEOPLE OF ONE TOWN by Barbara Demick (Text)
Gripping, closely reported account by prize-winning author of life in the Tibetan town of Ngaba, where dozens have immolated themselves in protest at the Chinese government’s claim of sovereignty.
THE INTEREST: HOW THE BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT RESISTED THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY, by Michael Taylor (Bodley Head)
Groundbreaking history finding that for 25 years after the UK parliament outlawed slavery in 1807 huge numbers in the colonies remained horrifically enslaved before slaveowners were paid a colossal sum.
METROPOLIS: A HISTORY OF HUMANKIND’S GREATEST INVENTION by Ben Wilson (Jonathan Cape)
Entertaining and panoramic account of how cities have shaped humanity, becoming the site of incredible splendours but have also imposed heavy social costs and “profoundly unnatural” living conditions.
THE POLYMATH: A CULTURAL HISTORY FROM LEONARDO DA VINCI TO SUSAN SONTAG by Peter Burke (Yale University Press)
The Cambridge historian gathers an impressive cast of polymathic artists, scientists, philosophers and others from the past six centuries and argues that in this age of specialisation we need brilliant generalists more than ever.
THE PRICE OF PEACE: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard
Keynes by Zachary D Carter (Random House)
Rich, well-written biography of the man whose notions of fairness and the imperfection of competition have come to the fore in the face of an economy-wrecking global pandemic, clearly explaining and locating his ideas within a broader historical framework.
LIFE STORIES
HOUSE OF GLASS: THE STORY AND SECRETS OF A TWENTIETH-CENTURY JEWISH FAMILY by Hadley Freeman (Fourth Estate)
Beautifully written, years-in-the-making memoir-investigation by the Guardian journalist to uncover the remarkable, at times tragic stories of her Jewish grandmother and great uncles during and after WW2.
INFERNO: A MEMOIR by Catherine Cho (Bloomsbury Circus)
Beautifully written and moving account of how a new mother ends up in a psychiatric facility with postpartum psychosis, interwoven with reflections on motherhood, her childhood and the cultural expectations of her Korean parents.
IN THE TIME OF THE MANAROANS by Miro Bilbrough (VUP)
The New Zealand writer and filmmaker’s memoir of her hippie upbringing is restrained but often moving, boasting an entertaining cast, and insightful about the often unglamorous realities of collectivist, off-the-grid lives.
JUST IGNORE HIM by Alan Davies (Hachette)
The English comedian and actor turns the spotlight on his early life, and the devastating actions of his father, in a splendidly written, unflinchingly honest and at times darkly amusing account.
INTIMATIONS: Six essays by Zadie Smith (Penguin)
Much has been written about the Covid experience, but Zadie Smith’s slim volume of personal essays captures the pandemic and lockdown with all of her clear-sighted intellect and warmth.
PHOSPHORESCENCE: ON AWE, WONDER AND THINGS THAT SUSTAIN YOU WHEN THE WORLD GOES DARK by Julia Baird (Fourth Estate)
Bestselling memoir across the Tasman deals with the aftermath of heartbreak and several bouts with cancer, the author and journalist writing about the things that lit up her life such as friendships, nature and faith, and investigating how others rediscovered awe and delight.
THE RATLINE by Philippe Sands (Orion)
Not just the fascinating life and crimes of a high-ranking Nazi, Otto von Wächter, but a deeply researched and gripping meditation on intergenerational guilt and wilful forgetting.
RED COMET: THE SHORT LIFE AND BLAZING ART OF SYLVIA PLATH by Heather Clark (Jonathan Cape)
The first full biography to draw on all Plath’s surviving letters shows a deep understanding of the person and the poetry, separate from Hughes and beyond the cliches. It’s compassionate and clear-eyed, and a monster of meticulousness at more than 1000 pages.
THIS PAKEHA LIFE: AN UNSETTLED MEMOIR by Alison Jones (BWB)
In this warm-hearted and generous memoir, Jones, an Auckland academic and the child of English immigrants, scrupulously unpacks her life to understand what being Pākehā means for her and other non-Maori New Zealanders.
TOM STOPPARD: A life by Hermione Lee (Faber & Faber)
A thorough, perceptive, entertaining bio by Lee, who gained access to all the playwright's papers, tracked down all his writing, and interviewed the who's who of stage and screen who came into his orbit.
SYBILLE BEDFORD: AN APPETITE FOR LIFE by Selina Hastings (Chatto & Windus)
The first rich and intimate bio of the author and bon viveur, by the chronicler of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, is dense with details: her aristo birth, dysfunctional family and her many affairs and intrigues, which helped populate her semi-autobiographic novels.
VESPER FLIGHTS by Helen Macdonald (Vintage)
The first book in six years from the author of H is for Hawk is a clear and passionate collection of several dozen essays about the natural world, our cultural associations towards it and depredations upon it.
WHEN TIME STOPPED by Ariana Neumann (Scribner)
It was only after stumbling upon a box of her father’s old papers that this Venezuelan-born UK journalist discovered he had escaped deportation from Prague to a concentration camp and assumed a non-Jewish identity, in this fine and heart-wrenching memoir.
YOU HAVE A LOT TO LOSE, by CK Stead (AUP)
The second volume of the novelist and poet’s memoirs contains all a literary biography needs: an honest and readable illumination of a writer’s craft and thought, alongside his politics, writerly feuds and infidelity.
ART, MUSIC & LITERATURE
BILLY APPLE®: LIFE/WORK by Christina Barton (AUP)
Possibly the definitive book on Billy Apple, arguably New Zealand’s most internationally significant living artist and unarguably a pioneer of pop and conceptual art.
ENDLESS SEA by Frances Walsh (Massey University Press, $70)
The stories of our seas and coasts, told with great style and rigour through the beautifully presented taonga of the New Zealand Maritime Museum.
AN EXQUISITE LEGACY by George Gibbs (Potton & Burton, $59.99)
George Gibbs, a retired entomologist, has written a splendidly detailed account of the life of his grandfather, George Hudson, who amassed probably the largest collection of local insects, now at Te Papa.
COLIN MCCAHON: IS THIS THE PROMISED LAND? Vol 2 1960-1987 by Peter Simpson (AUP)
The conclusion of Simpson's comprehensive survey of the work of our most famous painter, Colin McCahon, is scholarly, perceptive, passionate and lavishly illustrated.
THE DARK IS LIGHT ENOUGH: RALPH HOTERE: A biographical portrait by Vincent O’Sullivan (Penguin)
Even without images of the artists’ works – the result of copyright wrangles – O’Sullivan’s biography is an insightful and beautifully written account of Hotere, an artistic giant and his friend.
KARL MAUGHAN, edited by Hannah Valentine and Gabriella Stead (AUP)
Collected by the great and good, Karl Maughan’s paintings have remained steadfastly faithful to his subject: the garden. This first book on the artist, through more than 150 images, traces his thought, practice and oeuvre.
LANDMARKS by Owen Marshall, Grahame Sydney, Brian Turner (RHNZ Godwit, $75)
Twenty-five years after their last love letter to Central Otago, Timeless Land, Sydney’s sprawling, eerie landscapes are partnered with new writing from Turner and Marshall.
LETTERS OF DENIS GLOVER selected and edited by Sarah Shieff (Otago University Press)
Poet, founder of Caxton Press, war hero, outspoken critic, drinker, philanderer, a man of complexity and paradox, as revealed in this hefty, judicious collection by the editor of the letters of Frank Sargeson.
THE LIVES OF LUCIAN FREUD: FAME – 1968-2011 by William Feaver (Bloomsbury)
The final volume of Feaver's biography reveals the great English painter evolving from enfant terrible to Old Devil, and is a pageturner, perhaps too forgiving of the man but full of his authentic voice and pitiless genius.
MARTI FRIEDLANDER – PORTRAITS OF THE ARTISTS by Leonard Bell (AUP)
For five decades New Zealand's preeminent photographer captured the nation's artists and writers in this outstanding, mostly unseen collection, curated and with capsule biographies by her friend, the art historian Len Bell.
ME, ACCORDING THE HISTORY OF ART, by Dick Frizzell (Massey University Press)
By recreating the works of his favourite artists in the Western tradition, and writing a fizzing, gleefully idiosyncratic account of art history, Frizzell has produced an accessible, useful guide for the rest of us.
RAILWAYS STUDIOS by Peter Alsop et al (Te Papa Press, $70)
The seven-years-in-the-making, lavishly illustrated literary monument to Kiwi commercial art of Railways Studios, the advertising and design studio of NZ Railways which survived for 67 years.
SERIOUS NOTICING: SELECTED ESSAYS by James Wood (Vintage)
The latest collection from the US-based English literary critic is as good as anything he’s produced, his close reading extending to Chekhov, Orwell, Austen, Ferrante, Helen Garner and even Keith Moon.
WAGNERISM: ART AND POLITICS IN THE SHADOW OF MUSIC by Alex Ross (Fourth Estate)
A Pulitzer finalist for The Rest is Noise, Ross has written a masterly account of the huge cultural impact of Richard Wagner on the modern world, from western music to writers such as Virginia Woolf, to the taint of the Nazis.
WARHOL: A LIFE AS ART by Blake Gopnik (Allen Lane)
This massive new biography, which divides the artist’s life into chunks of time to examine his life and work, argues, with the aid of great anecdotes and endless research, that Warhol has overtaken Picasso as the most important and influential artist of the 20th century.
SCIENCE & NATURE
THE BOOK OF TRESPASS by Nick Hayes (Bloomsbury Circus)
In the UK, citizens are banned from 92 percent of the land and 97 percent of its waterways. In this deeply researched, poetic and passionate book, graphic artist Nick Hayes challenges inequitable land rights by trespassing on the land of the powerful.
THE CHILDREN OF ASH AND ELM: A HISTORY OF THE VIKINGS by Neil Price (Allen Lane)
Wide-ranging assessment by an archeologist that dismisses familiar stereotypes and cliches and reaches across continents and through history to paint an intimate portrait of the Norse mind, spiritual life and identity.
DUTCH LIGHT: CHRISTIAAN HUYGENS AND THE MAKING OF SCIENCE IN EUROPE by Hugh Aldersey-Williams (Pan Macmillan)
Not everyone will know Huygens, a 17th century Dutch mathematician, astronomer and inventor some of whose innovations are used to this day, something that this absorbing new biography may help to remedy.
ENTANGLED LIFE: HOW FUNGI MAKE OUR WORLDS, CHANGE OUR MINDS AND SHAPE OUR FUTURES by Merlin Sheldrake (Bodley Head)
An elegant and fascinating ode to fungi, from pig-luring truffles to their underground web of connections, to their multiple sexes, to their excellent help with beer and sourdough and mind-altering drugs.
EXPLAINING HUMANS: WHAT SCIENCE CAN TEACH US ABOUT LIFE, LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS by Camilla Pang (Viking)
A Royal Society science book prize winner written by a biochemistry PhD with autism, it's an investigation into human behaviour via proteins, machine learning and molecular chemistry.
KINDRED: NEANDERTHAL LIFE, LOVE, DEATH AND ART by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
(Bloomsbury Sigma)
Using the latest research, Sykes presents a vivid portrait of our ancient relatives, much like us if stouter and more muscled, but adaptable and inventive, the possessors of impressive hunting skills, a complex social life and advanced tools.
LIFE CHANGING: HOW HUMANS ARE ALTERING LIFE ON EARTH by Helen Pilcher (Bloomsbury Sigma)
Entertaining but ultimately serious account, by a science writer and presenter, of how humans are extensively messing with nature, particularly by way of selective breeding, genetic engineering and warming the climate.
HOW TO ARGUE WITH A RACIST: HISTORY, SCIENCE, RACE AND REALITY by Adam Rutherford (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)
Race is a social construct, but that doesn’t mean it’s invalid or unimportant, says Rutherford, a British geneticist and broadcaster, who fluently dismisses myths of racial pseudoscience and explains the latest scientific understanding of ancestry and genetics.
OWLS OF THE EASTERN ICE: THE QUEST TO FIND AND SAVE THE WORLD’S LARGEST OWL by Jonathan C Slaght (Allen Lane)
An expert on the Blakiston’s fish owl tells a fascinating story of adventure and dogged fieldwork as he works to safeguard these elusive, river-wading 2m wingspan birds from extinction in the remote forests of Russia.
THE PATTERN SEEKERS: A NEW THEORY OF HUMAN INVENTION by Simon Baron-Cohen (Allen Lane)
The autism expert proposes an ambitious new theory: that our unique ability to identify causation patterns has driven human progress for thousands of years and that the genes for this systemising skill overlap with the genes for autism.
THE RULES OF CONTAGION: WHY THINGS SPREAD – AND WHY THEY STOP by Adam Kucharski (Allen & Unwin)
Principles of disease modelling, like rules of contagion and herd immunity, can be used to fight not only biological infections like Covid-19 but financial panics, gang violence and online misinformation, show maths whizz and epidemiologist Kucharski.
SCIENCE FICTIONS: THE EPIDEMIC OF FRAUD, BIAS, NEGLIGENCE AND HYPE IN
SCIENCE by Stuart Ritchie (Bodley Head)
Ritchie, a lecturer at the psychology and neuroscience institute at King’s College London, explains in eviscerating detail the ways in which all the other science books you’ve read might be wrong.
UNFIT FOR PURPOSE: WHEN HUMAN EVOLUTION COLLIDES WITH THE MODERN WORLD by Adam Hart (Bloomsbury Sigma)
The biologist and broadcaster explores with clarity and wit the giant gulf between what we are as 20th century citizens and our stone-age bodies, contributing to stress, obesity, drug addiction, bowel diseases, social media problems and poor mental health.