Non-Fiction
January
Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War by Minoo Dinshaw (Allen Lane)
The story of the civil war told through the friendship of Bulstrode Whitelocke and Ned Hyde, close friends who blazed a trail in the intellectual and social world of early 17th-century London, only to end up on opposing sides in the conflict. Dinshaw examines the various factors — from religious differences to personal judgments — that split friends, families and a nation.

Hope: The Autobiography by Pope Francis (Viking)
In the first ever autobiography by a sitting pontiff — it was originally intended to be published posthumously — Pope Francis tells his life story, from Latin America to Rome, as well as offering “fearless” reflections on the major issues of our times, from war in Ukraine to climate change. The publishers also promise humour and warmth — and hope.
The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes (Scribe/Penguin Press)
Zombies on their phones in the street; a table for four at which everyone is gawping at their screens. Cause for pity — until we feel the buzz in our pocket. Hayes ventures into the debate about the impact of technology on our lives, the erosion of the divide between the private and public, and he makes the case for how “we all need to wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future”.
Music as Medicine: How We Can Harness Its Therapeutic Power by Daniel Levitin (Cornerstone)
One possible antidote to all the grim news out there right now is music. Neuroscientist and musician Levitin makes the case for the healing powers of music and explores how we can use it to heal our deepest wounds.
Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of Modern Hindu Identity by Manu S Pillai (Allen Lane)
In this account of the mutual impact of Hindu culture and Christianity upon each other, Pillai brings together an arresting cast of characters — maharajas, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen — to explore how this paved the way for politics in India today.

House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company by Eva Dou (Abacus/Portfolio)
The story of Ren Zhengfei, the reclusive entrepreneur who in the space of three decades built a global technology giant, Huawei, is also the story of modern China and its growing economic power and escalating tensions. As Dou writes, “Huawei is a company made in the image of its nation.”
The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin by Michel Krielaars, translated by Jonathan Reeder (Pushkin Press)
Making music in Stalin’s Russia was a dangerous business. Composers were expected to toe the party line — or face punishment, even death. This “fascinating and disturbing portrait of the absurdity of Soviet musical life” shows how composers and musicians struggled to negotiate their way through such difficult terrain — and still craft sublime melodies.
Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert D Kaplan (Random House/Hurst)
A new year brings a “new era of global cataclysm” in which war, climate change, great-power rivalry, technology and the end of empire combine in a deadly mix. Kaplan seeks to explain how we got here, drawing parallels between today and the history of the last century, in particular Weimar Germany, and delivers a call to arms to avoid the mistakes of the past.
February
Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates (Allen Lane)
The Gates life story in his own words, from his childhood in Seattle and his card-playing grandmother to his struggles to fit in, dropping out of Harvard and setting up Microsoft. The story ends in the late 1970s when Microsoft was still a minnow that had just signed its first deal with Apple, suggesting a sequel may be yet to come.

Fearless and Free by Josephine Baker, translated by Anam Zafar and Sophie Lewis (Vintage)
Singer, entertainer, raconteur, muse, spy — Baker was a woman of many lives and blazed a trail through 20th-century Europe and America. Here, in the first English-language translation of a book based on extensive interviews with a French journalist, she tells her own story.
The Cold War: A New History by Vladislav Zubok (Pelican)
Zubok, an acclaimed historian on the USSR, turns his focus to the cold war, challenging conventional explanations regarding why the west “won” and highlighting in particular the importance of non-western actors and forces. Along the way he asks what happens when stability and peace are no longer the default, when treaties are broken and when diplomacy ceases to function.
I Want to Talk to You: And Other Conversations by Diana Evans (Chatto & Windus)
A collection of essays, portraits and interviews on literature, art, music, identity, grief “and everything in between” from the acclaimed British novelist Evans.

The Making of Modern Corporate Finance: A History of the Ideas and How They Help Build the Wealth of Nations by Donald H Chew Jr (Columbia Business School Press)
For the past 40 years US corporate finance has, according to Chew, been “one of the world’s remarkable success stories” that has helped produce the world’s most productive and valuable businesses. How this came about — and what needs to happen next — is examined in this book.
Your Life Is Manufactured: How We Make Things: Why It Matters and How We Can Do It Better by Tim Minshall (Faber)
In a world of services, manufacturing seems a thing of the past. Not so, argues Minshall of Cambridge university, in a “wonderfully illuminating romp” through manufacturing that is a timely reminder of the importance of making things and the need to restore the link between maker and consumer.
Looking at Women, Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary from Ukraine by Victoria Amelina, foreword by Margaret Atwood (William Collins)
When Ukrainian novelist Amelina was killed, aged 37, by a Russian missile in July 2023 she was in the process of completing a documentary of the war based on testimonies of survivors of war and eye-witness accounts that have now been brought together in this book.

The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West by Alexander C Karp and Nicholas W Zamiska (Bodley Head)
Silicon Valley has lost its way, turning its focus and energies to the consumer market and spurning technology’s role in underpinning and strengthening democracy. So argues Karp, head of tech giant Palantir, and his colleague and co-writer Zamiska as they make the case for the Valley to redirect its attention to our most urgent challenges and rebuild its relationship with government.
The North Pole: The History of an Obsession by Erling Kagge (Viking)
The story of an “otherworldly place” that has long fascinated humanity, spanning ancient history and modern-day exploration — including the author’s own trip to the North Pole — that presents “a psychological record of what it means to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the face of adversity”.
March
Helen Garner: Collected Diaries by Helen Garner (W&N)
Three volumes spanning 20 years, from the 1970s to 1990s, detailing the start of Garner’s career as a novelist as well as the highs and agonies of relationships, these “shockingly relatable and forensically observed” diaries reveal the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work.

Mellon vs Churchill: The Untold Story of Treasury Titans at War by Jill Eicher (Pegasus Books)
In the 1920s the handling of what Churchill called Britain’s “monstrous war debts” to the US was a persistent source of tension between the two countries, pitting their respective “big beast” treasury chiefs against one another. Eicher’s vivid account recreates an “epic battle of wills”.
The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King by Christopher de Bellaigue (Bodley Head)
An “immersive reconstruction” of the life and world of the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, the most powerful and feared man of the 16th century. Written in the present tense, the book brings life and intensity to the story of one of history’s most consequential figures.
Is This Working? The Jobs We Do Told by the People Who Do Them by Charlie Colenutt (Picador)
The realities of working life in Britain today — from lorry driver to sex worker, hedge fund manager to carer — as told by the workers themselves. Colenutt’s study of how Britons view work also embraces those without work.
Patriarchy Inc: What We Get Wrong about Gender Equality — and Why Men Still Win at Work by Cordelia Fine (WW Norton/Atlantic)
An analysis of the persistent inequalities in who does what and who gets what in the world of work. Fine argues that rather than tick-box initiatives from HR we need effective, common-sense reforms that will make workplaces and society fairer and freer for everyone.

The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman by Didier Eribon, translated by Michael Lucey (Allen Lane)
How does our society treat the elderly? In this very personal reflection on the final months of his mother’s life, Eribon, acclaimed author of Returning to Reims, turns his focus to the end of life in a “wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between ageing and class, politics and literature”.
Changing My Mind by Julian Barnes (Notting Hill Editions)
The ability to change one’s mind is often heralded as mature and empowering. Really? Barnes has questions and in search of an answer explores “what is involved when we change our minds: about words, about politics, about books; about memories, age and time”.
Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
Shortages and growing unaffordability — from housing to the labour market to chips — are two of the defining characteristics of the 21st century. Klein and Thompson argue that this is because well-intentioned rules and regulations adopted in decades past have hobbled the present and explore how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds.
Spring: The Story of a Season by Michael Morpurgo (Hodder Press)
As winter recedes, Morpurgo observes the unfolding of a new spring — bluebells, new born lambs, birdsong — through stories, poems and reminiscences about childhood and seasons past.
When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter (Penguin Press)
The extravagant features, the scandals and bust-ups, the expense accounts. Magazines in the 1990s were nothing if not lively. This memoir from a consummate insider promises to take readers “inside the drawing-rooms of the great and not-always-good”.
Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress and Dr Crippen by Hallie Rubenhold (Doubleday)
Much has been written about Crippen, the infamous Edwardian wife-murderer. Social historian and award winning author Rubenhold offers a new perspective by giving a voice to those who have never properly been heard — the women, in particular those who brought Crippen to justice.

The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley (Allen Lane)
The horrors of fascism in 1930s Europe drove tens of thousands of central Europeans to seek refuge in Britain, bringing with them radical ideas and styles nurtured in Weimar Berlin, Red Vienna and modernist Prague that would transform their new homeland forever.
Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso by Sue Roe (Faber)
The story of the women who shared Picasso’s life and were instrumental in his career. Previously dismissed as passive models or muses, Roe reveals six remarkable, unconventional, independent and talented women in an “enthralling” account spanning 70 years, from Bohemian Montmartre to the glittering Riviera in the 1920s, through Paris under Nazi occupation and beyond the painter’s final years of seclusion.
John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie (Faber)
At the heart of the Fab Four stood the two teenage friends. Leslie tells the story “the love and jealousy between the two geniuses behind The Beatles”.
April

Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead by Kenneth Rogoff (Yale)
Former IMF chief economist Rogoff tells the story of the greenback’s remarkable postwar run and the challenges it faces today from crypto and the renminbi, the end of reliably low inflation and interest rates, political instability, and the fracturing of the dollar bloc. The Pax Dollar era is entering a new phase: America’s “outsized power and exorbitant privilege” can spur financial instability — at home as well as abroad.
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus (Random House)
“Definitive” biography of one of America’s greatest conservative thinkers, William F Buckley. More than two decades in the making, the book tells the story of the modern conservative movement as it rose from a formless coalition to a powerful cultural force and the birth of modern politics.
Capitalism and Its Critics: A Battle of Ideas in the Modern World by John Cassidy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Allen Lane)
A kaleidoscopic history of capitalism as told through the eyes of the system’s critics — from 18th-century weavers who rebelled against automation to the Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s and the current degrowth movement.
The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters by Diane Coyle (Princeton)
Why do we use 80-year-old metrics to understand today’s economy? Coyle argues that outdated systems of measurement impair and mislead policymaking and makes the case for a new framework that considers current economic realities.

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt (Bodley Head)
How did a manufacturer of video game components come to establish a monopoly on AI hardware and in the process reinvent the computer? Witt tells the story of the tech company that caught Silicon Valley by surprise and its visionary CEO Jensen Huang who based an early bold bet on AI.
There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift by Kevin Evers (Harvard Business Review)
Evers, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review, tells the story of the rise of Taylor Swift, explores the decisions that led to the phenomenon that was her Eras tour and examines the implications of her stratospheric success for the worlds of business, culture and politics.
38 Londres Street by Philippe Sands (W&N)
Through a mixture of memoir, travelogue, courtroom drama and detective work, Sands, a human rights barrister and author of East West Street, unravels the lives of two men — Walther Rauff, senior SS officer who escaped to Chile, and the dictator Augusto Pinochet — and exposes the full extent of their atrocities.
The North Road: A journey through time, place and memory by Rob Cowen (Hutchison Heinemann)
The Great North Road — a 400-mile multiplicity of ancient trackway, Roman road, pilgrim path, coach route and motorway that has run like a backbone through Britain for the past 2,000 years is the stuff of legends. Cowen’s personal and at times poetic account gives it fresh life.

The Ocean’s Menagerie: How Earth’s Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life by Drew Harvell (Bodley Head)
Invertebrates, those strange, spineless sea creatures (corals, glow-in-the-dark jellyfish and the like) that have evolved to survive some of the most inhospitable conditions on Earth, challenge our understanding of how life works. Harvell, a marine ecologist, travels from Hawaii to the Caribbean to Indonesia, to reveal some of the exceptional attributes of these underwater marvels.
May
Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton)
In this book Macfarlane takes readers on a journey through rivers in northern Ecuador threatened by goldmining, through the creeks and lagoons of southern India and on to north-eastern Quebec to explore the transformative idea that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings.
Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy by Laleh Khalili (Profile)
Whether it’s pumping oil, mining resources or shipping commodities across oceans, the global economy runs on extraction. Khalili reflects on the hidden stories behind late capitalism, from seafarers abandoned on debt-ridden container ships to the nefarious reach of consultancy firms and the cronyism that drives record-breaking profits.
Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion by Lamorna Ash (Bloomsbury)
Britain’s youngsters are turning to faith in surprising numbers. Ash embarks on a journey around Britain, from Evangelical youth festivals to Quaker meetings to a silent Jesuit retreat to find out why.

Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity by Marcus du Sautoy (Fourth Estate)
By looking at the earliest stone circles to Mozart’s obsession with numbers and Zaha Hadid’s architecture du Sautoy uses the arts to uncover the key mathematical structures that underpin both nature and human creativity.
Mark Twain by Ron Chernow (Penguin Press)
Master biographer Chernow reveals the magnificent and often maddening life of America’s first, and most influential, literary celebrity and author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Strangers and Intimates by Tiffany Jenkins (Picador)
As social media, surveillance and the expectations of constant openness reshape our lives, are we in danger of losing a part of ourselves? Jenkins takes readers on an epic journey revealing how privacy shaped the modern world, from ancient Athens to the feminists of the 1970s.
Homework: A Memoir by Geoff Dyer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
As the child of a dinner lady and a sheet-metal worker who became the lucky winner of the transformative promise of grammar school, Dyer has written a memoir that is not a story of hardship overcome but a celebration of opportunities afforded by the postwar settlement.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade (Faber)
Admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan. This is the biography of one of the most confounding — and contested — writers of the 20th century.
The British Imagination: A History of Ideas from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II by Peter Watson (Simon & Schuster)
Through 500 years of history, from Shakespeare to the Royal Society to the industrial revolution and the empire, this book is a tour of the most influential ideas — and extraordinary people — who made Britain what it is today.
Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe by Adam Weymouth (Hutchinson Heinemann)
Weymouth walks the path of a wolf from Slovenia who travelled thousands of miles through the Alps tracked by GPS in 2011, examining the social and climate changes facing these wild corners of Europe.
June
Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction by Sadiah Qureshi (Allen Lane)
This book explores how extinction went from being viewed as theologically dangerous to pervasive, even natural and shortly after discovery, used as a process to justify persecution and genocide.

Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson (Bloomsbury)
Dame Muriel’s life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events that influenced her writing. In this biography, Wilson sets out to solve the puzzle of “Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes”.
Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age: 1895-1965 by Frank Close (Allen Lane/Basic Books)
This is the story of how it was discovered that a hidden source of nuclear power, which began innocently and collaboratively, opened the way to a more terrible possibility: a thermonuclear bomb, the so-called “backyard weapon”, that could destroy all life on Earth — from anywhere.
The Genius Myth by Helen Lewis (Jonathan Cape)
The tortured poet. The rebellious scientist. The monstrous artist. The tech disrupter. You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. Lewis unravels a word that we all use without questioning what it means.
A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting From Antiquity to Now by James Delbourgo (riverrun)
Because they are driven by passion rather than profit, obsessive collectors also have been cultural heroes, seen as authentic and true to themselves. Delbourgo tells a captivating history of collectors: from ancient looters and idolaters to fin de siècle decadents, Freudian psychos and hoarders.

Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe (William Collins)
Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part oral history Ioffe’s book uses the lens of various women in her family and throughout Russian history to illuminate the contradictory truths at the heart of Russia.
How To Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir by Molly Jong-Fast (Picador)
Erica Jong’s daughter’s delicious and despairing memoir about an intense mother–daughter relationship, a sometimes chaotic upbringing with a fame-hungry parent, and how that can really mess you up.
The CEO: The Rise and Fall of Britain’s Captains of Industry by Michael Aldous and John D Turner (Cambridge University Press)
The CEOs of Britain’s largest companies wield immense power, but we know very little about them. How did they get to the top? Why do they have so much power? Are they really worth that exorbitant salary?
Fiction
January
Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett (Hamish Hamilton/Little Brown)
It’s been almost nine years since Haslett’s last novel, Imagine Me Gone, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. The wait has only built anticipation for this tale of a New York asylum lawyer grappling with his past after taking on the case of a young, gay man.

Another Man in the Street by Caryl Phillips (Bloomsbury)
The award-winning writer paints a vivid picture of “Lucky”, a young West Indian man making a new life for himself in 1960s London, in this meditation on the experiences of identity, exile and belonging of the Windrush generation.
Confessions by Catherine Airey (Viking)
In her much heralded debut (“irresistible”, “remarkable”), Airey follows three generations of women from one family as they leave Ireland for New York — and eventually find their way back again. A complex, assured novel that explores how the past inescapably shapes the present.
February
The South by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate)
The first in a planned quartet of novels that will follow one family through a tumultuous period, The South is concerned with a relationship that blossoms between two boys over the course of one eventful summer.
The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride (Faber)
McBride is a virtuoso with language who has won numerous awards for her fiction. In this, her fourth novel, she offers an immersive, experiential dissection of an intense, two-year-long romance.
Perspectives by Laurent Binet (Harvill Secker)
The author of the international bestseller HHhH is back with a detective novel of sorts set in Renaissance Florence. Bursting with all the art and intrigue, murder and Medicis one could hope for from a historical whodunnit.
March

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf/Fourth Estate)
The Americanah novelist returns with a blistering tale of four women in America and Nigeria whose stories are entwined. Adichie examines the nature of love and happiness and the choices we make that shape our lives.
Flesh by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape)
We follow 15-year-old István from Hungary, where he falls into a clandestine relationship with a neighbour old enough to be his mother, to an elite existence years later among London’s super-rich. A propulsive novel from the Booker-shortlisted writer about the forces that make — and break — a life.

Twist by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury/Random House)
McCann has crafted a thrilling tale of a man all at sea: Anthony Fennell is a journalist aboard a fibre-optic cable repair vessel off the west coast of Africa. His life is falling apart — and then the boat’s mysterious skipper goes missing.
April
Room on the Sea by André Aciman (Faber)
Paul and Catherine meet-cute on jury duty in a scorching New York. Their flirtations eventually lead to a week-long Italian getaway, but will they decide to return to their lives or continue the fantasy? A tale of love and regret from the author of Call Me By Your Name.
Audition by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press)
Described as “an exhilarating, destabilising Möbius strip of a novel”, Audition offers two competing narratives: that of an actress and her much younger male lunch date who meet at a Manhattan restaurant.

Sister Europe by Nell Zink (Viking)
Set over one wild, exhilarating night in Berlin, Zink’s new novel unleashes a motley crew of characters on an unexpected nocturnal journey through the city, painting a vivid picture of a continent at a critical moment.
May
Parallel Lines by Edward St Aubyn (Jonathan Cape)
The acclaimed author of the Patrick Melrose novels returns with a “thrilling, wondrous” story about a wildly disparate group of people who, over the course of a year, find their lives intersect and connect in unexpected ways. Expect wit and emotional acuity.

Twelve Post-War Tales by Graham Swift (Simon & Schuster)
Setting the seemingly ordinary lives of his characters against the great, tumultuous moments of history — from the second world war to the Cuban Missile Crisis, September 11 and the Covid pandemic — the Booker Prize winner traces a tender and moving web of connections across decades.
A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi (Faber)
A highly original and creative novel that follows Kinga, a woman “just trying to make it through the week” — a process more difficult than it sounds, thanks to the fact that each day sees a different version of her emerge, some more stable than others, and one bent on destroying them all.
June

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Cape)
The award-winning author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous crafts a tale of unexpected friendship and second chances in this innovative, playful novel that explores the foundations of life in America for those at the margins of society.
Helm by Sarah Hall (Faber)
Hall is a literary force of nature, and the inextricable link between people and the natural world lies at the heart of Helm, a novel about a “ferocious, mischievous wind” that for millennia has winnowed the picturesque landscape of the Eden Valley but is now under threat.
From FT writers
Zbig: The Life and Times of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Cold War Prophet by Edward Luce (Bloomsbury)
Luce, the FT’s US national editor, recounts the life and times of the Polish political strategist who became an key architect of US foreign policy during the cold war and beyond. His book promises to illuminate Brzezinski’s contribution to history and the nuanced way in which he strengthened US-China relations, shifting power away from Moscow.
The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance, 1940–1945 by Adam LeBor (Bloomsbury)
Using newly uncovered diaries, documents and interviews with the last survivors of this brutal period in Budapest’s history, LeBor, the FT’s thriller critic, tells the story of “the Casablanca of central Europe” through a vivid cast of characters as the Jewish population is relocated and the city is overrun by Nazis, bombed by the Allies and surrounded by the Red Army.
Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee (Simon & Schuster)
The FT’s San Francisco correspondent explores how Apple’s decision to anchor its supply chain in China has had a long-term impact on the brand. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with former Apple executives and engineers, he reveals how the company has helped upskill Chinese manufacturers and become increasingly vulnerable to the regime’s whims.
The summer and beyond
Plans for the second half of the year are still in flux, but among the topics and titles to look out for are a new family-based history from Lea Ypi (Indignity: A Double Investigation), Andrew Ross Sorkin’s account of the 1929 stock market crash (1929: Inside the Crash), a memoir by Arundhati Roy (Mother Mary Comes to Me) and a history of sentimentality (Feeling It by Ferdinand Mount). In fiction, some big names are set to return later in the year, including Mohammed Hanif (Rebel English Academy), Irvine Welsh (Men In Love), Karl Ove Knausgaard (The School of Night), William Boyd (The Predicament) and an as yet untitled novel from Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell is on the horizon this autumn
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