Sunil Rao can tell whether any statement is true — no explanation, he just knows — and he’s been used for that by intelligence services until they got tired of his drug habit. Adam Rubenstein is the American colonel sent…
Raphael Montes
Brazilian thriller from 2016, first published in English by Celadon in August 2026. Four childhood friends leave rural Brazil for a shared apartment in Copacabana — students working part-time jobs, chasing the city and a future. When the rent jumps…
Mick Herron
A standalone in the literary spy world of Slough House. A pointless government inquiry called Monochrome has been given a windowless room and no real powers, and two civil servants have spent two years finding nothing — until a classified…
Craig Childs
Two things are true in the desert: There isn’t enough water, and there is way too much of it. Childs spends the book hunting the first and getting caught by the second. He maps water holes in the Arizona desert,…
Kassia St. Clair
Seventy-five colors, two or three pages each, and every one has a story with a twist. Mummy brown was made from actual ground-up mummies, and Victorian painters kept buying it until they found out. Scheele’s green was arsenic and it…
Geoff Dyer
This is Dyer looking hard at photographs, mostly one at a time, mostly for a few pages each. Eugène Atget’s empty Paris streets, Dorothea Lange, Roy DeCarava, Vivian Maier, Alex Webb, Gary Winogrand, plus a long stretch on his own…
Chana Porter
An alien species arrives and instead of invading it just seeps into everything — the water, the food, the bodies — and makes the world gentle. There’s no scarcity, no illness, no death you don’t choose. Trina Goldberg-Oneka, a trans…
Robin Wall Kimmerer
A short book — essay length, illustrated — built on one plant. The serviceberry ripens in June and everything eats it: Birds, bears, people. Kimmerer uses it to lay out what she calls a gift economy, the way it works…
Ling Ma
Candace Chen works a dead-end job in New York coordinating the production of specialty Bibles in Chinese factories. Shen Fever arrives — a fungal infection that doesn’t kill people so much as lock them into repeating one familiar routine forever,…
Matthew B. Crawford
Crawford has a doctorate in political philosophy, took a think tank job, lasted five months, and quit to open a motorcycle repair shop. His argument is that we’ve built an economy that separates thinking from doing and calls that progress…
Seth Kantner
Kantner was born in a sod igloo on the Kobuk River to homesteading parents and grew up hunting and trapping among Iñupiaq neighbors in northwest Alaska. This is memoir in photographs and short essays — his father’s pictures and his…
Rachel Carson
Carson was already a bestselling nature writer when she turned her attention to pesticides, and she was dying of cancer while she finished this. The opening is a fable — a town where the birds have gone quiet — and…
Brendan Leonard
Leonard got sober at twenty-three after an arrest and a night in a cell, and then had to work out what a life looks like without the thing that had organized it. What he found was climbing. The book runs…
Dennis Mersereau
A field guide to what’s over your head, written by a weather journalist for people who don’t want the math. Cloud types and what each one is telling you about the next few hours. How a thunderstorm actually organizes itself…
James Lacatski, Colm Kelleher, and George Knapp
Lacatski was the Defense Intelligence Agency scientist who got the AAWSAP program funded — the predecessor to the better-known Pentagon UFO office — and this is the insider account of it. The program studied Skinwalker Ranch in Utah and the…
Peter Høeg
A six-year-old Greenlandic boy falls off a Copenhagen rooftop and the police call it an accident. Smilla Jaspersen, half Inuit, half Danish, a glaciologist who fits nowhere and likes nobody, looks at the tracks in the snow on that roof…
Eowyn Ivey
This Pulitzer Prize finalist feels like winter—wet snowflakes on eyelashes, the smell of a woodstove, fear of long, dark nights. Inspired by an old Russian folk tale, it’s a fictional story about a novice homesteading couple in 1920s Alaska who…
Yasunari Kawabata
A wealthy Tokyo dilettante named Shimamura takes the train through a long tunnel into the mountains of Niigata, where the snow piles up higher than the houses, and stays at a hot spring inn. There he takes up with Komako,…
Jess Walter
Rhys Kinnick blew up his life seven years ago and has been living off the grid in the woods of eastern Washington, no phone, no news, growing his own food and stewing. Then his granddaughter and grandson turn up at…
Andrea Mara
A woman in the bath hears something above the ceiling, watches the attic hatch swing down, and a masked figure drops through. Thirty seconds later she’s dead. Across town her estranged friend Julia sees a video online of a masked…
Bruce Chatwin
Chatwin went to central Australia to find out how Aboriginal songlines work — the invisible tracks across the country laid down by ancestral beings, sung into being, where the melody carries the shape of the land so a man can…
Sally Hepworth
Pippa and Gabe move their family to a cottage on a cliff in coastal Australia — a beautiful spot with an ugly reputation, because people come there to jump. Gabe has talked several of them down, which has made him…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
His first book, and the roughest. Jacques Bernis flies the Toulouse–Dakar mail run down the coast of Africa, over the Spanish Sahara where a forced landing means capture, and the narrator is a friend at one of the desert waystations…
Mary Doria Russell
A radio telescope picks up singing from Alpha Centauri, and the Jesuits — who have been doing astronomy and first contact for four centuries — quietly fund and crew the first mission. Eight people go. One comes back, mutilated and…
David Abram
Abram’s first book and the argument the rest of his work rests on. He apprenticed himself to traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal, expecting to talk about magic, and found their real work was keeping relations square with the land.…
