61 books
Aaron Rolph
In the hands of Europeans, a mountain hut is more than shelter. It’s an expression of centuries of culture and intimate knowledge of life in the continent’s highest peaks. The photo-dense Alpine Refuges offers a tour of some of these…
Charles Cumming
BOX 88 is a black-ops outfit run jointly by the British and the Americans, so far off the books that neither MI6 nor the CIA is sure it exists. Cumming runs two clocks. In 1989, Lachlan Kite is eighteen, a…
Rachel Kushner
Sadie Smith is a hired spy — ex-federal, now freelance, working for clients she never meets. Her job is to get inside a commune of radical farmers in southwest France and push them into doing something illegal enough to jail…
Beatriz Serrano
From the very first page of Discontent, the funny and sardonic debut novel by Spanish writer Beatriz Serrano, lyrics from Portugal. The Man’s “Purple Yellow Red & Blue” lodged in my head and stayed for the duration of the book:…
Franziska Gänsler
Iris runs a hotel in Bad Heim, a German spa town six hours from Berlin that used to draw tourists. Now fires burn across the river every summer, the smoke never clears, people wear masks outside, and the bookings have…
Paul Yoon
The narrator is a dog. Etna is a working military dog in an unnamed country, and after years at war he walks away from the men he fought beside one night and heads for the place he was taken from…
Rivka Galchen
Katharina Kepler was a widow in her seventies in a small German town, illiterate, sharp-tongued, in the business of mixing herbal remedies, and the mother of Johannes Kepler, who by then had worked out how the planets move. In 1615,…
David Szalay
István is fifteen, new in town, living with his mother in a flat on a Hungarian housing estate, and he doesn’t know how to talk to anybody. The married woman across the hall, closer to his mother’s age than his,…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
Saint-Exupéry flew reconnaissance during the collapse of France in May 1940, and this is one flight — low over Arras, through flak, to photograph German positions in a sector already lost. Everybody in the squadron knows the mission is pointless.…
William Boyd
Gabriel Dax writes travel books and doesn’t sleep. A fire took his mother and the family house when he was six, and he’s been dreaming it every night since. In August 1960, he’s in Léopoldville in the DRC and lands…
Michel Pastoureau
Green was hard to make and harder to keep. The dye wouldn’t hold — it faded, it shifted, it wouldn’t sit still on cloth — and medieval guilds kept the blue dyers and the yellow dyers separate by law, so…
Helen Macdonald
A goshawk is the falconer’s hard case — bigger, faster, and less forgiving than a falcon, with a reputation for being impossible to keep steady. Macdonald had been a falconer since childhood and she bought one in Scotland for £800,…
Charles Cumming
The second Lachlan Kite spy book, and it splits the same way the first one did. In 1993, Kite is a young officer sent into post-Soviet Russia under cover as an English teacher, running an exfiltration of a bioweapons scientist…
Naina Kumar
Neelu Pillai flies to Scotland for her estranged father’s wedding intending to keep her head down. Instead, she hooks up with a local the night before, then delivers a tipsy tirade at the rehearsal dinner that sends the bride running.…
Charles Cumming
This is the third Lachlan Kite spy novel. In 1995, he’s sent to West Africa to catch a war criminal from the Rwandan genocide, an operation that gets people killed and leaves a debt. In the present, the same man…
Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Smug Homo sapiens have long looked down on Neanderthals, like city folk sneering at country cousins. Snort. You couldn’t even not go extinct. But these hominins have always gotten a bad rap, and Rebecca Wragg Sykes’s affectionate synthesis of a…
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane found that a children’s dictionary had cut words like acorn, bluebell, and kingfisher to make room for broadband and cut-and-paste, and this book is his answer. Nine chapters, each on a landscape and a writer who saw it clearly…
Martin Amis
Nicola Six knows she’s going to be murdered and sets about arranging it. She picks two candidates in a west London pub — a small-time con man and darts obsessive named Keith Talent, and a rich, gentle sad sack named…
Keith McCloskey
In February 1959, nine experienced backcountry skiers died on a slope in the northern Urals. They cut their way out of the tent from the inside and ran into a blizzard at night in bare feet and underwear. Some froze;…
Jack Hitt
Hitt walked the Camino de Santiago in the early nineties, five hundred miles across northern Spain, back when the trail was still mostly empty and the pilgrim infrastructure was a few nuns with a stamp. He is not a believer…
Jason Matthews
Dominika is back in Moscow, promoted, and now spying for the Americans from inside the SVR while being personally noticed by Putin, who appears as himself throughout. The operational thread runs to Vienna and to an Iranian nuclear program, and…
Tony Judt
What the title says: Europe from the rubble of 1945 to 2005, east and west given equal weight, in one nine-hundred-page volume by a historian who could actually write. The material everybody knows — Marshall Plan, Wall, 1968, 1989 —…
Chloe Dalton
Dalton was a foreign policy adviser in Westminster, stranded at a country house during lockdown, when she found a newborn leveret alone on a track. Hares aren’t domesticable — they’ve never been tamed, they die of stress in captivity, and…
Jason Matthews
Dominika Egorova is a ballerina whose career ends with an injury, and her uncle in Russian intelligence gets her into Sparrow School, where the state trains officers in seduction as tradecraft. Her assignment is a young CIA officer in Helsinki…
Alice Feeney
Adam and Amelia have been married ten years and give each other a gift by the traditional list every anniversary — paper, cotton, leather. She wins a weekend away in a converted chapel in the Scottish Highlands, they drive up…
Amy Taylor
Amy Taylor is a Melbourne novelist whose first book, Search History, made The Guardian’s best-of-the-year list. Ruins, her second, drops a couple into an Athens summer. Emma and Julian are house-sitting for a friend and quietly falling apart — she…
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…
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…
Lev Grossman
I don’t know how I stumbled upon this book, because I mostly left my interest in fantasy behind in my teens (talkin’ to you, Tolkien). But, wow. I couldn’t put The Bright Sword down and even raved about it to…
Peter Swanson
A short one, told mostly as a diary, and it’s pulpy. Ashley, an American student in London in the nineties, is invited home to a friend’s family estate in the country for Christmas — an old house, a brother she’s…
Leonardo Sciascia
A man is shot dead boarding a bus in a Sicilian town square in front of forty people and by the time the carabinieri arrive nobody saw anything. Captain Bellodi, a northerner and a former partisan, investigates, which means construction…
Anaïs Nin
Set in Paris, 1931 to 1934. Nin is in her late twenties, married to a banker, in analysis, and just beginning to write, and the diary is her real work. This is the volume where she meets Henry Miller and…
Evelyn Clarke
A locked-room mystery published under the pseudonym Evelyn Clarke, which is V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke writing together. Arthur Fletch, a reclusive bestselling novelist, invites six struggling midlist authors — one each from thriller, romance, YA, sci-fi, horror — to…
Janice Hallett
Hallett builds novels out of documents, and this one is a mixed-media master’s course file: Six students, their emails, group chat, forum posts, submitted essays, and the tutor’s marking notes, all bundled and handed to an external examiner months after…
Zadie Smith
Eliza Touchet is a Scottish widow running the household of her cousin, a once-famous novelist now writing books nobody reads, in Victorian England. She becomes obsessed with the Tichborne trial — a butcher from Australia claiming to be a missing…
M.R. Carey
Melanie is ten, brilliant, and loves her teacher. Every morning, soldiers strap her into a wheelchair at gunpoint to take her to class. Carey lets you work out why on your own, and once you have it, the book turns…
Tana French
The second Cal Hooper mystery. Cal, a retired Chicago cop, has settled into the west Ireland village of Ardnakelty, is with Lena, and is teaching a teenage girl named Trey carpentry. Then Trey’s father comes back, four years gone, with…
Andrea Wulf
Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous scientist in the world in his lifetime and is now mostly a list of place names. Wulf brings him back: Five years in South America, climbing Chimborazo higher than anyone had gone, and…
Jason Matthews
The last of the Dominika Egorova spy trilogy, finished as Matthews was dying. Russian intelligence has a mole of its own, in place for decades and about to be appointed to run the CIA, and double-agent Dominika is the only…
Nan Shepherd
British author Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the introduction to the 2011 edition of this classic, is no slouch for words, but he struggled to label The Living Mountain, calling it a “formidably difficult book to describe.” He comes close when…
Kaliane Bradley
A near-future British government has time travel and no idea what to do with it, so it pulls a handful of people out of history moments before they would have died and assigns each one a “bridge” — a civil…
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane writes that an old path is a record of everyone who wore it, that walking one puts you in their company whether you want it or not, and that this does something to the inside of your head —…
W.G. Sebald
A man walks the coast of Suffolk, England, and the walk keeps opening into other things. A skull, a herring fishery, Thomas Browne’s missing remains, the silk trade, Joseph Conrad in the Congo, the Taiping rebellion, a collapsing country house,…
Tana French
Cal Hooper takes early retirement from the Chicago police after twenty-five years, a divorce, and a daughter who barely speaks to him, buys a wrecked cottage in the west of Ireland, and plans to fix it up and shoot rooks…
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…
A.E. Gauntlett
Annie is a university professor who never much believed in love until Mark, a surgeon she kept passing on the morning commute and then met properly at a support group for trauma survivors. Both of them are carrying something they…
Graham Greene
It’s set in a German prison in occupied France, with thirty hostages, three to be shot, lots drawn to see who goes. Chavel, a wealthy lawyer, draws one of the marked slips and offers everything he owns — house, money,…
Graham Greene
Vienna after the war, the city carved into four occupation zones and half of it rubble. Rollo Martins, a broke writer of pulp westerns, arrives to take a job from his old friend Harry Lime and finds Lime’s funeral instead.…
John Lanchester
Sea level rose, and Britain has ringed the entire island in concrete. Every citizen serves two years as a Defender on the wall, twelve-hour shifts staring at cold water, and the rule is simple: If Others get past you, you…
Mark Boyle
Irishman Mark Boyle does nothing halfway. Exhausted by industrialized, well, everything, he lived without using money for three years. Craving an even more elemental life, he bought land near Knockmoyle, hand-built a cabin, and spent a year with no modern…
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane set out to find what wildness is left in Britain and Ireland, expecting remoteness — islands, summits, moors — and slept out in fifteen of them over a year. Then Roger Deakin, his friend, kept pointing him back toward…
Algernon Blackwood
Two men in a canoe run the Danube in flood below Vienna and camp on a sandy island in a wilderness of willow scrub. The river is eating the island under them. The willows move when there’s no wind. Things…
Martin Amis
The book runs backward. It opens with a man dying in America and moves the wrong way down his life, narrated by a consciousness riding inside him that can’t control anything and doesn’t understand what it sees. So doctors take…
Stuart M. Kaminsky
Toby Peters is a broke Los Angeles private detective in the 1940s whose specialty is doing quiet jobs for movie stars. In this one the client is Cary Grant, being blackmailed with a photograph and tangled up in wartime counterintelligence…
Franny Moyle
J.M.W. Turner was the son of a Covent Garden barber, sold his first drawings out of the shop window, got into the Royal Academy at fourteen, and became the most radical painter in England — and stayed a rough, secretive,…
Robert Macfarlane
Rob Mac tackles what’s under foot, in three parts: what we shelter, what we yield, what we dispose of. He peers into a dark matter lab under a Yorkshire hill, the wood wide web and the fungal networks trading sugar…
Andrew Sean Greer
The writing in this book is anguished from the first page: It’s precious, far too self-aware, awkward, and twee. It set me on edge. I pushed through another or ten or so pages and gave up. I might return for…
Roger Deakin
You’ll never regret plunging into the “wild swimming” world of British environmentalist Roger Deakin, who lived in a moated farmhouse. Yes, a moat. You’re already charmed, right? Inspired by a short story, Deakin decided to swim throughout Britain in as…
Ian McEwan
The year is 2119, most of Britain is under water and reduced to an archipelago, and an academic named Thomas Metcalfe has built his career on a lost poem — read aloud once at a dinner party in 2014, never…
Benjamín Labatut
Five linked pieces that start as history and slide into fiction without telling you where the line is. Fritz Haber pulls nitrogen out of the air, feeds the world, and invents chemical weapons. Schwarzschild solves Einstein’s equations in the trenches…
Nick Hayes
This is the follow-up to The Book of Trespass and it moves from manifesto to action plan. Hayes and a dozen contributors argue that the English are locked out of ninety-odd percent of their own country and the answer isn’t…
