32 books
Paul Kingsnorth
Kingsnorth used to be a green campaigner, walked away from all that, and now lives on a smallholding in western Ireland, where he went and got himself baptized Orthodox. This book is twenty years of him chewing on one bone.…
D.W. Pasulka
Pasulka teaches religious studies in North Carolina and wrote her first book on purgatory. Digging through old Catholic accounts, she kept hitting things that sounded oddly familiar: orbs of light, luminous beings, spinning suns, discs in the sky. She spent…
Eleanor Catton
Birnam Wood is a guerrilla gardening collective in New Zealand — a few dozen people who plant crops on land nobody’s watching, roadsides, dead lots, farms gone fallow, sometimes with permission and sometimes not. Mira runs it, and after five…
Sarah Wynn-Williams
Wynn-Williams was a New Zealand diplomat who talked her way into a job at Facebook in 2011 because she believed the thing could do some good in the world. She stayed seven years running global public policy, in the room…
Nathaniel Rich
Forget banks. The real vault is a data center — endless rows of drives holding everybody’s private business, sitting in a windowless building nobody guards like a bank. Tim is a climate reporter worn out from writing the end of…
Cory Doctorow
Doctorow coined the word in 2022 and it spread fast enough that the American Dialect Society made it word of the year in 2023. This is the long version of the argument. Platforms start good — cheap, useful, generous —…
Anthony McCarten
A tech billionaire named Cy Baxter has built FUSION, a system that stitches together every camera, phone, card swipe, and database in the country and claims it can find anybody. There’s a $90 billion CIA contract riding on whether it…
Jenny Odell
This isn’t a digital detox book, which Odell says up front. She’s an artist who spends a lot of time watching birds in an Oakland rose garden. Her position is that the attention economy is an economy and that refusing…
Ling Ling Huang
Enka grows up on the poor side of a walled city in Florida, gets a scholarship to an elite art school, and immediately fixes on Mathilde, the prodigy everyone else is afraid to approach. Mathilde is genuinely great and genuinely…
M.R. Carey
A physicist in a collapsing Lagos discovers how to step sideways into parallel Earths and is immediately picked up by the Pandominion, an empire spanning a million versions of the world, run by the humans and animal-descended peoples who got…
Nathaniel Rich
Mitchell Zukor is a young math genius hired by a Manhattan firm called FutureWorld that sells corporations worst-case scenarios — for a fee, they calculate your catastrophic exposure and indemnify you against being sued for not foreseeing it. Mitchell is…
Margaret Atwood
Snowman is living in a tree, wrapped in a bedsheet, maybe the last human, looked after by a group of gentle green-eyed people who aren’t human at all and think he’s a prophet. He works backward through how this happened:…
Richard Powers
Four lives converging on Makatea, a French Polynesian island strip-mined for phosphate decades ago and now down to eighty residents who are being asked to vote on whether a consortium can build the first floating city offshore. There’s a tech…
Helen Macdonald
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…
Max Barry
Humans hit something in deep space called the salamanders, which killed the crew that found them, and humanity built a war fleet in response. Providence Five carries four people and an AI that does all the fighting, plotting, and deciding…
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…
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…
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…
Gary Shteyngart
A near-future America where everyone wears an äppärät around their neck broadcasting their credit rating and screwability to everyone in the room, the dollar is pegged to the yuan, and the country is being run into default by a party…
John McPhee
I think this might have been my first McPhee book. It’s three long pieces about people trying to stop geology. The Army Corps of Engineers at the Old River Control Structure in Louisiana, holding the Mississippi in its channel against…
Naomi Alderman
Three tech billionaires have bunkers, and their prediction models are telling them when to run. Around them, a handful of people who know the systems from the inside — a survivalist forum obsessive, a daughter, a lover, an ex-employee —…
Kim Stanley Robinson
It opens with a heat wave in Uttar Pradesh that kills twenty million people in a week, and the rest of the book is the world reacting. A UN agency is set up in Zurich to represent people who aren’t…
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…
Naomi Alderman
Teenage girls start producing an electrical charge from a strand of muscle across the collarbone, enough to hurt, enough to kill. They can wake it in older women. Inside a decade, the whole arrangement of the world has flipped. Alderman…
David Sax
Sax noticed—in 2016, the year I launched AJ in print—that vinyl, paper notebooks, film, board games, and independent bookstores were all growing while the industries around them digitized, and he set out to find out why. It isn’t nostalgia —…
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…
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…
Paolo Bacigalupi
Oil is gone, the seas came up, and the world runs on calories — which means the agribusiness companies that own the seed patents own everything. Thailand has held out, protected by seawalls, a ruthless Environment Ministry, and a hidden…
Gabrielle Zevin
Sam and Sadie meet as kids in a hospital game room in Los Angeles, fall out, and meet again in a Cambridge subway station in the nineties. They make a video game together in a borrowed apartment over one summer…
Colum McCann
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and failing novelist, gets an assignment about the undersea cables that carry the internet, and joins a repair ship off the west coast of Africa. The chief of mission is John Conway, a freediver and…
Matthew B. Crawford
Matthew Crawford devotes Why We Drive to an anonymous couple he sees running down a wooded trail, pretending they’re riding motorcycles, making vrooming noises and playfully leaping over roots. It’s this eye for the small but uniquely human details that…
