2025 Round Up: Favourite Nonfiction

Ideas, people, places. Here are the top titles that resonated with us in 2025.

Updated January 9, 2026
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Apple in China : the capture of the world's greatest company
McGee, Patrick
Apple isn't just a brand; it's the world's most valuable company and creator of the 21st century's defining product. The iPhone has revolutionized the way we live, work and connect. But Apple is now a victim of its own success, caught in the middle of a new Cold War between two superpowers. ...
The art spy : the extraordinary untold tale of WWII resistance hero Rose Valland
Young, Michelle
Between two rivers : ancient Mesopotamia and the birth of history
Al-Rashid, Moudhy N.
Book of Lives : A Memoir of Sorts
Atwood, Margaret.
Paper Book
'Fat and satisfying' Observer * 'I loved it' Dua Lipa * 'Deliciously naughty' iNews * 'Beautifully told' Woman & Home * 'Spellbinding' FT * Book of the Year Guardian, Financial Times, Observer, Belfast Telegraph ...
Careless people : a cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism
Wynn-Williams, Sarah
The instant Sunday Times bestseller No. 1 New York Times bestseller 'How else to put this? Bloody hell' - The Guardian 'Devastating . . . Funny . . . Highly enjoyable' - The Times 'Jaw-dropping . . . A tell-all tome' - Financial...
Dead and Alive : Essays
Smith, Zadie.
An illuminating new essay collection from one of the most distinctive, exciting and acclaimed writers of her generation, Zadie Smith 'Zadie Smith is a wonderful essayist. She is a natural. She writes as she thinks, and she thinks crisply and exactly' - Tessa Hadley,...
Empire of AI : dreams and nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
Hao, Karen
When longtime AI expert and journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, it was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely market forces. ...
Enshittification : why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it
Doctorow, Cory
Everything is tuberculosis : the history and persistence of our deadliest infection
Green, John
The Golden Road : how ancient India transformed the world
Dalrymple, William
Paper Book
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A Waterstones and TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR A SPECTATOR and History Today BOOK OF THE YEAR A revolutionary new history of the diffusion of Indian ideas...
A marriage at sea : a true story of love, obsession, and shipwreck
Elmhirst, Sophie
The mind electric : a neurologist on the strangeness and wonder of our brains
Anand, Pria
The mission : the CIA in the 21st century
Weiner, Tim
'No one has opened up the CIA to us like Weiner has, and The Mission deserves to win him a second Pulitzer' JOHN SIMPSON, GUARDIAN The epic successor to Tim Weiner's National Book Award-winning classic, Legacy of Ashes: a gripping and revelatory history of the CIA in...
Mother Mary Comes to Me
Roy, Arundhati
Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir, this is a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as 'my shelter and my storm...
One day, everyone will have always been against this
El Akkad, Omar
From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad, an urgent and necessary reckoning with what it means to live in the West today. As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West would be a place of freedom and justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the...
The serviceberry : abundance and reciprocity in the natural world
Kimmerer, Robin Wall
Paper Book
'This book will nourish your soul, heart, and mind' Anthony Doerr As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy....
The sirens' call : how attention became the world's most endangered resource
Hayes, Christopher
Paper Book
We all feel it - the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they're us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the...

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