Nonfiction that reads like fiction

Enjoy these narrative nonfiction staff picks!

Updated March 8, 2025
Drag items up and down to your preferred order then select the "Save Order" button.
The Wager : a tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder
Grann, David
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager...
The boys in the boat : nine Americans and their epic quest for gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
Brown, Daniel
Paper Book
Now a Major Motion Picture Directed by George Clooney The #1 New York Times-bestselling story about the American Olympic rowing triumph in Nazi Germany--from the author of Facing the Mountain. For readers of Unbroken, out of the depths of the...
The art thief : a true story of love, crime, and a dangerous obsession
Finkel, Michael
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first century * "The Art Thief, like its title character, has confidence, élan, and a great sense of timing."--The New Yorker A...
The lost city of Z : a tale of deadly obsession in the Amazon
Grann, David.
Paper Book
A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the...
Educated : a memoir
Westover, Tara
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, AND BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER * One of the most acclaimed books of our time: an unforgettable memoir about a young woman who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University
The man who loved books too much : the true story of a thief, a detective, and a world of literary obsession
Bartlett, Allison Hoover.
Paper Book
Rare book theft is even more widespread that fine art theft. Most thieves, of course, steal for profit - but John Charles Gilkey stole purely for the love of books. In an attempt to understand him better, journalist Allison Hoover Bartlett plunged herself into the world of book lust and discovered...
The library book
Orlean, Susan
Paper Book
A REESE WITHERSPOON x HELLO SUNSHINE BOOK CLUB PICK A WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR * A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER and NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 "A constant pleasure to read...Everybody who loves books...
Madhouse at the end of the Earth : the Belgica's journey into the dark Antarctic night
Sancton, Julian
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The "exquisitely researched and deeply engrossing" (The New York Times) true survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly awry--with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter ...
Fuzz : when nature breaks the law
Roach, Mary
Paper Book
What's to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers...
The glass castle : a memoir
Walls, Jeannette.
Paper Book
THE BELOVED #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER--FROM THE AUTHOR OF HANG THE MOON The extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, "nothing short of spectacular" (Entertainment Weekly) memoir from one of the world's most gifted storytellers. The Glass Castle...
A fever in the heartland : the Ku Klux Klan's plot to take over America, and the woman who stopped them
Egan, Timothy
Paper Book
The Roaring Twenties - the Jazz Age - has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in...
Let's pretend this never happened : (a mostly true memoir)
Lawson, Jenny
Paper Book
For fans of Tina Fey and David Sedaris--Internet star Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, makes her literary debut.   Jenny Lawson realized that the most mortifying moments of our lives--the ones we'd like to pretend never happened--are in fact the ones that define us. In the #1 N...
Outliers : the story of success
Gladwell, Malcolm
Paper Book
Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of Blink and The Bomber Mafia and host of the podcast Revisionist History, explores what sets high achievers apart--from Bill Gates to the Beatles--in this seminal work from "a singular talent" (...
Men explain things to me
Solnit, Rebecca
Paper Book
In her comic, scathing essay "Men Explain Things to Me," Rebecca Solnit takes on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She writes about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars...
18 tiny deaths : the untold story of Frances Glessner Lee and the invention of modern forensics
Goldfarb, Bruce
Paper Book
A captivating blend of history, women in science, and true crime, 18 Tiny Deaths tells the story of how one woman changed the face of forensics forever. Frances Glessner Lee, born a socialite to a wealthy and influential Chicago family in the 1870s, was never meant to have a career, let...
A carnival of snackery : diaries (2003-2020)
Sedaris, David
Paper Book
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice: There's no right way to keep a diary, but if there's an entertaining way, David Sedaris seems to have mas­tered it.   If it's navel-gazing you're after, you've come to the wrong place; ditto treacly...
A voyage long and strange : rediscovering the new world
Horwitz, Tony
Paper Book
A Voyage Long and Strange is a rich mixture of scholarship and modern-day adventure that brings the forgotten first chapter of America's history vividly to life. What happened in North America between Columbus's sail in 1492 and the Pilgrims' arrival in 1620?
I'm glad my mom died
McCurdy, Jennette
Paper Book
* #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER * MORE THAN 2 MILLION COPIES SOLD! A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor--including eating...
Hidden Valley Road : inside the mind of an American family
Kolker, Robert
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * ONE OF GQ's TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY * The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope...
The devil in the white city : murder, magic, and madness at the fair that changed America
Larson, Erik
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death. Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an...
Between the world and me
Coates, Ta-Nehisi
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NAMED ONE OF TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE * PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST * ONE OF OPRAH'S "BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH" * NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT...
Without you, there is no us : my time with the sons of North Korea's elite
Kim, Suki
Paper Book
A haunting account of teaching English to the sons of North Korea's ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jong-il's reign   Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no...
The warmth of other suns : the epic story of America's great migration
Wilkerson, Isabel.
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER * TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE * ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES'S FIVE BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY   "A brilliant and stirring epic . . . Ms. Wilkerson does for the...
The Romanov sisters : the lost lives of the daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra
Rappaport, Helen.
Paper Book
A 12-WEEK NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Helen Rappaport paints a compelling portrait of the doomed grand duchesses." --People magazine "The public spoke of the sisters in a gentile, superficial manner, but Rappaport captures sections of letters and...
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
Capote, Truman
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * The most famous true crime novel of all time "chills the blood and exercises the intelligence" (The New York Review of Books)--and haunted its author long after he finished writing it. On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb,...
The blind side : evolution of a game
Lewis, Michael
Paper Book
The young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story will one day be among the most highly paid athletes in the National Football League. When we first meet him, he is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday,...
Evicted : poverty and profit in the American city
Desmond, Matthew
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE * ONE OF TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE * ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY One of the most acclaimed books of our time, this modern classic "has set a...
And the band played on : politics, people, and the AIDS epidemic
Shilts, Randy
Paper Book
Upon its first publication more than twenty years ago, And the Band Played on was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigative reporting. An international bestseller, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made into a critically acclaimed...
The bad-ass librarians of Timbuktu : and their race to save the world's most precious manuscripts
Hammer, Joshua
Paper Book
To save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean's Eleven. In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the...
Five days at Memorial : life and death in a storm-ravaged hospital
Fink, Sheri
Paper Book
One of the New York Times's Best Ten Books of the Year Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Winner of the 2014 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize,...
Tribe : on homecoming and belonging
Junger, Sebastian
Paper Book
We have a strong instinct to belong to small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding--"tribes." This tribal connection has been largely lost in modern society, but regaining it may be the key to our psychological survival. Decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin...
The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks
Skloot, Rebecca
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "The story of modern medicine and bioethics--and, indeed, race relations--is refracted beautifully, and movingly."--Entertainment Weekly NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE * ONE OF THE "MOST...
Hidden figures : the American dream and the untold story of the Black women mathematicians who helped win the space race
Shetterly, Margot Lee
Paper Book
The #1 New York Times bestseller The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space--a powerful, revelatory history essential to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in...
Being mortal : medicine and what matters in the end
Gawande, Atul
Paper Book
#1 New York Times Bestseller In Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending Medicine has triumphed in modern times,...
The wordy shipmates
Vowell, Sarah
Paper Book
"The Wordy Shipmates" is "New York Times" bestselling author Sarah Vowell's exploration of the Puritans and their journey to America to become the people of John Winthrop's city upon a hill a shining example, a city that cannot be hid.' To this day, America views itself as a Puritan nation, but...
Friday night lights : a town, a team, and a dream
Bissinger, H. G.
Paper Book
Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa--the winningest high-school football team in Texas history. Odessa is not known to be a town big on dreams, but the Panthers help keep the hopes and dreams of this small, dusty town going. Socially and racially divided,...
Newjack : guarding Sing Sing
Conover, Ted.
Paper Book
Ted Conover, the intrepid author of Coyotes, about the world of illegal Mexican immigrants, spent a year as a prison guard at Sing Sing.Newjack, his account of that experience, is a milestone in American journalism: a book that casts new and unexpected light on this nation's prison crisis and sets a...
We are never meeting in real life : essays
Irby, Samantha
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * This essay collection from the "bitches gotta eat" blogger, writer on Hulu's Shrill and HBO's And Just Like That, and "one of our country's most fierce and foulmouthed authors" (Amber Tamblyn, Vulture) is sure to make you alternately cackle...
Chasing Lincoln's killer
Swanson, James L.
Paper Book
Chasing Lincoln's Killer is based on James L. Swanson's New York Times bestselling book, Manhunt, also an Apple TV+ Series. Based on rare archival material, obscure trial manuscripts, and interviews with relatives of the conspirators and the manhunters,...
From scratch : a memoir of love, Sicily, and finding home
Locke, Tembi
Paper Book
Now a limited Netflix series starring Zoe Saldana! **A REESE WITHERSPOON x HELLO SUNSHINE BOOK CLUB PICK ** NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** A poignant and transporting cross-cultural love story set against the lush backdrop of the Sicilian countryside, where...
Becoming
Obama, Michelle
Paper Book
An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States   #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * WATCH THE EMMY-NOMINATED NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER * ONE OF...
Faster : how a Jewish driver, an American heiress, and a legendary car beat Hitler's best
Bascomb, Neal
Paper Book
Winner of the Motor Press Guild Best Book of the Year Award & Dean Batchelor Award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism  For fans of The Boys in the Boat and In the Garden of Beasts, a pulse-pounding tale of triumph by an improbable team of...
The dead are arising : the life of Malcolm X
Payne, Les
Paper Book
Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X--all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam...
A honeybee heart has five openings : a year of keeping bees
Jukes, Helen
Paper Book
An inspiring, up-close portrait of tending to a honeybee hive--a year of living dangerously--watching and capturing the wondrous, complex universe of honeybees and learning an altogether different way of being in the world. "As strange, beautiful, and unexpected, as precise and exquisite...
The rescue artist : a true story of art, thieves, and the hunt for a missing masterpiece
Dolnick, Edward
Paper Book
In the predawn gloom of a February day in 1994, two thieves entered the National Gallery in Oslo. They snatched one of the world's most famous paintings, Edvard Munch's The Scream, and fled with their $72 million trophy. The thieves made sure the world was watching: the Winter Olympics, in...
A night to remember
Lord, Walter
Paper Book
The classic minute-by-minute account of the sinking of the Titanic, in a 50th anniversary edition with a new introduction by Nathaniel Philbrick First published in 1955, A Night to Remember remains a completely riveting account of the Titanic's fatal...
Empire of the summer moon : Quanah Parker and the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history
Gwynne, S. C.
Paper Book
The Epic New York Times Bestseller Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the Texas Book Award Winner of the Oklahoma Book Award...
Nickel and dimed : on (not) getting by in America
Ehrenreich, Barbara.
Paper Book
In this now classic work, Barbara Ehrenreich, our sharpest and most original social critic, goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara...
Ghost soldiers : the forgotten epic story of World War II's most dramatic mission
Sides, Hampton.
Paper Book
A tense, powerful, grand account of one of the most daring exploits of World War II. On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected troops from the elite U.S. Army 6th Ranger Battalion slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty miles in an attempt to rescue 513...
River of the gods : genius, courage, and betrayal in the search for the source of the Nile
Millard, Candice
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The harrowing story of one of the great feats of exploration of all time and its complicated legacy--from the New York Times bestselling author of The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR:...
Trailed : one woman's quest to solve the Shenandoah murders
Miles, Kathryn
Paper Book
A riveting, "beautifully written" deep dive into the unsolved murder of two free-spirited young women in the wilderness (John Grisham, #1 New York Times bestselling author), a journalist's obsession--and a new theory of who might have done it.​ ...
The great railway bazaar : by train through Asia
Theroux, Paul.
Paper Book
In this unique and hugely entertaining railway odyssey, Theroux vividly recounts his travels--and the people, places, and landscapes he encountered--on the Orient Express, the Khyber Mail, and the Trans-Siberian Express, through such countries as Turkey, Iran, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and the...
The escape artist : the man who broke out of Auschwitz to warn the world
Freedland, Jonathan
Paper Book
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award · New York Times Bestseller "A brilliant and heart-wrenching book, with universal and timely lessons about the power of information--and misinformation. Is it possible to stop mass murder by telling the truth?" -- Yuval Noah Harari,...
Empire of pain : the secret history of the Sackler dynasty
Keefe, Patrick Radden
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR * A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From...
The splendid and the vile : a saga of Churchill, family, and defiance during the Blitz
Larson, Erik
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake delivers an intimate chronicle of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz--an inspiring portrait of courage and leadership in a time of...
The stranger beside me
Rule, Ann.
Paper Book
In 1971, while working the late-shift at a Seattle crisis clinic, true-crime writer Ann Rule struck up a friendship with a sensitive, charismatic young coworker: Ted Bundy. Three years later, eight young women disappeared in seven months, and Rule began tracking a brutal mass murderer. But she...
American Sherlock : murder, forensics, and the birth of American CSI
Dawson, Kate Winkler
Paper Book
Known as the 'American Sherlock Holmes,' Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of America's greatest forensic scientists, with a skill level that seemed almost supernatural. Heinrich spearheaded the invention of new forensic tools that police still use today, including blood spatter analysis, ballistics,...
The demon of unrest : a saga of hubris, heartbreak, and heroism at the dawn of the Civil War
Larson, Erik
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The author of The Splendid and the Vile brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War in this "riveting reexamination of a nation in tumult" (Los Angeles Times). ...
American demon : Eliot Ness and the hunt for America's Jack the Ripper
Stashower, Daniel
Paper Book
Boston had its Strangler. California had the Zodiac Killer. And in the depths of the Great Depression, Cleveland had the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. On September 5th, 1934, a young beachcomber made a gruesome discovery on the shores of Cleveland's Lake Erie: the lower half of a female torso,...
You'll never believe what happened to Lacey : crazy stories about racism
Ruffin, Amber
Paper Book
*NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* *INDIE NEXT PICK* *A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR* Writer and performer on Late Night with Seth Meyers Amber Ruffin writes with her sister Lacey Lamar with humor and heart to share...
The wide wide sea : imperial ambition, first contact and the fateful final voyage of Captain James Cook
Sides, Hampton
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, TIME, THE ECONOMIST, NPR, THE NEW YORKER, THE SMITHSONIAN, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS A "thrilling and superbly crafted" (The Wall Street Journal) account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of...

Library staff! You can create and contribute to lists. Contact your catalog administrator or log in here.