There are a huge number of novels we’re excited about in 2021, but there are just as many great non-fiction reads that are set to hit our bookshelves in the coming months. Here, we compile a list of the non-fiction books we can’t wait to get our hands on in 2021.
1. Saving Justice by James Comey (12th January)
Synopsis: James Comey, former FBI Director and New York Times bestselling author of A Higher Loyalty, uses his long career in federal law enforcement to explore issues of justice and fairness in the US justice system.
James Comey might best be known as the FBI director that Donald Trump fired in 2017, but he’s had a long, varied career in the law and justice system. He knows better than most just what a force for good the US justice system can be, and how far afield it has strayed during the Trump Presidency.
In his much-anticipated follow-up to A Higher Loyalty, Comey uses anecdotes and lessons from his career to show how the federal justice system works. From prosecuting mobsters as an Assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York in the 1980s to grappling with the legalities of anti-terrorism work as the Deputy Attorney General in the early 2000s to, of course, his tumultuous stint as FBI director beginning in 2013, Comey shows just how essential it is to pursue the primacy of truth for federal law enforcement.
Saving Justice is gracefully written and honestly told, a clarion call for a return to fairness and equity in the law.
Pre-order Saving Justice here.
2. Some Body to Love by Alexandra Heminsley (14th January)
Synopsis: As the seagulls squawked overhead and the sun dipped into the sea, Alexandra Heminsley’s world was turning inside out.
She’d just been told her then-husband was going to transition. The revelation threatened to shatter their brand new, still fragile, family.
But this vertiginous moment represented only the latest in a series of events that had left Alex feeling more and more dissociated from her own body, turning her into a seemingly unreliable narrator of her own reality.
Some Body to Love is Alex’s profoundly open-hearted memoir about losing her husband but gaining a best friend, and together bringing up a baby in a changing world. Its exploration of what it means to have a human body, to feel connected or severed from it, and how we might learn to accept our own, makes it a vital and inspiring contribution to some of the most complex and heated conversations of our times.
Pre-order Some Body to Love here.
3. Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera (28th January)
Synopsis: In his brilliantly illuminating new book Sathnam Sanghera demonstrates how so much of what we consider to be modern Britain is actually rooted in our imperial past. In prose that is, at once, both clear-eyed and full of acerbic wit, Sanghera shows how our past is everywhere: from how we live to how we think, from the foundation of the NHS to the nature of our racism, from our distrust of intellectuals in public life to the exceptionalism that imbued the campaign for Brexit and the government’s early response to the Covid crisis. And yet empire is a subject, weirdly hidden from view.
The British Empire ran for centuries and covered vast swathes of the world. It is, as Sanghera reveals, fundamental to understanding Britain. However, even among those who celebrate the empire there seems to be a desire not to look at it too closely – not to include the subject in our school history books, not to emphasize it too much in our favourite museums.
At a time of great division, when we are arguing about what it means to be British, Sanghera’s book urges us to address this bewildering contradiction. For, it is only by stepping back and seeing where we really come from, that we can begin to understand who we are, and what unites us.
Pre-order Empireland here.
4. The Panic Years by Nell Frizzell (11th February)
Synopsis: The Panic Years: a period between adolescence and menopause; a personal crisis created by the world around us; a time to reassess and make change; a conundrum, a transformation, an opportunity.
Every decision a woman makes during the panic years – about partners, holidays, jobs, homes, savings, friendships – will be impacted by the urgency of the single decision that comes with a biological deadline, the one decision that is impossible to take back; whether or not to have a baby.
But how to stay sane in such a maddening time? How to know who you are and what you might want from life? How to know if you’re making the right decisions?
Raw, hilarious and beguilingly honest, Nell Frizzell’s account of her panic years is both an arm around the shoulder and a campaign to start a conversation. This affects us all – women, men, mothers, children, partners, friends, colleagues – so it’s time we started talking about it with a little more candour.
Pre-order The Panic Years here.
5. Black Is The Body by Emily Bernard (11th February)
Synopsis: In twelve intensely personal, interconnected essays, Emily Bernard sets out to tell stories from her life that enable her to talk about truth, race, family and relationships, and much more.
She observes the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities of growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a PhD from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in America’s New England today.
Ultimately, she shows us that it is in our shared experience of humanity that we find connection, happiness and hope.
Pre-order Black is the Body here.
6. Consent: A Memoir by Vanessa Springora (18th February)
Synopsis: Thirty years ago, Vanessa Springora was the teenage muse of one of France’s most celebrated writers, a footnote in the narrative of an influential man. At the end of 2019, as women around the world began to speak out, Springora, now in her forties and the director of one of France’s leading publishing houses, decided to reclaim her own story.
Consent is the story of her stolen adolescence. Devastating in its honesty, Springora’s painstaking memoir lays bare the cultural attitudes and circumstances that made it possible for a thirteen-year-old girl to become involved with a fifty-year-old man.
Drawing parallels between children’s fairy tales, French history and the author’s personal life, Consent offers intimate insights into the meaning of love and consent, the toll of trauma and the power of healing in women’s lives.
Pre-order Consent: A Memoir here.
7. Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson (2nd March)
Synopsis: In 12 Rules for Life, acclaimed public thinker and clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson offered an antidote to the chaos in our lives: eternal truths applied to modern anxieties. His insights have helped millions of readers and resonated powerfully around the world.
Now in this much-anticipated sequel, Peterson goes further, showing that part of life’s meaning comes from reaching out into the domain beyond what we know, and adapting to an ever-transforming world. While an excess of chaos threatens us with uncertainty, an excess of order leads to a lack of curiosity and creative vitality. Beyond Order therefore calls on us to balance the two fundamental principles of reality – order and chaos - and reveals the profound meaning that can be found on the path that divides them.
In times of instability and suffering, Peterson reminds us that there are sources of strength on which we can all draw: insights borrowed from psychology, philosophy, and humanity’s greatest myths and stories. Drawing on the hard-won truths of ancient wisdom, as well as deeply personal lessons from his own life and clinical practice, Peterson offers twelve new principles to guide readers towards a more courageous, truthful and meaningful life.
Pre-order Beyond Order here.
8. The Soul of a Woman: Rebel Girls, Impatient Love and Long Life by Isabel Allende (2nd March)
Synopsis: As a child, Isabel Allende watched her mother, abandoned by her husband, provide for her three small children. As a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s, she rode the first wave of feminism. She has seen what has been accomplished by the movement in the course of her lifetime. And over the course of three marriages, she has learned how to grow as a woman while having a partner, when to step away, and the rewards of embracing one’s sexuality.
So what do women want? To be safe, to be valued, to live in peace, to have their own resources, to be connected, to have control over their bodies and lives, and above all, to be loved. On all these fronts, there is much work to be done, and this book, Allende hopes, will ‘light the torch of our daughters and granddaughters with mine. They will have to live for us, as we lived for our mothers, and carry on with the work still left to be finished.’
Pre-order The Soul of a Woman here.
9. Friends by Robin Dunbar (4th March)
Synopsis: Friends matter to us, and they matter more than we think. The single most surprising fact to emerge out of the medical literature over the last decade or so has been that the number and quality of the friendships we have has a bigger influence on our happiness, health and even mortality risk than anything else except giving up smoking.
Robin Dunbar is the world-renowned psychologist and author who famously discovered Dunbar’s number: how our capacity for friendship is limited to around 150 people. In Friends, he looks at friendship in the round, at the way different types of friendship and family relationships intersect, or at the complex of psychological and behavioural mechanisms that underpin friendships and make them possible – and just how complicated the business of making and keeping friends actually is.
Mixing insights from scientific research with first person experiences and culture, Friends explores and integrates knowledge from disciplines ranging from psychology and anthropology to neuroscience and genetics in a single magical weave that allows us to peer into the incredible complexity of the social world in which we are all so deeply embedded.
Working at the coalface of the subject at both research and personal levels, Robin Dunbar has written the definitive book on how and why we are friends.
Pre-order Friends here.
10. Failures of State by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnot (18th March)
Synopsis: The extraordinary inside story of the UK’s response to the coronavirus pandemic from the country’s most reputable investigative journalist unit at The Sunday Times.
Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus recounts the extraordinary political decisions taken at the heart of Boris Johnson’s government during the global pandemic.
Meticulously researched and corroborated by hundreds of inside sources, politicians, emergency planners, scientists, doctors, paramedics and bereaved families, along with leaked data and documents, this is the insider’s account of how the government sleepwalked into disaster and tried to cover up its role in the tragedy – and it exposes one of the most scandalous failures of political leadership in British history.
In the eye of the storm was Boris Johnson, a Prime Minister who idolised Winston Churchill and had the chance to become a hero of his own making as the crisis engulfed the nation. Instead he was fixated on Brexit, his own political destiny and a myriad of personal issues, all while presiding over the UK government’s botched response to the global coronavirus pandemic. After missing key Cobra meetings, embracing and abandoning herd immunity and dithering over lockdown, Johnson left the NHS facing an unmanageable deluge of patients. His inaction resulted in the deaths of many thousands of British people and his own hospitalisation at the hands of the pandemic, yet further reckless decisions allowed a deadly second wave to sweep across the country in the autumn months with the economy on the brink of collapse.
With access to key figures at the top of government during the most tumultuous year of modern British history, Failures of State is an exhaustive and thrillingly told story – and one of the most essential pieces of investigative reporting for a generation.
Pre-order Failures of State here.
11. New Yorkers by Craig Taylor (23rd March)
Synopsis: A symphony of contemporary New York told through the magnificent words of its people – from the best-selling author of Londoners.
In the first twenty years of the twenty-first century, New York City has been convulsed by terrorist attack, blackout, hurricane, recession, social injustice, and pandemic. New Yorkers weaves the voices of some of the city’s best talkers into an indelible portrait of New York in our time – and a powerful hymn to the vitality and resilience of its people.
Vibrant and bursting with life, New Yorkers explores the nonstop hustle to make it; the pressures on new immigrants, people of colour, and the poor. It captures the strength of an irrepressible city that – no matter what it goes through – dares call itself the greatest in the world.
Drawn from millions of words, hundreds of interviews, and six years in the making, New Yorkers is a grand portrait of an irrepressible city and a hymn to the vitality and resilience of its people.
Pre-order New Yorkers here.
12. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (30th March)
Synopsis: At the March on Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was in a mood to reflect on her life and her legacy. She had spent decades as one of the most successful entertainers the world had ever seen, but, she told the crowd, “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too”. Inspired by these words, celebrated poet and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound meditation on Black performance in the modern age, in which culture, history and his own lived experience collide.
In prose that brims with jubilation and pain, A Little Devil in America explores a sequence of iconic and intimate performances which take Abdurraqib from mid-century Paris to the moon-and back down again, to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio. Each moment in each performance he examines has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and his own personal history of love and grief-whether it’s the twenty-seven seconds of ‘Gimme Shelter’ in which Merry Clayton sings, or the magnificent hours of Aretha Franklin’s homegoing; Beyoncé’s Super Bowl half-time show or a schoolyard fistfight; Dave Chapelle’s skits or a game of spades among friends.
Infused with the lyricism and rhythm of the musicians Abdurraqib loves, and richly textured with compassion and humour, A Little Devil in America is a unique exaltation of Black performances, cultures and communities.
Pre-order A Little Devil in America here.
13. The Hard Crowd by Rachel Kushner (8th April)
Synopsis: A wildly original first essay collection from the bestselling, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Mars Room. In her twenties Rachel Kushner went to Mexico in pursuit of her first love – motorbikes – to compete in the notorious and deadly race, Cabo 1000. As fellow racers died on the roadside, bikes were stolen and friends abandoned one another in the heat of the chase, she crashed at 130mph and miraculously survived; soon after, she decided to leave her controlling boyfriend and manoeuvred her way into a freer new life.
The Hard Crowd is a white-knuckle ride through that life; a book about muscling your way through, finding your own path and, as she says in the hair-raising opening piece, ‘completing the ride without dying’. In nineteen razor-sharp essays she explores friendship, loss, social justice, art and more, taking us into the world of truckers, a Palestinian refugee camp, the American prison system and the San Francisco music scene, via the work of Jeff Koons, Marguerite Duras and the Rolling Stones. Fearless and bold, The Hard Crowd is an electrifying book about living fast and free in a crowded world.
Pre-order The Hard Crowd here.
14. Rememberings by Sinead O’Connor (3rd June)
Synopsis: Sinéad O’Connor’s voice and trademark shaved head made her famous by the age of twenty-one. Her recording of Prince’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ made her a global icon. She outraged millions when she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on American television.
O’Connor was unapologetic and impossible to ignore, calling out hypocrisy wherever she saw it.
She has remained that way for three decades.
Now, in Rememberings, O’Connor tells her story – the heartache of growing up in a family falling apart; her early forays into the Dublin music scene; her adventures and misadventures in the world of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll; the fulfilment of being a mother; her ongoing spiritual quest – and through it all, her abiding passion for music.
Rememberings is intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and full of hard-won insights. It is a unique and remarkable chronicle by a unique and remarkable artist.
Pre-order Rememberings here.
15. Projections: A Story of Human Emotions by Karl Deisseroth (15th June)
Synopsis: In this groundbreaking portrait of the human mind, a renowned psychiatrist and neuroscientist explores the biological and physical nature of our inner worlds through poignant, and at times shocking, clinical stories.
Karl Deisseroth has spent his life pursuing truths about the human mind, both as a clinical psychiatrist and as a researcher developing the revolutionary field of optogenetics, which allows us to decipher the brain’s workings using light. In Projections, he combines his groundbreaking access to the brain’s inner circuitry with a deep empathy for his patients to examine what mental illness reveals about the origin of human feelings–how the broken can illuminate the unbroken.
Pre-order Projections here.
16. Everything You Really Need to Know about Politics by Jess Phillips (24th June)
Synopsis: From the sublime to the ridiculous, the inner workings of Westminster are often a mystery to an outsider. Here, Jess Phillips lifts the lid on the systems and rules that govern us all, and in her own inimitable style shows us what’s really going on in British politics. Drawing on her tenure as an MP, she will explain the process of running for government; changing a law; serving her constituents; wrangling with her fellow MPs and so much more. This is the perfect book for anyone who’s a bit confused about how it all works…
17. Things Are Against Us by Lucy Ellmann (4th July)
Synopsis: Lucy Ellmann’s essay collection is on the way. The essays explore a variety of topics and key figures including feminism, environmental catastrophe, labour strikes, sex strikes, Little House On The Prairie, Donald Trump, Alfred Hitchcock and Virginia Woolf.
18. The Sex Lives of African Women by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah (22nd July)
Synopsis: The Sex Lives of African Women uniquely amplifies individual women from across the African continent and its global diaspora, as they speak of their diverse experiences of sex, sexualities and relationships.
Many of the women who tell their stories in this collection recall the journeys they have travelled in order to own their own sexualities. They do this by grappling with experiences of child sexual abuse, resisting the religious edicts of their childhood, and by asserting their sexual power.
From finding queer community in Egypt to living a polyamorous life in Senegal to understanding the intersectionality of religion and pleasure in Cameroon to choosing to leave relationships that no longer serve them, these narratives are as individual and illuminating as the women who share them.
The Sex Lives of African Women provides a deep insight into women’s quest for freedom, highlights the complex tapestry of African women’s sexuality, and bestows upon all women inspirational examples to live a truly liberated life.
19. The Comfort Book by Matt Haig (July)
Synopsis: The Comfort Book is a collection of little islands of hope. It gathers consolations and stories that give new ways of seeing ourselves and the world.
Matt Haig’s mix of philosophy, memoir and self-reflection builds on the wisdom of philosophers and survivors through the ages, from Marcus Aurelius to Nellie Bly, Emily Dickinson to James Baldwin.
This is the book to pick up when you need the wisdom of a friend, the comfort of a hug or just to celebrate the messy miracle of being alive.
20. Tunnel 29 by Helena Merriman (5th August)
Synopsis: It’s August, 1962, and Joachim Rudolph is digging a tunnel under the Berlin Wall. But he isn’t tunnelling out of the East. He’s tunnelling in from the West to help dozens of people escape from East Germany.
Inspired by award-winning BBC journalist Helena Merriman’s research for her acclaimed BBC podcast, Tunnel 29 is the true story of the most remarkable escape tunnel dug under the Berlin Wall – as told through the voices of the people involved. Hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with surviving participants and thousands of pages of Stasi documents have given Helena Merriman not only fresh information, but also new insights into the escapers and their extraordinary plan.
For the first time she is able reveal the identity of an informant who infiltrated the tunnellers. While husbands, wives and children start to crawl through the wet, cold darkness beneath Berlin’s notorious ‘Death Strip’, the Stasi are mounting an operation to stop the escape going ahead – and kill or capture everyone involved. Helena Merriman brilliantly and chillingly portrays the mounting tension as Joachim Rudolph and his team wait for those terrified escapers – people who are willing to risk everything to gain the freedom the East denies them…
21. On Freedom by Maggie Nelson (2nd September)
Synopsis: So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom’s long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept’s complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.
Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing “practices of freedom” by which we negotiate our interrelation with-indeed, our inseparability from-others, with all the care and constraint that relation entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.
For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture-from recent art world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis-is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.
