The best non-fiction books

Born to a Black mother and white father under apartheid -- when his very existence was a crime -- Trevor Noah tells the funniest, most moving memoir you'll read.

The murder of a widowed mother of ten in 1972 Belfast opens a story about the IRA, the Troubles, and what it costs people to commit violence in the name of a cause.

A woman raised by survivalist parents in rural Idaho -- who never attended school -- earns a PhD from Cambridge.

How did one unremarkable species conquer the world and reshape it beyond recognition? A sweeping history of humankind.

Small changes compound into remarkable results -- the most practical guide to changing your behaviour ever written.

A neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal lung cancer asks: what makes a life worth living? One of the most moving memoirs ever written.

A Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist argues that life's meaning can be found even in the most unbearable suffering.

A pioneering psychiatrist reveals how trauma reshapes the body and brain -- and what it takes to heal.

Malcolm X tells his own story -- from Midwestern childhood through street crime, conversion to Islam in prison, rise to national prominence, and a final transformation that cost him his life.

The former First Lady tells her story from the South Side of Chicago to the White House -- with unusual candour about everything that happened between and inside those walls.

The Great Migration -- the six million Black Americans who left the South between 1915 and 1970 -- told through the lives of three people who made the journey.

The Sackler family built one of the great American philanthropic dynasties -- using money made by marketing OxyContin to a crisis they helped create.

A Nobel Prize-winning physicist remembers picking locks at Los Alamos, learning to draw, playing bongo drums in strip clubs, and solving the Challenger disaster -- mostly by doing things differently from everyone else.

A journalist investigates Theranos, the blood-testing startup valued at nine billion dollars -- and discovers the technology does not work and never did.

A letter to his teenage son about what it means to live in a Black body in America -- urgent, beautiful, and impossible to look away from.

A fifteen-year-old boy is transported from a Hungarian village to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald -- and survives to write the most important memoir of the Holocaust.

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe arrive in New York as penniless artists and become each other's first love, greatest audience, and lifelong devotion.

An Oscar-winning actress traces the path from extreme childhood poverty in Rhode Island to the pinnacle of her profession -- and the self-acceptance that proved hardest of all.

Maya Angelou's memoir of growing up Black in the American South is a story of trauma, resilience, and the fierce power of words.

A Nobel laureate summarises forty years of research into human judgment -- and reveals that the intuitive mind is faster, more powerful, and more reliably wrong than we think.

A thirteen-year-old Jewish girl hides with her family in a concealed annex in Amsterdam for two years -- and keeps a diary that becomes one of the most read books in history.

A brilliantly entertaining tour of the human body -- everything you never knew about the extraordinary machine you live in.

A man reconnects with his dying former professor for a series of Tuesday conversations that become the most important lessons of his life.

A journalist looks back on a nomadic childhood with eccentric, brilliant, and deeply neglectful parents and asks what she owes them now.

A geobiologist writes about trees, seeds, and soil -- and about the decades she spent building a career in science in a world that didn't make it easy.

After her husband dies at the dinner table and her daughter lies in a coma, Joan Didion examines grief with the precision of a war correspondent.

A father chronicles his son's methamphetamine addiction across several years and multiple relapses, trying to understand a disease that nearly destroys them both.

In 1951 a Black woman's cancer cells were taken without her knowledge and became one of the most important tools in medical history -- her family found out decades later.

The story of success is actually the story of advantages most people don't see -- and Gladwell dismantles the myth of the self-made exceptional individual.

In a culture that rewards the loudest voice in the room, this book makes a powerful case for the quiet ones.

A young man gives away his savings and walks into the Alaskan wilderness alone -- and never walks out.

A comedian, writer, and actor recalls her rise through the male-dominated world of television comedy with wit, warmth, and extremely honest opinions about eyebrows.

A woman with no hiking experience sets out alone to walk over a thousand miles of wilderness trail to save herself from grief and self-destruction.

A Yale Law School graduate traces his journey from a chaotic Appalachian family through the Marines to elite education -- a memoir that became a cultural lightning rod.