Memoir
Caro Giles ( 4) Unschooled Little Toller, 2nd, HB, £20, 9781915068439
4
As the wife and mother of two state secondary school teachers and a former primary school governor, I am ashamed to admit that I have sometimes taken a slightly dim view of those who homeschool their children. But this beautifully written book changed my mind. Giles documents her struggle to educate her four daughters, all of whom have special educational needs, poorly met or entirely uncatered for by our underfunded state school system. That she documents it all with such grace won my warm admiration.
Poetry
Len Pennie ( 6) poyums annaw Canongate, 25th, HB, £14.99, 9781837263288
6 Psychology
Stephen Grosz ( 9) Love’s Labour Chatto, 4th, HB, £20, 9780701188962
Psychanalyst Grosz’s book The Examined Life was about learning how to live. This engrossing new book, which draws on 40 years of candid and surprising conversations with lovesick patients, is about learning to love. And from the woman who hesitates to post her wedding invitations and then decades later cannot decide whether to divorce, to the man whose partner’s death is almost too much to bear, Grosz concludes that it is a difficult process; in fact, it is the labour of a lifetime.
I have come late to the amazing Pennie but, as anyone who saw her Nibbies acceptance speech after winning the Discover Book of the Year Award 2025 knows, she is a resounding force for good. Fresh from that win, the performance poet and TikTok phenomenon, who writes in both Scots and English, follows her debut collection, Poyums, with a second, blistering collection that confronts patriarchy, gender-based violence and societal injustice with tenderness, a jousting wit and not a little righteous fury.
5 Memoir
Arundhati Roy ( 5) Mother Mary Comes to Me Hamish Hamilton, 4th, HB, £20, 9780241761717 “I have thought of my own life as a footnote to the things that really matter.” So writes Roy in the opening chapter of this enthralling memoir, which has all the sweep and verve of her fiction. At heart, it could be characterised as an account of how she became the person and the writer she is, but its magnetic poles belong to her extraordinary, singular mother Mrs Roy, with whom she had a complex relationship but who was also, Roy writes, “my shelter and my storm”.
Literature
Ann Morgan ( 10) Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing Renard Press, 1st, PB, £10, 9781804471326
7 Economics
Corinne Low ( 7) Femonomics: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and How to Get the Most Out of Yours Hodder Press, 25th, HB, £22, 9781399737609
8 Philosophy 9
Paul Kingsnorth ( 8) Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity Particular, 23rd, HB, £25.99, 9780241788400 “You don’t understand Progress, which is always and everywhere a Good Thing. But you can feel something going on that is not a good thing.” If you have a radical heart, it will beat all the faster after reading this rallying SOS by acclaimed novelist, non-fiction writer and poet Kingsnorth. Examining the currents driving the global industrial economy, he prophesies what is next for our disenchanted civilisation in the face of a “hollowing out of humanity” in which our very souls are at stake.
What if you had the power to prioritise things you value, rather than the things that others do? If you have often felt, as I have, that many books purporting to reflect the experience of being a working women do no such thing, then this data-rich guide could be for you. Low, who has herself encountered many of the dilemmas she enjoyably scrutinises, aims to empower women to get a better deal: one that will reclaim their time, energy and joy.
Inviting us to “read upside down and see what falls out”, this open-hearted and gently bracing book examines the assumptions we make and the gaps that can open up in our understanding as a consequence, however widely we read. Morgan, the author of Reading the World: How I Read a Book from Every Country, draws on an approach she has developed over more than a decade of interactions with book lovers around the globe in the cause of deepening our appreciation of the world’s complexity and richness when we read.
10 11
ZHANG XIAOHONG
BETTINA VON ZWEHL
PICTURE CREDIT
JO SITTENFELD
THE WHARTON SCHOOL
IGOR E A MORGAN
MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI
Books New Titles: Non-Fiction
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