Patriot, Alexei Navalny
This is Alexei Navalny’s life in his own words: his Soviet childhood, political awakening, his marriage and beloved family, his total commitment to taking on a corrupt regime and his enduring love of Russia and its people. His 2020 poisoning by the Russian security services was a global news event. In 2024 he died in a brutal Siberian prison. He began writing Patriot whilst recovering from his poisoning; it ends with his prison diaries, seen in this book for the first time.
Shattered: A Memoir, Hanif Kureishi
On Boxing Day 2022, in Rome, Hanif Kureishi had a fall. When he came to, in a pool of blood, he was horrified to realise he had lost the use of his limbs. He could no longer walk, write or wash himself. He could do nothing without the help of others, and required constant care in a hospital. So began an odyssey of a year through the medical systems of Rome and Italy, with the hope of somehow being able to return home, to his house in London.
While confined to a series of hospital wards, he felt compelled to write, but being unable to type or to hold a pen, he began to dictate to family members the words which formed in his head. The result was an extraordinary series of dispatches from his hospital bed – a diary of a life in pieces, recorded with rare honesty, clarity and courage.
The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science, Dava Sobel
For decades Marie Curie was the only woman in the room at international scientific gatherings, and despite constant illness, she travelled far and wide to share the secrets of radioactivity, a term she coined. She is still the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields.
Her ingenuity extended far beyond the laboratory walls; grieving the death of her husband, Pierre, she took his place as professor of physics at the Sorbonne, devotedly raised two daughters, drove a van she outfitted with x-ray equipment to the front lines of World War I, befriended Albert Einstein and inspired generations of young women to pursue science as a way of life.
Approaching Marie Curie from a unique angle, Sobel navigates her remarkable discoveries and fame alongside the women who became her legacy – from Norway’s Ellen Gleditsch and France’s Marguerite Perry, who discovered the element francium, to her own daughter, Irene, another Nobel Prize winner. Elements of Marie Curie deftly illuminates the trailblazing life and enduring influence of one of the most consequential figures of our time.
What I Ate in One Year [and Related Thoughts], Stanley Tucci
In What I Ate in One Year, Tucci records twelve months of eating, in restaurants, kitchens, film sets, press junkets, at home and abroad, with friends, with family, with strangers, and occasionally just by himself.
Ranging from the mouth-wateringly memorable, to the comfortingly domestic, to the infuriatingly inedible, the meals memorialized in this diary are a prism through which he reflects on the ways his life, and his family, are constantly evolving. Through food he marks – and mourns – the passing of time, the loss of loved ones, and prepares himself for what is to come.
The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, Kate Summerscale
London, 1953. Police discover the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terrace house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they find another body beneath the floorboards, and then an array of human bones in the garden. But they have already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place, three years ago, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?
A nationwide manhunt is launched for the tenant of the ground-floor flat, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. Star reporter Harry Procter chases after the scoop. Celebrated crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begs to be assigned to the case. The story becomes an instant sensation, and with the relentless rise of the tabloid press the public watches on like never before. Who is Christie? Why did he choose to kill women, and to keep their bodies near him? As Harry and Fryn start to learn the full horror of what went on at Rillington Place, they realise that Christie might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice in plain sight.
Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy, Jon Michaels and David Noll
Time and again, when confronted with serious challenges to their power and privilege, white Christian nationalists seek solace – and satisfaction – in state-supported forms of vigilantism. This was true at the dawn of the American republic, when Northern abolitionists threatened the Southern slavocracy. It was also true in the aftermath of the Civil War, when emancipated Black Americans and their Northern allies sought to fulfil the promises of Reconstruction. And though this pattern was seemingly broken after the Civil Rights revolution of the 1950s and ’60s – and abandoned once and for all – legal vigilantism has made a surprising, roaring comeback in the months and years following the failed coup of January 6, 2021.
Vigilante Nation tells this story of the American Right marginalising, subordinating, and disenfranchising the increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan members of the American polity. This book exposes the vigilantes’ plans, explains their methods – everything from book bans to anti-abortion bounties to attacks on government proceedings, including elections—and underscores the stakes.
Information sourced from publishers.
