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Goodreads Choice Awards — Non-Fiction

Award-winning non-fiction titles recognised by the Goodreads Choice Awards. From memoirs to science, history to self-help.

1217 books available

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Fresh Popularity Rating Publish Year Price Latest

The Crossroads of Should and Must: Find and Follow Your Passion

Elle Luna

There are two paths in life: Should & Must. We arrive at this crossroads over and over again, and every day. And we get to choose. Starting out or starting over, making a career change or making a life change, the most life-affirming thing you can do is to honor the voice inside that says your have something special to give, and then heed the call and act. Many have traveled this road before. Here’s how you can, too. #choosemust An inspirational gift book for every recent graduate, every artist, every seeker, and every career change.

RM 19.90

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

Ruth Franklin

This historically engaging and relevant biography establishes Shirley Jackson as a towering figure in American literature and revives the life and work of a neglected master. Still known to millions primarily as the author of the The Lottery , Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) has been curiously absent from the mainstream American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense and psychological horror, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America more deeply than anyone. Now, biographer Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author of such classics as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle . Placing Jackson within an American gothic tradition that stretches back to Hawthorne and Poe, Franklin demonstrates how her unique contribution to this genre came from her focus on "domestic horror." Almost two decades before The Feminine Mystique ignited the women's movement, Jackson's stories and nonfiction chronicles were already exploring the exploitation and the desperate isolation of women, particularly married women, in American society. Franklin's portrait of Jackson gives us "a way of reading Jackson and her work that threads her into the weave of the world of words, as a writer and as a woman, rather than excludes her as an anomaly" (Neil Gaiman). The increasingly prescient Jackson emerges as a ferociously talented, determined, and prodigiously creative writer in a time when it was unusual for a woman to have both a family and a profession. A mother of four and the wife of the prominent New Yorker critic and academic Stanley Edgar Hyman, Jackson lived a seemingly bucolic life in the New England town of North Bennington, Vermont. Yet, much like her stories, which channeled the occult while exploring the claustrophobia of marriage and motherhood, Jackson's creative ascent was haunted by a darker side. As her career progressed, her marriage became more tenuous, her anxiety mounted, and she became addicted to amphetamines and tranquilizers. In sobering detail, Franklin insightfully examines the effects of Jackson's California upbringing, in the shadow of a hypercritical mother, on her relationship with her husband, juxtaposing Hyman's infidelities, domineering behavior, and professional jealousy with his unerring admiration for Jackson's fiction, which he was convinced was among the most brilliant he had ever encountered. Based on a wealth of previously undiscovered correspondence and dozens of new interviews, Shirley Jackson―an exploration of astonishing talent shaped by a damaging childhood and turbulent marriage―becomes the definitive biography of a generational avatar and an American literary giant.

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Vegan 100: Over 100 Incredible Recipes from Avant-Garde Vegan

Gaz Oakley, Simon Smith, Adam Laycock

Tempted to try your hand at vegan food but don't know where to start? Or even just to make meat-free Monday a regular thing? Long gone are the days of vegan food being dull and worthy: Vegan 100 is bold, vibrant and gorgeous. The emphasis in Gaz's 100 tempting vegan recipes is first and foremost on FLAVOR. From Deep Purple Soup to Sage and Smoked Chilli "Dog", through vegan "Fish and Chips" to Chocolate Tart and Raw Cacao "Cheesecake", it's all incredible-tasting food that just happens to be vegan. Delectable, beautiful and packed with dishes that are good for you, this is like no other vegan cookbook.

RM 98.71

Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

Huw Lemmey, Ben Miller

Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked. We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those ‘bad gays’ whose unexemplary lives reveals more than we might expect? Part revisionist history, part historical biography and based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes and asks what we can learn about LGBTQ history, sexuality and identity through its villains and baddies. From the Emperor Hadrian to notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors excavate the buried history of queer lives. This includes fascist thugs, famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, imperialists, G-men and architects. Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge the mainstream assumptions of sexual identity. They show that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century and that its interpretation has been central to major historical moments of conflict from the ruptures of Weimar Republic to red-baiting in Cold War America. Amusing, disturbing and fascinating, Bad Gays puts centre stage the queer villains and evil twinks in history.

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Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

T Kira Madden

Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight. As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls. With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawai'i to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It's a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful.

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The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move

Sonia Shah

A prize-winning journalist upends our centuries-long assumptions about migration through science, history, and reporting--predicting its lifesaving power in the face of climate change. The news today is full of stories of dislocated people on the move. Wild species, too, are escaping warming seas and desiccated lands, creeping, swimming, and flying in a mass exodus from their past habitats. News media presents this scrambling of the planet's migration patterns as unprecedented, provoking fears of the spread of disease and conflict and waves of anxiety across the Western world. On both sides of the Atlantic, experts issue alarmed predictions of millions of invading aliens, unstoppable as an advancing tsunami, and countries respond by electing anti-immigration leaders who slam closed borders that were historically porous. But the science and history of migration in animals, plants, and humans tell a different story. Far from being a disruptive behavior to be quelled at any cost, migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change, a biological imperative as necessary as breathing. Climate changes triggered the first human migrations out of Africa. Falling sea levels allowed our passage across the Bering Sea. Unhampered by barbed wire, migration allowed our ancestors to people the planet, catapulting us into the highest reaches of the Himalayan mountains and the most remote islands of the Pacific, creating and disseminating the biological, cultural, and social diversity that ecosystems and societies depend upon. In other words, migration is not the crisis--it is the solution. Conclusively tracking the history of misinformation from the 18th century through today's anti-immigration policies, The Next Great Migration makes the case for a future in which migration is not a source of fear, but of hope.

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The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

William Dalrymple

The story of how the East India Company took over large swaths of Asia, and the devastating results of the corporation running a country. In August 1765, the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and set up, in his place, a government run by English traders who collected taxes through means of a private army. The creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional company and became something much more unusual: an international corporation transformed into an aggressive colonial power. Over the course of the next 47 years, the company's reach grew until almost all of India south of Delhi was effectively ruled from a boardroom in the city of London.

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The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World

Shelley Puhak

The remarkable, little-known story of two trailblazing women in the Early Middle Ages who wielded immense power, only to be vilified for daring to rule. Brunhild was a Spanish princess, raised to be married off for the sake of alliance-building. Her sister-in-law Fredegund started out as a lowly palace slave. And yet—in the 6th-century Merovingian Empire, where women were excluded from noble succession and royal politics was a blood sport—these two iron-willed strategists reigned over vast realms for decades, changing the face of Europe. The two queens commanded armies and negotiated with kings and popes. They formed coalitions and broke them, mothered children and lost them. They fought a years-long civil war—against each other. With ingenuity and skill, they battled to stay alive in the game of statecraft, and in the process laid the foundations of what would one day be Charlemagne’s empire. Yet after Brunhild and Fredegund’s deaths—one gentle, the other horrific—their stories were rewritten, their names consigned to slander and legend. In The Dark Queens , award-winning writer Shelley Puhak sets the record straight. She resurrects two very real women in all their complexity, painting a richly detailed portrait of an unfamiliar time and striking at the roots of some of our culture’s stubbornest myths about female power. The Dark Queens offers proof that the relationships between women can transform the world.

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American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond

Jeremy Dauber

From the acclaimed author of American Comics and Jewish Comedy comes a sweeping and entertaining narrative that details the rise and enduring grip of horror in American literature, cinema, and, ultimately, culture—from the taut, terrifying stories of Edgar Allan Poe to the grisly, lingering films of Jordan Peele America is held captive by horror stories. They flicker on the screen of a darkened movie theater and are shared around the campfire. They blare out in tabloid true-crime headlines, and in the worried voices of local news anchors. They are consumed, virally, on the phones in each of our pockets. Like the victims in any slasher worth its salt, we can’t escape the thrall of scary stories. In American Scary , noted cultural historian and Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes the reader to the startling origins of the horror genre in the United States, drawing a surprising through-line between the lingering influence of the European Gothic, the enslaved insurrection tales propagated by slaveholders, and the apocryphal chronicles of colonial settlers kidnapped by Native Americans, among many others. These foundational narratives give rise to and are influenced by the body of work we more closely associate with the weird fiction of HP Lovecraft, the lingering stories of Shirley Jackson, the unsettling films of Alfred Hitchcock, the up-all-night tales of Stephen King, and the gripping critiques of Jordan Peele. From “The Tell-Tale Heart” to M3gan , we begin to see why the horror genre is the perfect prism through which to view America’s past and present. With the extraordinary historical breadth and dexterous weave of insight and style that has made him twice a finalist for the National Jewish Book, Dauber makes the haunting case that horror reveals the true depths of the American mind. Featuring cameos Shirley Jackson • The Sixth Sense • Edgar Allan Poe • Nathaniel Hawthorne • Anne Radcliffe • Charles Brockden Brown • Los Espookys • Washington Irving • Nat Turner • Night of the Living Dead • H.P. Lovecraft • Alien • Mary Heaton Vorse • Edith Wharton • Norman Bates • Lon Chaney • Frankenstein • Dracula • H.G. Wells • William Faulkner • Dashiell Hammett • Tananarive Due • Twilight Zone • The Handmaid’s Tale • Ray Bradbury • I Am Legend • Elia Kazan • Psycho • Ralph Ellison • The Blair Witch Project • Stanley Kubrick • Helter Skelter • Jordan Peele • The Walking Dead • H.H. Holmes • Harriet Beecher Stowe

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Sunny-Side Up: More Than 100 Breakfast & Brunch Recipes from the Essential Egg to the Perfect Pastry

Waylynn Lucas

Breakfast and brunch recipes from the essential egg to the perfect pastry, from pastry chef and Cake Wars judge Waylynn Lucas. Sunny-Side Up is about making delicious brunch and breakfast food with love and attention--whether it's a scrambled egg for one or a full-on champagne brunch buffet for a special occasion. And it's not an exclusive party for seasoned foodies. In fact, Waylynn considers it her responsibility as a trained pastry chef to make things less--not more--complicated for home cooks who want to make super-yummy breakfast delights in their own kitchen. The book will feature more than 100 recipes and 100 photographs. Recipes run the gamut from decadent Grapefruit Pistachio Cakes and Almond Frangipane Pear Baked French Toast to on-the-go breakfast bars and yogurt pops to healthful Spinach, Roasted Red Pepper, and Goat Cheese Frittatas, Avocado Pineapple Smoothies, and breakfast bowls. Fun brunch cocktails round out the recipes to make an all-occasion powerhouse of delicious and uplifting recipes.

RM 106.61

Nourish Me Home: 125 Soul-Sustaining Recipes Inspired by the Elements

Cortney Burns, Heami Lee

Nourish Me Home features 110 recipes in 6 chapters that pay homage to the seasons and the elements of water, fire, air, and ether. The curious, creative, fearless Cortney Burns—formerly of Bar Tartine—is back with a personal cookbook project about nostalgia, immigration, and her own uniquely delicious recipes Cortney Burns's cooking always includes layered flavors and textures, surprising ingredients, and healthful twists, and her recipes range from weeknight turn-tos such as salads, soups, and vegetable-forward mains to the homemade liqueurs and ferments she's famous for. • Teaches readers how to convert their own experiences and sense of place into kitchen inspiration and development of a personal cooking style • Recipes cover mains to drinks and desserts to condiments, such as sauces and pickled fruits • Complete with hand-drawn illustrations and 100 vibrant photographs As in Bar Tartine , the pantry of preserved foods forms the backbone of this cookbook, adding all the physical and mental health benefits of fermented foods and streamlining cooking. The focus here is on healthy, vegetable-forward recipes, emphasizing techniques for turning proteins into side dishes or seasonings, rather than the main event. • A groundbreaking project that connects seasonal cooking to raising one's personal vibration • Perfect for home cooks, those dedicated to mindfulness, fans of Cortney Burns and Bar Tartine, foodies, professional chefs, and restaurateurs • Add it to your collection of books like Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat, Six Seasons by Joshua McFadden, and Dining In by Alison Roman

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100 Cookies: The Baking Book for Every Kitchen, with Classic Cookies, Novel Treats, Brownies, Bars, and More

Sarah Kieffer

Featured in Food & Wine, The Kitchn, Cup of Jo, Wall Street Journal, Wine Enthusiast, Food52, Bake from Scratch Magazine. Nominated for a 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Cookbooks From celebrated blogger Sarah Kieffer of The Vanilla Bean Baking Blog ! 100 Cookies is a go-to baking book featuring 100 recipes for cookies and bars, organized into seven chapters. Chocolatey, fruity, crispy, chewy, classic, inventive —there's a foolproof recipe for the perfect treat for everyone in this cookie recipe book. • Introduces innovative baking techniques • Includes an entire chapter dedicated to Kieffer's "pan banging" technique that ensures crisp edges and soft centers for the most delicious cookies • Nearly every cookie dough recipe is accompanied by a photograph. Dessert recipes range from the Classic Chocolate Chip made three different ways, to bars, brownies, and blondies that reflect a wide range of flavors and global inspiration. This is the comprehensive-yet-charming cookbook every cookie lover (or those who love to bake cookies) needs. • Highly giftable with a textured case and a ribbon marker • Recipes include Marshmallow Peanut Butter Brownies, Olive Oil Sugar Cookies with Blood Orange Glaze, Red Wine Cherry Cheesecake Swirl Bars, and Pan-Banging Ginger Molasses, S'mores Cookies, Snickerdoodles, and more • A great pick for the home baker in search of a new bake sale recipe or someone who just loves cookies, as well as fans of Sarah Kieffer's blog and Instagram • Add it to the shelf with cookbooks like Sally's Cookie Addiction by Sally McKenney; Dorie's Cookies by Dorie Greenspan; and The Perfect Cookie: Your Ultimate Guide to Foolproof Cookies, Brownies & Bars by America's Test Kitchen

RM 118.50

Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy

Damien Lewis

The New Yorker, Best Books of 2022 Vanity Fair, Best Books of 2022 Booklist, Best Books of 2022 Singer. Actress. Beauty. Spy. During WWII, Josephine Baker, the world's richest and most glamorous entertainer, was an Allied spy in Occupied France. Prior to World War II, Josephine Baker was a music-hall diva renowned for her singing and dancing, her beauty and sexuality; she was the highest-paid female performer in Europe. When the Nazis seized her adopted city, Paris, she was banned from the stage, along with all “negroes and Jews.” Yet instead of returning to America, she vowed to stay and to fight the Nazi evil. Overnight, she went from performer to Resistance spy. In Agent Josephine , bestselling author Damien Lewis uncovers this little-known history of the famous singer’s life. During the war years, as a member of the French Nurse paratroopers—a cover for her spying work—Baker participated in numerous clandestine activities and emerged as a formidable spy. In turn, she was a hero of the three countries in whose name she served—the US, France, and Britain. Drawing on a plethora of new historical material and rigorous research, including previously undisclosed letters and journals, Lewis upends the conventional story of Josephine Baker, explaining why she fully deserves her unique place in the French Panthéon.

RM 90.81

The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

From a star theoretical physicist, a journey into the world of particle physics and the cosmos—and a call for a more liberatory practice of science. In The Disordered Cosmos , Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter—along with a perspective informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek . One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly nontraditional, and grounded in Black and queer feminist lineages. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, misogyny, and other forms of oppression. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society, beginning with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. The Disordered Cosmos dreams into existence a world that allows everyone to experience and understand the wonders of the universe.

RM 437.82

A Smile in One Eye

Ralph Webster

Librarian's Note: This is an alternate-cover edition for ASIN B01HRZ13O2 The Third Reich is rising. The creeping madness in the heart of Germany will soon stain the entire world. This is the chilling account of one family as they flee for their lives. The Wobsers are prosperous, churchgoing, patriotic Germans living in a small East Prussian town. When Hitler seizes power, their comfortable family life is destroyed by a horrifying Nazi regime. Baptized and confirmed as Lutherans, they are told they are Jewish, a past always respected but rarely considered. This distinction makes a life-and-death difference. Suddenly, it is no longer a matter of faith or religion; their lives are defined by race. It is a matter of bloodlines. And, in Nazi Germany, they have the wrong blood. Written by a second generation Holocaust survivor, this is a compelling refugee story laced with contemporary overtones. In addition to serving as a fascinating piece of history, A Smile in One Eye: A Tear in the Other is a passionate call to arms for organizations and individuals to properly protect and help the world’s refugees.

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Algorithms to Live By

Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

A fascinating exploration of how insights from computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives, helping to solve common decision-making problems and illuminate the workings of the human mind All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such issues for decades. And the solutions they've found have much to teach us. In a dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, acclaimed author Brian Christian and cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths show how the algorithms used by computers can also untangle very human questions. They explain how to have better hunches and when to leave things to chance, how to deal with overwhelming choices and how best to connect with others. From finding a spouse to finding a parking spot, from organizing one's inbox to understanding the workings of memory, Algorithms to Live By transforms the wisdom of computer science into strategies for human living.

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The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

Rick Atkinson, John Sterling

In the initial volume of the Revolution Trilogy Rick Atkinson recounts the first twenty-one months of America’s violent war for independence. From the battles at Lexington and Concord in spring 1775 to those at Trenton and Princeton in winter 1777, American militiamen and then the ragged Continental Army take on the world’s most formidable fighting force. It is a saga alive with astonishing characters: Henry Knox, the former bookseller with an uncanny understanding of artillery; Nathanael Greene, the bumpkin who becomes a brilliant battle captain; Benjamin Franklin, who proves to be the wiliest of diplomats; George Washington, the commander in chief who learns the difficult art of leadership when the war seems all but lost. The story is also told from the British perspective, making the mortal conflict between the redcoats and the rebels all the more compelling.

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A Fighting Chance

Elizabeth Warren

An unlikely political star tells the inspiring story of the two-decade journey that taught her how Washington really works—and really doesn't—in A Fighting Chance As a child in small-town Oklahoma, Elizabeth Warren yearned to go to college and then become an elementary school teacher—an ambitious goal, given her family's modest means. Early marriage and motherhood seemed to put even that dream out of reach, but fifteen years later she was a distinguished law professor with a deep understanding of why people go bankrupt. Then came the phone call that changed her life: could she come to Washington DC to help advise Congress on rewriting the bankruptcy laws? Thus began an impolite education into the bare-knuckled, often dysfunctional ways of Washington. She fought for better bankruptcy laws for ten years and lost. She tried to hold the federal government accountable during the financial crisis but became a target of the big banks. She came up with the idea for a new agency designed to protect consumers from predatory bankers and was denied the opportunity to run it. Finally, at age 62, she decided to run for elective office and won the most competitive—and watched—Senate race in the country. In this passionate, funny, rabble-rousing book, Warren shows why she has chosen to fight tooth and nail for the middle class—and why she has become a hero to all those who believe that America's government can and must do better for working families.

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Killing the Rising Sun

Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard

The powerful and riveting new book in the multimillion-selling Killing series by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard Autumn 1944. World War II is nearly over in Europe but is escalating in the Pacific, where American soldiers face an opponent who will go to any length to avoid defeat. The Japanese army follows the samurai code of Bushido, stipulating that surrender is a form of dishonor. Killing the Rising Sun takes readers to the bloody tropical-island battlefields of Peleliu and Iwo Jima and to the embattled Philippines, where General Douglas MacArthur has made a triumphant return and is plotting a full-scale invasion of Japan. Across the globe in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team of scientists are preparing to test the deadliest weapon known to mankind. In Washington, DC, FDR dies in office and Harry Truman ascends to the presidency, only to face the most important political decision in history: whether to use that weapon. And in Tokyo, Emperor Hirohito, who is considered a deity by his subjects, refuses to surrender, despite a massive and mounting death toll. Told in the same page-turning style of Killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy, Killing Jesus, Killing Patton , and Killing Reagan , this epic saga details the final moments of World War II like never before.

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Killing England

Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard

Told through the eyes of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Great Britain’s King George III, Killing England chronicles the path to independence in gripping detail, taking the reader from the battlefields of America to the royal courts of Europe. What started as protest and unrest in the colonies soon escalated to a world war with devastating casualties. O’Reilly and Dugard recreate the war’s landmark battles, including Bunker Hill, Long Island, Saratoga, and Yorktown, revealing the savagery of hand-to-hand combat and the often brutal conditions under which these brave American soldiers lived and fought. Also here is the reckless treachery of Benedict Arnold and the daring guerilla tactics of the “Swamp Fox” Frances Marion.

RM 24.90

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