Looking for something new to read? Browse our non-fiction picks for May! Includes heart-wrenching memoirs, biographies of famous figures, and many more.
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations.
This is Also a Love Story: Searching for Good in a Divided World
Sally Hayden
Acclaimed foreign correspondent Sally Hayden has spent her career on the global frontlines, uncovering some of the darkest moments of our time. Yet even in the face of unimaginable adversity, she’s witnessed hope and goodness.
In ‘This is Also a Love Story’, Hayden reexamines catastrophe through the love stories she has come across. She introduces us to a couple separated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a mother in northeast Nigeria who risks everything to save her daughter from forced marriage to Boko Haram militants. We meet a group of Syrian women searching tirelessly for their missing spouses and children, while launching a call for justice, and read letters from the bereaved to the dead, still being written over a decade after the tsunami that devastated Japan.
These stories crisscross the globe, from Uganda to Lebanon, Rwanda to Iraq, and through them Hayden invites us to reconsider what it means to be human across the world today.
The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness
Hannah Murray
In 2017, Hannah Murray was a successful actor whose career had taken her to Hollywood and given her the opportunity to act with A-list stars and Oscar-winning directors.
But as the daily costs of acting grew, from the degradations of auditions to repeating violent scenes over and over, Hannah found herself searching for something to make her feel better.
One day, a reiki healer promises her a new kind of treatment, a kind of magic, and all of a sudden Hannah’s life is changed. Back in London, she becomes increasingly involved with the organisation behind the magic, an organisation whose charismatic leader, promises of secret knowledge, and increasingly complex rituals, are seductive, cult-like – and ultimately destructive, as Hannah finds herself on a week-long course from her friends and family – and her sanity falls apart.
‘The Make-Believe’ is a shockingly honest and extraordinarily intimate portrayal of a mind taken over the edge.
This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë
Deborah Lutz
Emily Jane Brontë was just 27 when she started writing the wayward and electric novel Wuthering Heights. Three years later, she was dead.
Out of step with her own time and remembered as the strangest of the Brontë sisters, there’s much that we don’t know about her – most of her papers were destroyed after her death. But as Deborah Lutz explores in this, one of the first biographies of Emily in 20 years, the writing that has survived seethes with storm and strife and with the beautifully desolate landscape of Yorkshire.
Featuring illuminating readings of her poems, This Dark Night takes us inside the world of Emily’s irrepressible spirit and wild imagination.
Rock Goes to College: The Campus Music Scene That Shaped a Generation
Paul Sexton
The hectic, hugely entertaining, and definitive story of the wonderful and entirely amateurish British university gig scene that launched the career of some of the world’s most famous bands, including Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, Joan Armatrading and Dire Straits.
Seasoned music journalist Paul Sexton sets out to document this extraordinary moment in British music history. Tapping into his huge network of contacts in the music industry, Rock Goes to College is a fascinating, raucous ride of a book, crammed full of incredible, never-before-heard stories of the beginnings of some of the most famous acts on the planet.
Ramsholt
Johnnie Shand Kydd
An elegiac collection of essays accompanied by photographs from the renowned Johnnie Shand Kydd.
The reader joins Johnnie on dream like walks through the East Suffolk landscape of Ramsholt, in a book that is at once timeless, moving and mysterious.
Shameless: Finding Freedom and Resilience Through Failure
Andrea McLean
‘What if I fall? What if I fly?’
When Andrea McLean said this to millions of people when quitting her high-profile TV job she didn’t know she’d soon fall flat on her face in front of them too.
Leaving her role as the longest-serving host on the award-winning Loose Women to follow her dreams, Andrea soon learnt that failure happens to the best of us – and when it arrives, shame won’t be far behind. But it doesn’t have to define us.
In this unflinchingly honest and brilliantly enlightening book, Andrea lays everything bare, from financial ruin and broken marriages to cancel culture and toxic TV. Tracing the collapse of her business, she confesses the failures that once filled her with stomach-clenching shame and the lessons they have taught her about finding the resilience to get up again.
Diary of a Beauty Editor: What Works, What Doesn’t – from the Woman Who Really Knows
Sarah Jossel
Sunday Times beauty director and columnist Sarah Jossel is one of the most influential voices in the UK beauty industry today.
Over the last fifteen years she has had a front-row seat to every new product launch, tip, trick and beauty trend out there – and now she is sharing all of that knowledge with you.
‘Diary of a Beauty Editor’ is a guidebook on how to look and feel your best self. It lays out everything Sarah has learnt about beauty over the course of her career as well as sharing all expert tips and insider advice on the best products and treatments to try.
High Fibre Heroes: How to Turn 12 Everyday Vegetables into 100 Joyful, Health-Boosting Recipes
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Many of us aren’t getting enough fibre in our diets, but Hugh shows us how simple – and delicious – it can be with 100 easy recipes all celebrating 12 veg heroes.
In this book, Hugh gets the very best out of these often underestimated, everyday veggies, serving up completely delicious, health-boosting, sustainable, plant-friendly recipes every time. This is food that’s good for you, your wallet and for the planet, too.
With a focus on whole, unprocessed plants, these plant-forward recipes are thrifty, thoughtful dishes, but exciting and delicious too, proving that plant-based flavour is yours for the taking.
The Steps
Sylvester Stallone
We know Sylvester Stallone as one of the most revered actors, writers and directors of all time, yet his life story is every bit as dramatic, intense and inspiring as his greatest creations on screen.
Bringing together a no-holds-barred account of a fascinating life with messages of hope, positivity and resilience, Sly gives readers an intimate and revealing glimpse into his own journey for the very first time.
True Crime: A Memoir
Patricia Cornwell
Patricia Cornwell is best known for her international bestselling thriller series about forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Every story comes from somewhere, and Scarpetta’s began when Patricia Cornwell embedded herself in a morgue.
In this achingly honest memoir, Cornwell excavates her own life, detailing her traumatic childhood being raised by neglectful parents, her father abandoning the young family on Christmas day, her mother being institutionalized twice, an abusive foster family, and developing a parental relationship with evangelist Billy Graham’s wife Ruth.
Cornwell depicts a harrowing hospitalization and near-death car accident. She unflinchingly shares overcoming obstacles that later gave her the ambition to become an award-winning police reporter. From there it was research in a medical examiner’s office that would turn into a full-time job. She would become a forensic expert and worldwide publishing phenomenon.
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