Summer 2026
Kin
Two childhood friends take different paths through education, family absence and the search for belonging.
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Cover via Open Library
Book clubs & reading recommendations
Barack Obama’s reading recommendations
Fiction, history, memoir and ideas from Barack Obama’s summer reading and year-end favourites. Explore each selection in its original seasonal context, with introductions to each work and fine editions to discover where available.
Selections shown: 70
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Summer 2026
The Things We Never Say
A history teacher’s private loneliness and an unexpected revelation unsettle his understanding of the people closest to him.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2026
A World Appears
Pollan investigates consciousness through scientific inquiry and questions about the nature of subjective experience.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2026
Whistler
A chance reunion leads a woman to reconsider a childhood relationship, an old accident and the shape of her adult life.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2026
This Land is Your Land
Gage visits historical sites across the United States to examine how Americans commemorate and contest their past.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2026
Vigil
A spirit attending a dying oil executive confronts a man who sees little reason to regret his life.
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2026
One Sun Only
Stories explore family ties, artistic ambitions and the unexpected turns through which people make sense of their lives.
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2026
Seek Immediate Shelter
A false missile alarm exposes tensions among neighbours and leaves consequences that persist long after the immediate danger passes.
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Selected edition cover
Summer 2026
Data Empire
Risam traces the relationship between information and power through a history of data collection and control.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2026
Transcription
A writer preparing to interview his elderly mentor loses the use of his recording device, unsettling memory, friendship and the record he hopes to make.
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2026
Cool Machine
Ray Carney’s efforts to protect his family draw him back into crime amid the transformations of 1980s New York.
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Year-end 2025
The Look
Obama reflects on clothing, personal expression and the public meanings attached to her appearance.
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2025
Paper Girl
Macy returns to her Ohio hometown to investigate the divides shaping educational opportunity and community life.
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Year-end 2025
Flashlight
A father's disappearance reverberates through his daughter's life and a family's history across countries and decades.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2025
We the People
Lepore examines the history of the United States Constitution through struggles over amendment, interpretation and democratic change.
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Selected edition cover
Year-end 2025
The Wilderness
The intertwined lives of friends reveal changing relationships, aspirations and experiences of Black American adulthood.
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Selected edition cover
Year-end 2025
There is No Place for Us
Goldstone follows working families whose employment does not protect them from homelessness in contemporary Atlanta.
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Year-end 2025
North Sun
A nineteenth-century ship's journey into Arctic waters becomes a story of ambition, danger and confinement.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2025
1929
Sorkin reconstructs the personalities, decisions and financial pressures surrounding the Wall Street crash of 1929.
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2025
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Two young people's relationship unfolds across migration, family expectations and the difficulty of finding a place in the world.
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2025
Dead and Alive
Smith's essays consider contemporary culture and politics through the questions raised by art, public life and private experience.
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2025
What We Can Know
A future scholar's search through the traces of our own era becomes a story about memory, knowledge and what survives.
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2025
Mark Twain
Chernow traces Samuel Clemens's transformation into Mark Twain and his complicated life as writer, celebrity and public critic.
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2025
The Book of Records
A father and daughter reach a place of refuge where stories connect different lives and periods of history.
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Summer 2025
Abundance
Klein and Thompson argue for building more of what society needs by reconsidering the barriers to public and private development.
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2025
King of Ashes
A son's return to his family's business draws him into criminal debts, violence and the demands of loyalty.
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2025
Rosarita
A young woman in Mexico encounters a stranger who claims to have known her mother in another life.
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2025
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
A recovered historical account reveals a vampire's story of survival and revenge in the American West.
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2025
A Marriage at Sea
Elmhirst reconstructs a couple's marriage and their extraordinary survival together after a shipwreck in the Pacific.
No shop edition listed
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Summer 2025
Audition
An actor's meeting with a younger man opens into a story of unstable identities, intimacy and competing realities.
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2025
Who is Government?
Writers profile public servants whose largely unseen work supports the daily functioning of the United States government.
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2025
The Sirens’ Call
Hayes examines how attention became a contested resource and how its capture shapes politics and everyday life.
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Year-end 2024
The Anxious Generation
Haidt argues that changes in childhood and smartphone use have contributed to declining adolescent mental health.
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2024
Intermezzo
Two brothers respond differently to their father's death as relationships test their ideas about grief and responsibility.
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2024
Patriot
Navalny recounts his life, opposition politics and imprisonment through memoir and prison writing.
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2024
Orbital
Six astronauts circle Earth, observing its landscapes while reflecting on distance, connection and planetary life.
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2024
The Anthropologists
An expatriate couple's search for a home becomes an exploration of friendship, ritual and making a life in an unfamiliar city.
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2024
Stolen Pride
Hochschild investigates pride, humiliation and political allegiance through a community in Appalachian Kentucky.
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Selected edition cover
Year-end 2024
In Ascension
A marine biologist's investigations lead from the ocean's depths towards questions about origins, family and life beyond Earth.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2024
Growth
Susskind examines economic growth, its achievements and costs, and the choices involved in pursuing it.
No shop edition listed
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Year-end 2024
Someone Like Us
A journalist's return to the United States becomes a search through an Ethiopian American family's concealed histories.
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Year-end 2024
The Work of Art
Interviews and working materials reveal how artists across different disciplines develop and revise their work.
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Summer 2024
James
A retelling of Huckleberry Finn centres Jim's intelligence and agency as he navigates slavery and the struggle for freedom.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via ABC Radio National
Summer 2024
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
Basketball, Ohio and personal memory become ways of examining achievement, belonging and the meaning of making it.
No shop edition listed
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Summer 2024
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here
Blitzer traces connections between United States policy, Central American upheaval and the lives of migrants.
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Summer 2024
Reading Genesis
Robinson reads Genesis as a literary and theological account of human nature, judgement and grace.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2024
Headshot
The lives of young competitors converge at a girls' boxing tournament in Nevada.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2024
The God of the Woods
A girl's disappearance from a summer camp exposes the histories and inequalities surrounding a wealthy family's estate.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2024
Beautiful Days
Williams's stories move ordinary situations towards disorienting encounters with desire, dread and the inexplicable.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2024
Martyr!
A newly sober Iranian American poet searches for meaning in his mother’s death and his family’s history.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2024
Memory Piece
Three friends pursue art, technology and collective possibility across a changing America and an imagined future.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2024
The Ministry of Time
A government project brings people from the past into modern London, complicating its narrator's work and emotional life.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2024
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
Ganz examines the resentments, personalities and political movements that reshaped American public life in the early 1990s.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2024
Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It
Reeves examines difficulties facing boys and men in education, work and family life, and considers possible responses.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Summer 2024
The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
Sides follows James Cook's final voyage and the encounters, ambitions and conflicts surrounding it.
No shop edition listed
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Summer 2024
Help Wanted
Employees in a large retail warehouse navigate precarious schedules, workplace ambitions and the hope of better jobs.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2023
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
A neighbourhood grocery store becomes a meeting point for a community facing prejudice, vulnerability and a hidden crime.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2023
The Maniac
Linked narratives explore the mathematician John von Neumann and the unsettling ambitions of scientific intelligence.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2023
Poverty, By America
Desmond examines how American institutions and everyday advantages help sustain poverty amid national wealth.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2023
How to Say Babylon
Sinclair recounts growing up in Jamaica and her struggle to build a life beyond a restrictive family world.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2023
The Wager
Grann reconstructs a shipwreck, mutiny and competing accounts of survival during an eighteenth-century naval expedition.
No shop edition listed
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Year-end 2023
The Vaster Wilds
A servant girl fleeing a colonial settlement faces a dangerous wilderness and the beliefs she carries into it.
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Year-end 2023
Humanly Possible
Bakewell traces centuries of humanist thinking through people who placed human experience at the centre of inquiry.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2023
King: A Life
Eig's biography examines Martin Luther King Jr.'s public leadership alongside the pressures and complexities of his private life.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2023
The Covenant of Water
A family's history in Kerala unfolds across generations under the shadow of a recurring vulnerability to water.
No shop edition listed
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Cover via ABC Radio National
Year-end 2023
The Best Minds
Rosen revisits a childhood friendship transformed by mental illness and asks how institutions understood and failed his friend.
No shop edition listed
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Year-end 2023
All the Sinners Bleed
A small-town sheriff investigates a school shooting that exposes further violence and entrenched racial tensions.
No shop edition listed
Image credit
Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2023
The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory
Alberta investigates the relationship between American evangelical Christianity, political power and national identity.
No shop edition listed
Image credit
Cover via Open Library
Year-end 2023
Some People Need Killing
A journalist reports on killings under Rodrigo Duterte's drug war and the language used to justify them.
No shop edition listed
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Cover image: Penguin Random House
Year-end 2023
This Other Eden
A mixed-race island community faces expulsion as outsiders impose their ideas of progress and respectability.
No shop edition listed
Image credit
Cover via Open Library