Non-fiction for the fiction reader

Award-winning journalist Patrick Radden Keefe unpicks the story of the Sackler family, one of the richest families in the world, whose greed and corruption led to a pandemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people. Radden Keefe's incredible knowledge of his subject, and brilliant writing, alongside the jaw-dropping story itself, make this tale of an American pharmaceutical company and the family that ran it a genuine page-turner.

Ninety-seven-hour weeks, life and death decisions, a constant tsunami of bodily fluids, and the hospital parking meter earns more than you. The life of a junior doctor may not sound funny, but Adam Kay’s memoir certainly is. These true stories of life on the hospital ward were scribbled in his diaries after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends. Whether you've seen the recent TV adaptation starring Ben Wishaw or not, this hugely entertaining but also painful and moving story is best told through Adam Kay's original words. 

Into the Wild explores the true story of a young man who walked, alone, into the Alaskan wilderness and was found dead with an SOS note four months later. Chris McCandless had given all his money away and abandoned all his material possessions, and was living in a disused bus. Jon Krakauer pieces together the final months of this young man's life in this fascinating book: part travelogue, part nature writing, part detective story. 

What if society wasn't fundamentally rational, but was motivated by insanity? This thought sets Jon Ronson on an utterly compelling adventure into the world of madness. He meets psychopaths, those whose lives have been touched by madness and those whose job it is to diagnose it, including the influential psychologist who developed the Psychopath Test, from whom Jon learns the art of psychopath-spotting: a skill which seemingly reveals that madness could indeed be at the heart of everything . . .

An already proven fiction writer moving to non-fiction can offer a good opportunity for the fiction reader, too. Here, the bestselling author of The Book Thief turns memoirist in this tender and beautifully written book about opening the family home to three dogs. There's chaos, injury, the destruction of property; reckonings with failure and testings of will; and an explosion of love, joy and a feeling of family. A book about humanity and the natural world.

Stay True is a deeply moving and intimate memoir about growing up and moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging. When Hua Hsu first meets Ken in a Berkeley dorm room, he hates him. A frat boy with terrible taste in music, Ken seems exactly like everyone else. For Hua, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to – the mainstream. Despite these first impressions, they become best friends. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking not even three years after the day they first meet. This story of a coming-of-age cut short is a gentle, beautiful piece of writing, which rightly won the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir.

Unflinching, confronting taboos, and revealing hitherto unknown scandals, Black and British describes how the lives of black and white Britons have been entwined for centuries: vivid confirmation that black history cannot and should not be kept separate. Taking us from Roman Britain to the present day via the medieval imagination, Elizabethan ‘blackamoors’ and the global slave-trading empire, David Olusoga shows that the great industrial boom of the nineteenth century was built on American slavery, and that black Britons fought at Trafalgar and in the trenches of both World Wars. Originally published in 2016, this most recent edition is fully revised and updated and includes a new chapter on the Windrush scandal and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

Beautiful, audacious, moving and very funny, this memoir – from the author of Ghost Wall and Summerwater – is a remarkable look at the way a brain turns on itself, and then finds a way out. In the household of Sarah Moss's childhood, 1970s austerity and second-wave feminism came together: she must keep herself slim but never be vain, she must be intelligent but never angry, she must be able to cook and sew and make do and mend, but know those skills were frivolous. Clever girls should be ambitious but women must restrain themselves. Years later, her self-control had become dangerous, and Sarah found herself in A&E. The return of her teenage anorexia had become a medical emergency, forcing her to reckon with all that she had denied her hard-working body and furiously turning mind.

Come for the jaw-dropping insider view and vicarious thrill of a sociopath recounting their darker impulses, stay for the redemptive love story and fascinating insights you could only get from a sociopath who is also a doctor of psychology. Ever since she was a small child, Patric Gagne knew she was different. Finally diagnosed as an adult, she soon realised that the official descriptions of sociopathy were far from the full story. With help, and a change in perceptions, is there a way for sociopaths to integrate happily into society? And can she find it before her own behaviour goes a step too far?

This may sound like a cosy crime novel but it's actually the rather darker true story of a real detective agency run by Maud West in the first half of the twentieth century; a portrait of both a woman ahead of her time and of the rather salacious underbelly of ‘good society’ during that time. As Jill Paton Walsh, author of the Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane mysteries put it: 'If you are susceptible to Miss Marple . . . you must read The Adventures of Maud West. You will never know the difference between fact and fiction again.' 

Alice Loxton's original and insightful device through which to explore history – visiting the lives of eighteen figures at the age of eighteen – makes for a witty and engaging read. What happens if the First World War breaks out while you’re at university? How does a young woman born without arms or legs make a living in Georgian London? What turns a rugby-obsessed teenager from a Welsh mining town into Richard Burton? Join an eclectic cast of young Britons across the nation and throughout its history.

Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart is a memoir of grief, food and family and offers a frank and nuanced portrayal of a daughter's relationship with her mother. The particular, high expectations; their late-night bonding over food; and the mother's terminal cancer diagnosis, which forces Zauner to fully engage with her Korean identity and reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.