Ideas, Culture & Modern Life Books

An astonishing undercover investigation into the paranoid and misogynistic subcultures of the manosphere, by the Orwell Prize-longlisted author of Hired. Rarely has there seemed a more confusing time to be a man. This uncertainty …

The tech disruptor. The tortured poet. The rebellious scientist.The monstrous artist. You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to t…

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. From the bestselling author of Mayflies and Caledonian Road, a heart-enriching celebration of what makes us great: our friends. If we are lucky in our lives, our friendships will be ri…

A #1 bestseller in the Netherlands, this urgent book explains why fascism has returned to Europe in the 21st century - and how we can stop it. 'Excellent' Timothy Snyder'Definitive' Jason Stanley'Chilling' Paul Mason'Read this boo…

A career-spanning collection of inspiring, revelrous essays about art and artistsLike Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembranc…

The rise, fall, and revival of the Caesar of Silicon Valley. Elon Musk famously leads his companies from a bully pulpit, cutting through red tape whenever possible with little regard for the fallout. Musk's approach to business an…

Naomi Klein, author of era-defining bestsellers, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything and No Logo, is back with her most compulsive and personal book yet: a revelatory journey into the mirror world of our polarised ageWhen …

Cosmetic surgeries are at an all-time high, Ozempic is bringing back 'heroin chic' and the manosphere on the rise - after four waves of feminism, what went wrong? Despite decades of progress, modern womanhood feels more challengin…

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award 2025. Longlisted for the 2025 Financial Times & Schroders Business Book of the Year. Shortlisted for Foyles Non Fiction Book of the Year 2025. A New York Times Bestseller. An ey…

This anthology of personal essays explore how video games have shaped our lives, our cultural imagination and contemporary storytelling. From novelists and critics to game designers themselves, the writers in this collection ask t…

MY NAME IS MARIANNA SPRING AND SOME OF MY TROLLS SAY THEY WANT TO KILL METhreats and abuse litter my social media feeds. They infect my everyday life. Sometimes the people behind the messages try to find me in person.This seems to…

Bill Gates is one of the most powerful figures of the past four decades. But the world-famous public image he has so carefully crafted is not the whole truth. In this explosive new book, Anupreeta Das (finance editor of the New Yo…

In November of 2022, a webpage was posted online with a simple text box. It was an AI chatbot called ChatGPT, and was unlike any app people had used before. It was more human than a customer service agent, more convenient than a G…

Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside to a hilariously uncomfortable memory of buying drugs in a …

This book's title, No Straight Road Takes You There, is an evocation and a declaration. Highways tend to be built across the easy routes and flat places, or the landscape is cleared away - logged, graded, levelled, tunnelled throu…

An entertaining account of the philosophy and technology of hacking-and why we all need to understand it.It's a signal paradox of our times that we live in an information society but do not know how it works. And without understan…

Is this how democracy dies? Based on his smash hit podcast, The Coming Storm is Gabriel Gatehouse's brilliant exploration of the roots of Q Anon and the rise of the extreme right in the US. It's a story that reaches back decades, …

The tools and understanding you need to protect yourself, and your family.Smartphone Nation will transform the way you - and your children - understand your devices and how they affect you. In this practical, agenda-setting book, …

'A landmark contribution to humanity's understanding of itself' The New York TimesWhy can it sometimes feel as though half the population is living in a different moral universe? Why do ideas such as 'fairness' and 'freedom' mean …

Fake news. Alternative facts. Conspiracy theories.Misinformation is one of the defining problems of our age, and despite what we may think, we are all susceptible. So how and why does misinformation spread? And, more importantly, …

Fake news. Alternative facts. Conspiracy theories.Misinformation is one of the defining problems of our age, and despite what we may think, we are all susceptible. So how and why does misinformation spread? And, more importantly, …

In October 2022, Elon Musk marched through Twitter’s front doors after buying the digital giant for $44 billion. His takeover came with the promise of fundamental change, but nothing could prepare the company for the chaos to come…

What can freedom really mean? In this invigorating, essential book, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience or talk about freedom. Drawing on pop culture, theory and real life, she follows freedom - with all its comp…

James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him the voice of his generation. Ranging over Harlem in the 1940s, movies, novels, his preacher father and his experiences of Paris, they capture the complexity of black life at t…

Andy Borowitz has been called a "Swiftian satirist" (The Wall Street Journal) and "one of the country's finest satirists" (The New York Times). Millions of fans and New Yorker readers enjoy his satirical news column "The Borowitz …

For fans of Bad Blood, a thrilling account of the tech start-up selling a radical new form of facial recognition.  When Kashmir Hill stumbled upon Clearview AI, a mysterious startup selling an app that claimed it could identify an…

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. In this personal and wide-ranging exploration of how our collective imaginations fail to grasp the scale of environmental destruction, Amitav Gh…

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. In The Democracy of Species Robin Wall Kimmerer guides us towards a more reciprocal, grateful and joyful relationship with our animate earth, fr…

Bestselling author Colm O'Regan is a worrier. A professional one. Caution is his watchword.Risk aversion is his love language. Now Colm is grappling with the biggest worry of all: the whole 'planet being on fire' thing and how exa…

Winner of the UKs 2022 Costa Prize for Biography A portrait of one of the most enigmatic figures in the annals of white-collar crime. . . From the acclaimed author of A Very English Scandal, a thrilling and dramatic true-life acco…