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Novels of every kind, from modern classics to recent favourites. Literary fiction includes Toni Morrison's Beloved, W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz and Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing; fantasy runs from Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea to Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell; science fiction from Frank Herbert's Dune to Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. There is suspense in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and Tana French's In the Woods, horror from Stephen King, historical fiction, satire, and romance from Emily Henry and Talia Hibbert. Browse the subcategories to find your next read; every book has a full profile, reading guide and discussion questions.
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True lives, told by the people who lived them or by writers who followed them closely. Memoirs range from Tara Westover's Educated and Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle to James Herriot's vet's life in All Creatures Great and Small and Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air. Travel writers Patrick Leigh Fermor, Wilfred Thesiger and Paul Theroux cross continents on foot, by camel and by train. Biographies cover figures as different as The Black Count by Tom Reiss, the founder of Amazon in The Everything Store and the inventors in Walter Isaacson's The Innovators, while The Autobiography of Malcolm X remains a landmark. For readers who like real stories with real stakes.
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History, politics and society for curious general readers, and the largest section on WebToTell. Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, Matthew Desmond's Evicted and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's How Democracies Die examine the present; Mary Beard's SPQR, Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee open up the past. Economic history follows money and trade in Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money and Chris Miller's Chip War, Karen Armstrong's A History of God traces religious ideas, and classic travel writers from Bruce Chatwin to Patrick Leigh Fermor bring places and peoples to life. Browse the subcategories, from military history to sociology, to find your next read.
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Books on power, government and the public good. Robert A. Caro's The Power Broker shows how one unelected man, Robert Moses, reshaped New York; Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith's The Dictator's Handbook explains how leaders keep power. Hannah Arendt and Michael J. Sandel bring political theory, Isabel Wilkerson's Caste and Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us examine race and policy, and Diane Ravitch and Jonathan Kozol look at schools. Chris Miller's Chip War and Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers cover international power, and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring shows how one book can change public policy. For engaged citizens and students of politics.
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Books about crime, justice and the systems that judge people. The first book in this section is Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect, in which the psychologist behind the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment asks how ordinary, decent people come to commit cruel acts, linking his study to the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. Zimbardo argues that situations and systems, not only individuals, must be held responsible. A provocative book for readers interested in criminology, ethics and human behaviour. More books on law and justice will join this section over time.
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Philosophy for readers who want to think more clearly about how to live. Michael J. Sandel's Justice and Peter Singer's The Expanding Circle ask what we owe each other; Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis tests ancient wisdom against modern psychology. Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism are classics of political thought. Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds looks at consciousness through the octopus, Brian Christian's The Alignment Problem at the ethics of artificial intelligence, and Karen Armstrong and Eknath Easwaran's translation of The Bhagavad Gita open the philosophy of religion. Clear books for curious readers, no background needed.
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Science and medicine writing at its most engaging. Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies, a "biography" of cancer, and The Gene, the history of genetics, combine science with human stories. Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells of the woman whose cells, taken without consent, transformed medical research. Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score shows how trauma affects body and brain, Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life explores fungi, and Elizabeth Kolbert's Under a White Sky asks whether we can engineer our way out of environmental damage.
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Books about faith, sacred texts and the history of religion, for believers and the curious alike. Karen Armstrong's A History of God, The Case for God and The Great Transformation trace religious thought across traditions and centuries; Huston Smith's The World's Religions is a classic introduction. William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience and Richard Rohr's The Universal Christ explore spiritual experience, Reza Aslan's Zealot the historical Jesus, Robert Wright's Why Buddhism Is True Buddhist ideas, and Eknath Easwaran's translation brings The Bhagavad Gita to new readers. Tara Westover's Educated and Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower show religion's power in a family and in an imagined future.
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Psychology for general readers, from how we think to why we behave as we do. Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow explains the two systems of thought behind our choices; Robert B. Cialdini's Influence the science of persuasion. Jonathan Haidt, Philip Zimbardo and Robert M. Sapolsky explore morality, group behaviour and the biology of behaviour, and Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score shows how trauma lives in the body. Oliver Sacks's case studies, William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience and Robert Wright's Why Buddhism Is True round out a shelf for anyone who wants to understand the mind.
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Science and nature writing for curious readers. Ecology and the environment are at the centre: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass and Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life, about the hidden world of fungi. Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds explores the octopus mind, David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo evolution on islands, and Katie Mack's The End of Everything the possible ends of the universe. Andrea Wulf, Robert Macfarlane, Amitav Ghosh and David Wallace-Wells write about nature, landscape and climate. Readable, often beautiful science for non-specialists.
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Books on the body, the mind and the practice of medicine, written for general readers. Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Robert Sapolsky's Behave explore the brain and behaviour; Sherwin B. Nuland's How We Die and Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air look honestly at mortality. John M. Barry's The Great Influenza tells the story of the 1918 pandemic, and Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto shows how simple tools prevent medical errors. On mental health, Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon and Robert Kolker's Hidden Valley Road, about a family with six sons diagnosed with schizophrenia, are essential reading.
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Books on how technology is built, and what it does to us. Walter Isaacson's The Innovators tells the story of the people behind the computer and the internet. The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford is a novel that teaches modern IT and DevOps practice. Brian Christian's The Alignment Problem explains the challenge of making artificial intelligence do what we actually want. For engineers, managers and anyone curious about the technology shaping daily life.
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