Well written and interesting non- fiction books

The Idea of the Brain by Matthew Cobb. It's a history of neuroscience and the gradual discoveries of how the brain works. Interesting and well-written. Matthew has also written two books about WW2 - about the French Resistance and the liberation of Paris, both of which are very good (the French Resistance one especially).

Alive was also incredible

The crashed plane

Unnatural Causes, by Richard Shepherd.

Written in Bone by Professor Sue Black, a Scottish forensic anthropologist. Narrated by the author on Audible, fascinating.

Anything by Bill Bryson and I quite like a biography too.

If you are interested in true crime, Mae West's book (Fred and Rose West's daughter) is a good read although horrifying due to the subject.

Otherlands by Thomas Holliday if you like natural history - liked it so much I read it twice over. I am completely obsessed with prehistoric life though.

Have you read any Svetlana Alexievitch? Her books on Russia are incredible, I'd recommend Second Hand Time which is about the fall of the Soviet Union. She writes these sort of palimpsests of people's stories that sort of coalesce together, such an unusual format but they're fascinating.

The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clementine Wamariya. Her life story of being separated from her family as a child in Rwanda, refugee camps and then living in the US. I really enjoyed it, a more thoughtful and intelligent account than other such memoirs. It doesn’t present as a typical something awful happened/ misery-lit book.

Richard Rhodes ‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb’

Incredible coverage of the whole thing

Empire of Pain for the opioid crisis

The Only Plane in the Sky - an Oral History of 9/11 - an extraordinary book.

Nothing To Envy by Barbara Demick about life in North Korea based on interviews with people who’ve escaped from there

Yes also this one

Sorry - not baptised as a baby , converted to Protestant and married to a non Jew

I enjoyed Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland.

Also The Popes by John Julius Norwich - a rip roaring read.

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing is superb.

When the dust settles by Lucy Eastwood. I bought it after hearing her on desert island discs. She’s a disaster and emergency planner/responder and it’s incredibly interesting

Victor Klemperer’s diaries - a non practising Jew (son of a rabbi but baptised Protestant), professor of German literature in Dresden in 1930s. It’s utterly utterly gripping. Goes all the way through rise of nazism, 2WW, and into communist East Germany. So well written, but so shocking. It’s vast, and I’ve literally been carving out hours to sit and read it - because it’s so gripping.

Yes yes to Factfulness and invisible women.
I absolutely loved The Penguin Lessons.

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold, about the lives of the five victims of Jack the Ripper. Fascinating for details of the lives of working class women in Victorian London and goes against all the received wisdom about who they were and how they ended up as victims.

I loved The Emperor of all Maladies.

The Ghost Map.

The House by the Thames and the People who Lived There

Just remembered another good one - The Book of Trespass, by Nick Hayes. More political than the others I suggested; it’s about access to the land and private property, with lots of historical background.

Oh lovely, an opportunity for me to witter on about Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor Of All Maladies. This book, by an oncologist who specialises in blood cancers, is one of the best things I've ever read. He's compassionate, knowledgeable and he writes beautifully. One word of warning; Mukherjee knows a lot about leukaemia as it affects children. I don't have children and reading what he's seen wrung me out. It would make very hard reading for those who are parents, especially if your young ones have been seriously ill.

The Radium Girls - Kate Moore - what happened to the radium dial painters in three factories in the US in the early twentieth century. This book almost functions as a precursor to Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, in the way it shows up institutional indifference, cruelty and rank stupidity. It's a very hard read (in terms of what it's about rather than difficulty) but also very hard to put down.

The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth. It is fascinating and very readable, and A History of the World in 47 Borders by John Elledge, also eye opening.

I loved Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton - really made me think about nature and our relationship to the natural world, and the descriptions are beautiful.

And I’m currently reading Stone Lands by Fiona Robertson - fascinating stuff on (pre)history and standing stones, but also a meditation on grief and memory following her husband’s cancer diagnosis.