A Times, Express and Daily Mail Book of the Year 2022

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Presumed Innocent returns with a riveting legal thriller in which a reckless private detective is embroiled in a fraught police scandal

Lucia Gomez is a female police chief in a man’s world and she’s walked a fine line to succeed at the top. Now a trio of police officers in Kindle County have accused her of soliciting sex for promotions and she’s in deep.

Rik Dudek is an attorney and old friend of Lucia’s. He’s the only one she can trust, but he’s never had a headline criminal case. This ugly smear campaign is already breaking the internet and will be his biggest challenge yet.

Clarice ‘Pinky’ Granum is a fearless PI who plays by her own rules. Her 4-D imagination is her biggest asset when it comes to digging up dirt for Rik but not all locks are best picked.

It’s cops against cops in this hive of lies. And it will take more than honeyed words from the defence to change the punchline and save the Chief from her own cell.

‘A very funny, intelligent, deliberately and engagingly resistant, and moving piece of writing’ Amit Chaudhuri

A ‘recovering writer’ – his first novel having been littered with typos and selling only fifty copies – Frank Jasper is plucked from obscurity in Port Jumbo in Nigeria by Mrs Kirkpatrick, a white woman and wife of an American professor, to attend the prestigious William Blake Program for Emerging Writers in Boston.

Once there, however, it becomes painfully clear that he and the other Fellows are expected to meet certain obligations as representatives of their ‘cultures.’ His colleagues, veterans of residencies in Europe and America, know how to play up to the stereotypes expected of them, but Frank isn’t interested in being the African Writer at William Blake – any anyway, there is another Fellow, Barongo Akello Kabumba, who happily fills that role.

Eventually expelled from the fellowship for ‘non-performance’ and ‘non-participation,’ Frank Jasper sets off on trip to visit his father’s college friend in Nebraska – where he learns not only surprising truths about his father, but also how to parlay his experiences into a lucrative new career once he returns to Nigeria: as a commentator on American life…

Seesaw is an energetic comedy of cultural dislocation – and in its humour, intelligence and piety-pricking, it is a refreshing and hugely enjoyable act of literary rebellion.

Through a series of on the ground interviews and analysis of national trends, The Rise of Reform investigates whether the Reform Party represents a genuine threat to the Labour-Conservative establishment’s stranglehold on British politics. Are Farage’s party a paper tiger or about to form the next UK government?

Nick Tyrone is a liberal Remainer. Can he be convinced by Reform’s offer by spending hours and hours with representatives of the party over the course of a year?

Today’s computer scientists play the same role as the oracles of the ancient world and the astrologers of the Middle Ages. Modern predictions not only advise on war, crop output, and marriages, but algorithms and statisticians also now determine whether we can get a loan, a job, an apartment, or an organ transplant. And when we cede ground to these predictions, we lose control of our own lives.

In this powerful, refreshing new look at the many ways prediction shapes our everyday lives, University of Oxford professor Carissa Véliz explains how putting too much stock in others’ predictions makes us vulnerable to charlatans, con artists, dubious technology, and self-deception. Examining a wide range of subjects both personal and societal, including medicine, climate, technology, society, and others, Véliz uncovers a number of insights: predictions about humans tend to be self-fulfilling; more data doesn’t guarantee better outcomes; AI is more likely to increase risk than decrease it; and a free and robust society requires not more prediction, but better preparation.

Véliz argues in this incisive and bracingly original book that the main promise of prediction is not knowledge of the future, but rather power over others. Prophecy is an invitation to defy those orders and live life on our own terms.

A hill is not a mountain. You climb it for you, then you put it quietly inside you, in a cupboard marked ‘Quite A Lot Of Hills’ where it makes its infinitesimal mark on who you are. Ring the Hill is a book written around, and about, hills: it includes a northern hill, a hill that never ends and the smallest hill in England. Each chapter takes a type of hill – whether it’s a knoll, cap, cliff, tor or even a mere bump – as a starting point for one of Tom’s characteristically unpredictable and wide-ranging explorations. Tom’s lyrical, candid prose roams from an intimate relationship with a particular cove on the south coast, to meditations on his great-grandmother and a lesson on what goes into the mapping of hills themselves. Because a good walk in the hills is never just about the hills: you never know where it might lead.

‘Daniel Wiles connects us viscerally to the past we have buried the history we choose to ignore’ Hilary Mantel

1950s, Chile. Bernardo has journeyed to his childhood home, tucked deep into the Patagonian wilderness – though it seems little more than a shack to his young son, James. The place is nothing like England, where James was born. The land is harsh. Unyielding.

Then Bernardo sees it. Short and lean and striking. The puma, with its huge paws on the earth. What will a father do to ensure his family’s survival? And what might he become when survival is no longer an option?

Thrilling and powerfully atmospheric, The Puma is a novel about fathers and sons, and our desperate attempts to tame the wilderness of the past.

A Telegraph Book of the Year 2025

‘Compelling and timely’ Tirthankar Roy

‘Essential reading’ David Eltis

Many now claim that Western countries should pay reparations to former colonies for the lasting damage they caused, especially through slavery. Why is this claim being made now? How far does it make sense? And, more generally, how can historic wrongs be righted?

Reparations removes the sloganeering from a newly-fashionable cause, sets the issue in its proper historical context, and mounts an ethical counter-argument. The natural sequel to Nigel Biggar’s bestselling and widely acclaimed Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, it makes a powerful contribution to an increasingly prominent public debate.

REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • A ‘nuanced, brilliant’ (Essence) debut about one unforgettable Southern Black family and its youngest daughter’s coming of age in the 1990s.

‘A triumph of a debut, Redwood Court is storytelling at its best: tender, vivid, and richly complicated’ – Jacqueline Woodson, New York Times bestselling author of Red at the Bone

Mika Tabor spends much of her time in the care of loved ones, listening to their stories and witnessing their struggles. On Redwood Court, a cul-de-sac in an all-Black working-class suburb of Columbia, South Carolina, she learns important lessons from those who raise her.

With visceral clarity and powerful prose, award-winning poet DéLana R. A. Dameron reveals the devastation of being made to feel invisible and the transformative power of being seen.

‘Will change how you see the world’ Derren Brown

Radical Thinking is a book about how you view the world. It’s about the things that shape your thoughts, from what you notice and how you interpret it, to what you assume, believe and want. It’s also about how, if you think in a radical way, you can look beyond your limited view of the world to see the bigger picture.

ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHERS PROMISED THAT SWEEPING AWAY THE OLD ARISTOCRACY AND TRADITIONAL INSTITUTIONS WOULD LIBERATE US.

To some extent it did – but it also undermined the things that nourished ordinary people: family, marriage, religion and local community. In Regime Change, Patrick Deneen examines the western tradition and argues that we must use the neglected resources of our philosophical heritage to construct a better way forward. Drawing on thinkers ranging from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Burke and Disraeli, Deneen develops a postliberal alternative.

This iconoclastic book challenges the easy assumptions of left and right. It is a blueprint for the radical changes we need to negotiate the paradoxes of the 21st century, while remaining alive to the wisdom of the past.

‘Regime Change offers a sober assessment of where we are and a way forward that will challenge ideologues on all sides of the political maelstrom’ — MARY HARRINGTON, author of Feminism Against Progress

‘Articulates a vision for a populist politics that can rebuild what has been torn down’ — J. D. VANCE, United States Senator and author of Hillbilly Elegy