Matthew Crawford is a philosophy graduate turned think-tank employee turned motorcycle mechanic. An unusual trajectory that gives him a unique insight into life on both sides of the white-and blue-collar divide. It is his contention in this book, that it’s time to rethink and perhaps upend the narrative that higher education and knowledge work offer the only path to a successful and fulfilling life...

James Gordon Farrell (1935–1979) is best known for three thematically linked novels: Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur, and The Singapore Grip, collectively known as the Empire Trilogy. The Siege of Krishnapur, published in 1973, won that year's Booker Prize and was later shortlisted for the Best of the Booker in 2008...

The Persian Boy is a work of historical fiction by Mary Renault, published in 1972. It's the second book in her trilogy about Alexander the Great, following Fire from Heaven and preceding Funeral Games. However, it works perfectly well as a standalone novel...

William Dalrymple has a marvellous ability to write history that reads like a novel. This book is a narrative adventure in which he writes about the British in India during the 18th century, the relationship that soldiers and officers of the East India Company had with the people of India, Hindu and Muslim that they lived among. This was a time when they made an effort to learn Indian languages, understand the customs and the culture, take on local ways of living and being, and assimilated in more ways than one...

This is one of Michael Pollan’s earliest books, written more than thirty years ago. By his own account, he’s always been a keen gardener, and though this is the only book that he’s written about gardening, it is (as tends to be the case with most of his writing) one of the best books about gardening you could possibly read...

This novel, set in contemporary Palestine, centers on Sonia, a British-Palestinian actress who returns to Palestine after a long absence to visit her sister Haneen, who lives in Haifa and teaches at a university in Tel Aviv. While Haneen and Sonia are not estranged per se, there is a distance there, to be bridged. Haneen introduces Sonia to a close friend of hers, Mariam, a theatre director who is putting together a production of "Hamlet" in the West Bank. It is art but it is also an act of resistance...

This is a charming book. It’s warm and funny and gently satirical. It has a fairly unusual plot, and it's very entertaining. It's an easy read in the sense that the narrative carries you along, and it's so absorbing that it's hard to put the book down. This book is set in the 1930's, in a small English village called Silverstream...

It is 1938, the eve of WWII. London. There is tension in the air as war seems inevitable. Stella Fry, a young Englishwoman who has recently returned to London from Vienna, finds herself jobless and heartbroken. In search of employment, she answers an advertisement from the renowned mystery writer, Hubert Newman, who needs a manuscript typed. However, the very next day, Stella is shocked to learn of Newman's sudden and unexplained death...

Nicholas Carr has been writing about technology and the effect it has on us for more than a decade. In this book he traces the development of communication technologies right from the letters that people began writing to each other millennia ago, to the development of printing and newspapers, to the telegraph and telephone, to mass media like radio and TV, all the way to the internet and social media...

This book, as it says in the title, is a diary, a day-to-day record of one year in a bookshop written by the owner Shaun Bythell who runs a second-hand bookshop in Wigtown which is Scotland’s book town. His shop is called, very simply, The Bookshop...

This is a poignant, and often humorous, story of the Mendes family in Bombay, about living with a family member struggling with mental illness and the profound impact this has on all their lives. The story is narrated by the unnamed son, who is trying to come to terms with his mother Imelda’s (Em) recurring battles with bipolar disorder, while his father, Augustine (‘The Big Hoom’) serves as the family’s stoic anchor amidst the chaos, of which there is plenty...

The novel is set in Vienna in the 1960’s, in a café that becomes the gathering place for a varied and initially unconnected group of people, who eventually grow into a community. The story begins when Robert Simon, a young man, who spent years working in the market stalls takes a leap of faith to open his own cafe...