Best nonfiction books
Memoir, history and essays that read with the momentum of a novel.
Ranked by how often each title comes up across 9 reading lists on NextBook — not by our opinion of them.
1 of 12recommended on 2 listsThe Golem and the Jinni
Helene Wecker
Two beings built for someone else's purpose trying to work out what they owe themselves — Rin's question exactly, asked slowly in 1899 New York.
2 of 12recommended on 2 listsThe Liars' Club
Mary Karr
Karr is the writer who made this kind of memoir possible: a Texas childhood of guns, secrets and drink, told without a single line of pleading.
3 of 1214
Peter Clines
Not an outbreak novel at all, but the same pleasure: ordinary people methodically working out what is going on, one clue at a time.
4 of 121984
George Orwell
Asimov asks whether history can be steered. Orwell asks who gets to write it down afterwards. Read as a pair they cover both directions of control.
5 of 12A Darker Shade of Magic
V.E. Schwab
The palate cleanser on this list: fast, inventive fantasy with a magic system that corrupts its users, and none of the historical weight Kuang carries.
6 of 12A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman
A curmudgeon with rules, a neighbourhood that keeps interrupting him, and a found family assembled entirely against his will. Comfort reading with real grief inside.
7 of 12A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
Punk-era music people tracked forwards and backwards across forty years, a different form each chapter — same industry, but Egan has no interest in comforting you.
8 of 12An Ember in the Ashes
Sabaa Tahir
A military academy in an occupying empire, told from both a soldier's side and a slave's — the same setup as Sinegard, pitched for readers who want the romance kept in.
9 of 12Angela's Ashes
Frank McCourt
A drinking father, a mother barely holding on, and a boy who somehow makes it funny. The closest match in tone to Walls, one ocean and fifty years away.
10 of 12Born a Crime
Trevor Noah
Much funnier and every bit as clear-eyed about a mother who is the whole reason you survived — apartheid Johannesburg in place of an Idaho mountain.
11 of 12Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Another society engineered from above by planners convinced they know best, and another novel far more interested in the argument than in the chase.
12 of 12Brother, I'm Dying
Edwidge Danticat
Danticat's family memoir turns on two fathers and an immigration detention cell, and shares Walls's refusal to sort love and failure into separate boxes.
Start from one you already loved
A genre is a blunt instrument. Pick the nonfiction book you actually liked and we’ll rank the next one by what you liked about it.
- Books like FoundationIsaac Asimov
- Books like The Poppy WarR. F. Kuang
- Books like The Invisible Life of Addie LaRueV.E. Schwab
- Books like World War ZMax Brooks
- Books like The Glass CastleJeannette Walls
- Books like Daisy Jones & The SixTaylor Jenkins Reid
- Books like EducatedTara Westover
- Books like A Gentleman in MoscowAmor Towles
- Books like Sapiens: A Brief History of HumankindYuval Noah Harari
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