Winter can be a time to slow down, take stock of the year so far and hibernate with a good book, so why not do it while also keeping your mind sharp and engaged with some excellent non-fiction? Here, we’ve got some groundbreaking examinations on global politics, history and technology, insightful and candid memoirs, and a treat at the end for any Chelsea football fans! Keep reading on to learn more!
Spirit Untamed
By Ajaz Ahmed
Heni 3 | 9781911736301 | Hardback | £29.99 | Out Now
Manifesto and memoir by Ajaz Ahmed, British entrepreneur and founder of global design and innovation agency AKQA.
Spirit Untamed is a deeply personal and thought-provoking collection of reflections from Ajaz Ahmed, tracing three decades of creative leadership, personal growth and cultural commentary. From growing one of the world’s most celebrated creative companies to launching a new venture built on first principles, Ajaz Ahmed offers a unique perspective on the challenges of modern leadership, the contradictions of corporate life and the quiet strength that comes from living your values. Rather than following a linear autobiography, the book unfolds thematically, exploring topics such as identity and resilience and the pursuit of meaningful work. Written in a voice that is both grounded and reflective, the book invites readers into moments of solitude, conflict, imagination and clarity. It captures the tension between building something at scale and keeping hold of what truly matters.
The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity
By Sarah Schulman
Peninsula Press | 9781913512774 | Paperback | £12.99 | Out Now
By writer, activist and outspoken critic of the Israeli War on Gaza, Sarah Schulman shows that, in order reckon with solidarity, we need to understand its inherent fantasies.
The book examines a range of movements the author has been involved with and moments she has lived through: from the fight for abortion rights in post-Franco Spain, to AIDS activism in New York in the 1990s, to the current wave of campus protest movements against Israel’s war on Gaza. The book looks at how these movements have succeeded and where they have failed. Schulman argues that, under today’s globalised power structures, solidarity can no longer function as a simple union of equals, but instead requires the collaboration of conflicted perpetrators and those that they have excluded or oppressed.
Signs Among The Stones
By Jem Bloomfield
Herne Books | 9781917665148 | Hardback | £16.99 | 28/11/2025
Delves into the literary connections and social references of C.S. Lewis’s beloved books The Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy.
This fascinating book explores the numerous literary connections, themes, symbolism, and cultural and social references underlying The Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy, the fourth and fifth books in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia series, following the same format of Paths in the Snow and Gold on the Horizon, Jem Bloomfield’s popular explorations of the first three Narnia tales (both published under the DLT imprint). In Signs Among the Stones, Bloomfield considers the significance of the very different landscapes of The Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy — subterranean caves and arid deserts, both a world away from the more familiar forests and castles of other Narnia tales — and explores what the books can tell us about Lewis’s ideas on meaning, questing and storytelling.
An Opinionated Guide to Rainy Day London
By Emmy Watts
Hoxton Mini Press | 9781917719094 | Paperback | £10.95 | Out Now
Your indispensable guide to everything the city has to offer when the weather is rubbish.
London is great… but let’s be honest, it’s also often raining. In a city renowned for its showers, Londoners know how to make the most of the day despite the downpour. World-class museums and snug pubs are just the beginning: explore subterranean vintage markets, sprawling food courts, board game cafes, roller rinks, luxe basement spas, cavernous climbing centres and even, for the intrepid, heated lidos that stay open year-round (feel the rain on your skin!). Welcome to the best of the city in the worst of the weather.
Bad Language
By So Mayer
Peninsula Press | 9781913512798 | Paperback | £12.99 | Out Now
Calls out the harm that words can do, while searching for crafty ways that we can collectively reclaim language for protest and pleasure.
In Bad Language, So Mayer blends memoir and manifesto as they explore the politics of speech, while looking at how language has been used – and abused – in their own life. What is the relationship between language and sexual violence? And how can we ‘make ourselves up’ in language, when words themselves are encoded by a dominant culture that insists we see ourselves as powerless listeners rather than active speakers? Examining the semantic traps of their own multi-lingual childhood – and taking in texts from the Torah to Grimms’ Fairytales, from protest march bust cards to the works of Ursula K. Le Guin – Mayer asks who gets to speak, and who is forced into silence.
French Cooking for Two
By Michèle Roberts
Les Fugitives | 9781068433832 | Paperback | £14.99 | Out Now
A sequel to the Nigella Lawson stocking filler for 2024: French Cooking for One.
Friendship has its own distinctive seasons, constantly changing and evolving, just as the years revolve. Cooking for a friend, you can show your affection in a direct, practical way. Composing a menu to suit or intrigue a particular beloved person, you are demonstrating how well you understand and appreciate them. This book is divided into three overlapping seasons, following the 1929 classic La bonne cuisine by Madame Saint-Ange. In each section you will find dishes and suggestions appropriate to the season as well as ideas for particular seasonal moments, such as sardine sandwiches a la Colette, designed to be packed into bicycle baskets for picnics. These recipes are designed to be straightforward to follow so you can concentrate on your guest rather than dashing between stove and table.
The Body Digital
By Vanessa Chang
Melville House Publishing | 9781685891978 | Paperback | £14.99 | Out Now
A dazzling tour of the history of the complex relation between technology and the human body…
What is the relationship between our bodies and our senses and technology? In today’s world of blinding technological change, of artificial intelligence and deepfakes and Chat GPT, it is easy to forget that we have always had complicated relations with technology – whether that technology is computers, player pianos, and even eyeglasses. In this wide-ranging and fascinating study, Vanessa Chang shows us that in order to understand the future, we must look to the past.
Palestine Mapped
By Thomas Suárez
Olive Branch Press | 9781623716158 | Hardback | £40.99 | Out Now
A lavishly illustrated and meticulously guided excursion through the mapping of historic Palestine from the earliest record through the early twentieth century.
Palestine is as much a region of the earth as it is a place in the psyche of those who mapped it. Author Thomas Suárez is uniquely qualified to address the mapping of this region ‘from the river to the sea,’ as he is both an authority on the history of cartography and has written extensively on Palestine. Lavishly illustrated, Palestine Mapped guides the reader through the Greek and Roman concepts of Palestine, Islamic mapping, and the European ‘Holy Land’ mapping that has dominated for half a millennium. But Suárez makes that dominant view part of the story, rather than the ‘lens’ through which he observes it, setting the book starkly apart from all others on the mapping of the region.
Trying
By Chloé Caldwell
Verve Books | 9780857309365 | Paperback | £12.99 | 27/11/2025
If you’re writing about your life in real time, are you inherently fucked?
Over the years that Chloé Caldwell had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she’d read everything she could find on infertility. But no memoir or message board reflected her experience; for one thing, most stories ended with in vitro fertilisation, a baby or both. She wanted to offer something different. Caldwell began a book. She imagined a selective journal about her experience coping with stasis and uncertainty. Is it time to quit coffee, find a new acupuncturist, get another blood test? Her questions extended to her job at a clothing boutique and to her teaching and writing practice. Why do people love equating publishing books with giving birth? What is the right amount of money to spend on pants or fertility treatments? How much trying is enough? She ignored the sense that something else in her life was wrong that was not on the page… until she extracted a confession from her husband. Broken by betrayal but freed from domesticity, Caldwell felt reawakened, to long-buried desires, to her queer identity, to pleasure and possibility. She kept writing, making sense of her new reality as it took shape. With the candour, irreverence, and heart that have made Caldwell’s work beloved, Trying intimately captures a self in a continuous process of becoming – and the mysterious ways that writing informs that process.
John Simons/Since 1955
By Paul Simons
Reel Art Press | 9781909526990 | Paperback | £24.95 | Out Now
A celebration of 70 years of British menswear icon, John Simons.
John Simons has been the definitive voice on Ivy League style in the UK for 70 years. He has shaped the way generations of men dress both in London and around the world. He is the man who named the ‘Harrington’ jacket and who introduced terms like ‘button down’, ‘Weejuns’ and ‘workwear’ into the modern style lexicon. Blending the finest contemporary items with elusive vintage pieces, his unique approach to curation draws from music, film and art and has had an enduring sartorial influence on menswear worldwide. john simons/since 1955 celebrates seventy years of John’s style and innovation, exploring the cultural forces that inspired him through original movie posters, magazine advertisements and C20th modern art; and showcasing customers in their finest Ivy threads. This beautiful volume delves into John’s deep love of mid-century music, art and design. It is a tribute to a quiet icon and a testament to timeless style.
Men At Work
By Glenn Kurtz
Seven Stories Press | 9781644215029 | Hardback | £25 | Out Now
This little-known chapter of American labour history captures forgotten stories and 30 unseen photos of the working class, immigrant, and Indigenous construction workers who built the architectural icon, made famous by Lewis W. Hine’s legendary portraits.
Who built the Empire State Building? Astonishingly, no list of workmen on this historic landmark was ever compiled. While the names of the owners, architects, and contractors are well known, and Lewis Hine left us indelible images of the workers, their identities – the last generation of workmen still practising these time-honoured trades, have not been identified until author Glenn Kurtz unearthed their individual stories for this book. Drawing on eclectic sources – census, immigration, and union records; contemporary journalism; the personal recollections of their descendants – Kurtz assembles biographies of these workers. He creates not only a portrait of the building’s labour force, and a revolutionary re-interpretation of Hine’s world-famous photographs, but also a fundamental reimagining of what made the Empire State Building a fitting symbol for the nation, built as it was at the very height of the Great Depression.
Chelsea FC: The Official History
By Rick Glanvill; Foreword by John Terry
Vision Sports Publishing | 9781913412777 | Hardback | £40 | 27/11/2025
The complete official history of Chelsea Football Club, which celebrates its 120th anniversary in 2025.
Written by Club Historian Rick Glanvill and lavishly illustrated with archive photography and memorabilia from the Chelsea FC Museum, this is the most comprehensive history of the club ever published. From its formation in 1905 to the trophy-laden recent years, Chelsea FC: The Official History focuses on the great matches and key players who have shaped the story of London’s most glamorous club. The luxurious coffee table book also charts the incredible rise of Chelsea FC Women – the dominant force in English women’s football – from the 1970s until the present day.
