The best paperbacks of 2022 (2024)

Missed it in hardback? Don’t want to break the bank? Or maybe you just want a book that’s not going to weigh your bag down. Whatever you’re looking for, we’ve got you covered. Here’s our list of the best paperbacks of 2022 so far, which we’ll be adding to each week. You can also check out our comprehensive guide to the best paperbacks of 2021.

Paperback of the week

The Clockwork Girl by Anna Mazzola
Orion £8.99
Madeleine Chastel is pressured into spying on Dr Reinhart, a clockmaker and creator of automata who is suspected of subversive experimentation. She navigates a world of dangerous intrigues that lead eventually to Louis XV’s court. Mazzola’s novel is an atmospheric and constantly surprising thriller.
Nick Rennison

Best of 2022 so far

Fiction

The Pharmacist by Rachelle Atalla
Hodder £8.99
Wolfe is the pharmacist of the title, living in a bunker after an apocalyptic event. She administers to her patients and keeps a low profile, but, as weeks underground roll into months, tensions rise. Rachelle Atalla nails the claustrophobic atmosphere and brings this world to life convincingly in her impressive debut.
Jessie Lethaby

Harrow by Joy Williams
Tuskar Rock £8.99
In the murky “post-disaster present” of this novel, “all the prisons had been emptied, the opera houses and theaters closed”. Its narrator, Khristen, treks across the desert. This bizarre novel may be a hard read, but its fragmentary, hallucinatory form captures something essential about a world in disintegration.
Robert Collins

A Killing in November by Simon Mason
riverrun £9.99
DI Ray Wilkins is a British-Nigerian graduate of Balliol, but the only thing he has in common with his new colleague, Ryan Wilkins, is a surname. Ryan grew up in a very different Oxford, in a caravan park, and he reacts with hostility when called to investigate a murder at a posh college. This moody, atmospheric novel is full of surprises.
Joan Smith

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Faber £8.99
This novella is set in an Irish town in 1985 during the weeks before Christmas. We see the community through the coal merchant Bill Furlong’s eyes as he works in the bitter weather, alive to hypocrisies in himself and others. There is plenty to admire in this snowglobe of a story that fits a whole bustling, yearning world into 114 pages.
Claire Lowdon

Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart
Allen & Unwin £8.99
A group of friends escape to upstate New York to sit out the first wave of the pandemic together, meeting every night for lavish meals. It’s a true pleasure to sink into Shteyngart’s expansive, benevolent storytelling, and he has captured that time beautifully: the intense, almost maniacal aliveness of the early days of the pandemic.
Claire Lowdon

More Than I Love My Life by David Grossman
Vintage £9.99
The Adriatic island of Goli Otok was the site of a brutal labour camp run by Yugoslavia’s communist government for the “re-education” of political dissidents. One such inmate was Eva Nahir Panic, a Jewish Yugoslavian woman who was imprisoned there for several years in the early 1950s before emigrating to Israel. Grossman’s delicately crafted novel is a fictionalised account of Panic’s ordeal and its long aftermath.
Houman Barekat

Tenderness by Alison MacLeod
Bloomsbury £8.99
At the heart of Tenderness, Alison MacLeod’s ambitious fourth novel, are the creation of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and its later life as a work supposedly too obscene to be freely available to readers. Weaving together fact and fiction with impressive skill, MacLeod marshals a number of very different but interlinked narratives.
Nick Rennison

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
Fleet £8.99
Whitehead’s eighth novel is a pulpy neo-noir about an ambitious furniture salesman who can’t quite escape his roots as the son of a hustler killed by the cops. Over five years, in a red-blooded book full of powerful personalities, we see how shady hustles undermine his attempts to be an upstanding citizen.
Johanna Thomas-Corr

Palmares by Gayl Jones
Virago £8.99
Jones’s first novel in 22 years conjures up an epic quest for freedom and knowledge in 17th-century Brazil. Astonishingly rich in character and incident, filled with magic and mystery, Jones’s return to fiction after so long an absence proves confusing in its telling at times but always intriguing.
Nick Rennison

Blank Pages by Bernard MacLaverty
Vintage £9.99
MacLaverty’s fiction often deals with painful subjects (most notably intolerance and sectarian savagery in his native Belfast), but does so with invigorating clarity and depth. His latest short story collection is even darker than usual, but still shines with literary accomplishment and is full of wonders.
David Grylls

The Republic of False Truths by Alaa Al Aswany
Faber £8.99
This searing survey of the country from which Aswany is now an exile centres on Tahrir Square, where the 2011 Egyptian revolution began and bloodily ended. A masterly panorama of doomed revolution, the novel puts Aswany in the company of Joseph Conrad as a fictional confronter of despotism.
Peter Kemp

The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett
Viper £8.99
Ex-con Steven Smith has disappeared after a long stretch in prison. Janice Hallett’s second novel consists of transcripts of audio files recovered from Smith’s phone. They kick off a serpentine plot involving secret codes, German spies and a Nazi scheme to steal the UK’s gold reserves. It’s a classic romp and every page is a joy.
Joan Smith

April in Spain by John Banville
Faber £8.99
In this eighth Quirke novel, the Irish pathologist is on holiday in Spain when he spots a young woman from Dublin whom he believed to be dead. He is convinced she is the niece of a politician, but his bungling attempts to establish the truth have disastrous consequences. Banville’s sly observations about his characters are a joy to read.
Joan Smith

The Bloodless Boy by Robert J Lloyd
Melville House £9.99
The year is 1678 and London is still recovering from the twin blows of fire and plague. A child’s body, drained of its blood, is found on the bank of the River Fleet. Robert Hooke, curator of experiments at the fledgling Royal Society, and his young assistant Harry Hunt are asked to investigate. Their efforts lead them into a morass of deceit and danger, and they uncover a plot to kill the king, Charles II.
Nick Rennison

Opal Country by Chris Hammer
In Opal Country Hammer returns to the outback and the small town of Finnigans Gap, where a dwindling band of miners is trying to find opals in a nearly exhausted seam. When one of them is found dead, a detective from Sydney is sent to assist the local police. The setting plays to Hammer’s strengths, allowing him to lay bare the rivalries in a town that’s dying on its feet.
Joan Smith

The Gardener by Salley Vickers
When Hassie, an illustrator, goes halves on a house in the country with the sister she has never got on with, she makes the garden her particular domain and overhauls it with the help of a young Albanian Muslim. Hassie weathers bereavement, a break-up and midlife despair, but finds a sense of new beginnings and a feeling for the power of place.
Phil Baker

Billy Summers by Stephen King
Hodder £8.99
Billy, a former Iraq war sniper, is being paid $2 million to kill (and silence) another hitman in the town where he will stand trial. However, when Billy rescues a rape victim, his plans change. Disciplined but adventurous, equally good at action scenes and psychology, King shows with this novel that, at 74, he’s a writer back at the top of his game.
John Dugdale

Dinner Party: A Tragedy by Sarah Gilmartin
One £8.99
This debut novel begins and ends with a dinner party, weaving a tapestry of a family battered by tragedies. But this is also a surprisingly funny book, with joyously good descriptions of such events as laser hair removal. Tragedies, Gilmartin seems to say, are not sealed-off stories — they happen all the time, and are mixed in with laughter too.
Laura Hackett

Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks
Vintage £8.99
Faulks returns to the long shadow cast by the First World War in his latest Austrian-set novel. The book uses human actors to explore big ideas, like the tumult of politics, the history of psychoanalysis and women’s economic agency. He has written a yearning, wistful, lovelorn novel, intent on exploring the price of being human.
Patricia Nicol

The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy
Bloomsbury £8.99
Resignation is the governing emotion of the mostly female protagonists in the 15 gritty, bitter and hard-won stories of this first collection. Children are burdens not blessings; husbands and partners, with a few exceptions, are disappointments or worse. Yet Kennedy’s voice is electric.
Andrew Holgate

Sharpe’s Assassin by Bernard Cornwell
HarperCollins £8.99
Richard Sharpe, Cornwell’s tarnish antihero of the Napoleonic Wars, first appeared in 1981, but we’ve heard nothing of him for 15 years. Now he has returned, and Cornwell has demonstrated once again that he is a master of his particular craft. His knowledge of the period is immense. And it’s matched by the energy of the prose in which he recounts Sharpe’s escapades.
Nick Rennison

Magpie by Elizabeth Day
4th Estate £8.99
This thriller at first seems to be in the overfamiliar territory of Single White Female, in which the outsider in the home poses a threat. Yet it is told from two perspectives, and the second calls everything in the first account into question. The scintillating plotting isn’t at the expense of credible characterisation or emotional depth.
John Dugdale

Silverview by John le Carré
Penguin £8.99
This final le Carré novel was written several years ago, but held back until after his death last December. In almost every respect Silverview fulfils the late-period le Carré stereotype. It’s deftly and confidently written, but so slight you can easily read it in one sitting. In the very first sentence it’s raining.
Dominic Sandbrook

My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
Granta £8.99
Riley specialises in savage emotional reckonings that play out against dismal British cityscapes. My Phantoms is about the psychological battleground between a semi-estranged mother and daughter. The dialogue is superb, and these struggling individuals feel so agonisingly real you can’t look away.
Johanna Thomas-Corr

True Crime Story by Joseph Knox
Penguin £8.99
In this dazzlingly original book, author Evelyn tries to find out what happened to a missing student. We read interviews and her emails to a friend, one Joseph Knox. The real Knox pulls off a hybrid triumph: an old-fashioned whodunnit and a smart literary novel questioning the true crime genre.
John Dugdale

Penguin £9.99
A traumatised 13-year-old, Benny Oh, is the hero of Ozeki’s fourth novel. Two years ago his stoned Japanese jazz-clarinetist father was mistaken for a rubbish bag and run over by a chicken truck. Gender-fluid ferrets and the popularising of all things Zen aren’t beyond parody here. Plus there’s plenty of plot to push things along.
Francesca Angelini

A Calling for Charlie Barnes by Joshua Ferris
Penguin £8.99
Narrated by Jake Barnes (the same name as the central character in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises), Ferris’s novel is set amid the Great Recession of 2008 as Jake’s father, Charlie, copes with the double whammy of huge financial losses and a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.
Andrew Male

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber £8.99
This is Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the Nobel prize for literature, and could almost be a companion piece to Never Let Me Go. With it he performs the same feat of alchemy by which fitments of science fiction — clones and robots — are suffused with such human warmth that only an unfeeling reader would be left unmoved.
Peter Kemp

The Magician by Colm Tóibín
Penguin £8.99
Tóibín’s latest novel chronicles the life of Thomas Mann, the Nobel prizewinning German author of Death in Venice (1912) and The Magic Mountain (1924). Based on vast amounts of reading, The Magician is a masterly synthesis of biographical and historical research.
David Grylls

The Waiter by Ajay Chowdhury
Vintage £7.99
In this superb first novel, Kamil Rahman, a disgraced detective, has just arrived in the East End from India. When his boss’s oldest friend is murdered at a glitzy party in north London, Rahman can’t resist launching his own investigation — and risking deportation. Chowdhury paces this outstanding novel like an old hand.
Joan Smith

The Royal Secret by Andrew Taylor
HarperFiction £8.99
This novel is the fifth in Taylor’s always riveting series of Restoration-era adventures featuring James Marwood, an often reluctant agent of Charles II’s government. With all his customary deftness and skill, Taylor weaves a colourful, complicated plot involving royal secrets, foreign spies in London and a mangy lion, caged in a merchant’s stables, that is used to frighten a man to death.
Nick Rennison

The Cold Millions by Jess Walter
Penguin £8.99
The Beautiful Ruins author creates a brilliantly multifaceted panorama of early 20th-century America in her latest novel. Millionaires and hobos, anarchists and cops, saloon girls and entertainers people the pages of a novel that focuses on the coming-of-age story of Rye Dolan, a teenager thrust into the maelstrom of street politics in Spokane, Washington.
Nick Rennison

Ten Days by Austin Duffy
Granta £12.99
Wolf, an errant but successful artist, returns to the family home in London to care for his dying Jewish wife, Miriam. Wolf’s memory plays tricks on both him and the reader in a portrait of Alzheimer’s surely underpinned by Duffy’s career in medicine. This is a quietly wonderful novel, full of resonance yet unforgiving in its gaze.
Andrew Holgate

All Human Wisdom by Pierre Lemaitre
MacLehose Press, £8.99
This sequel to The Great Swindle begins in 1927 with a bravura opening chapter describing the funeral of Edouard and Madeleine’s father. There’s a will that creates widespread disgruntlement and a forgotten safe that contains money no one knows about. Throw in a cold and twisted man running the bank, an ambitious, sexually alluring young woman and a brilliant, if possibly shady “man for hire” and you have the ingredients Balzac would have cooked with.
David Mills

Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan
Vintage £8.99
Waterford-born Megan Nolan’s first novel is set in the clanking, sweltering engine room of a toxic relationship. The star feature of Nolan’s narration is her ability to cut through received ideas about women, relationships and even rape. Her headlong, fearless prose feels like salt wind on cracked lips. You wince and you thrill.
Claire Lowdon

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Bloomsbury £8.99
This is a bold debut on the relationship between the online and real-life worlds. The fabulously irreverent narrator worries about how social media radicalises users into communal conformist thinking and the absurdity of cancel culture. Much of this, delightfully, is satirised with Lockwood’s characteristic dry humour.
Francesca Angelini

Luster by Raven Leilani
Picador £9.99
Leilani is a caustic, funny and skilful storyteller, taking us deeply and convincingly inside the head of a millennial woman frantically trying to make sense of the world and her place within it.
Mika Ross-Southall

Non-fiction

The Ottomans by Marc David
BaerBasic Books £12.99
The story of how a Turkic tribe came to rule over a Eurasian empire for nearly 700 years (from the late 13th century until 1922) is one of the greatest, and it’s rivetingly retold here. Baer’s portrait teems with life and colour, human interest and oddity, cruelty and oppression mixed with pleasure, benevolence and great artistic beauty.
Christopher Hart

Fabric by Victoria Finlay
Profile £10.99 pp528
Cloth once drove whole economies and trading systems. Think of the Silk Road or the Woolsack in the House of Lords. In this subtle, compendious and rich history of fabric, the journalist Victoria Finlay blends globe-trotting research (from tweed in the Outer Hebrides to Kashmir shawls) with her own family history.
James McConnachie

The Burgundians by Bart Van Loo
Apollo £12 pp624
Three cheers for this rollicking history of the Burgundians, which throws in as many mad kings, knights and jesters as any reader could want. Stuffed with elaborate feasts and bloody battles, Van Loo’s thrillingly colourful and entertaining book has been an enormous success in his native Belgium and it’s easy to see why.
Dominic Sandbrook

The Ruin of All Witches by Malcolm Gaskill
Penguin £9.99
This is a brilliant portrait of a small, beleaguered New England community in the 17th century. People distanced from us by four centuries, and an almost entirely alien world view, live again as real, flawed, deeply sympathetic human beings. It will haunt you long after you have turned the last page.
Christopher Hart

The Fires of Lust by Katherine Harvey
Reaktion £12.99
Sex in the Middle Ages was both simple and complicated, a necessary pleasure and a deadly sin. Katherine Harvey takes the reader on a memorable, occasionally eye-watering, journey beneath the medieval bedsheets, from swallowing a bee as a contraceptive to applying quicklime to the penis to cure STDs. It’s an enjoyable romp.

Spying and the Crown by Richard J Aldrich and Rory Cormac
Atlantic £12.99
This book records the close links between the royal family and the world of espionage. Some royals were avid consumers of secret reports, while others were under close watch. Stretching back to Elizabeth I and her spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, there is something of interest on pretty much every page.
Roland White

My Own Worst Enemy by Robert Edric
Swift £9.99
This memoir of the historical novelist Robert Edric’s working-class childhood in 1960s Sheffield is resolutely unfashionable in its setting and subject matter, but is a classic little gem of the genre, one that summons up with great care a world that is now so unfamiliar that it feels like another planet.
Andrew Holgate

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011 by William Feaver
Bloomsbury £14.99
The painter emerges as fully three-dimensional in this second part of Feaver’s biography. He is selfish, spoilt, often reprehensible, sometimes vicious (not above posting dog faeces through an enemy’s letterbox), but also honest about his failings, generous and capable of inspiring great loyalty.
Michael Prodger

Making Darkness Light by Joe Moshenska
Basic Books £12.99
This is unlike any book about Milton I have read. It is often densely erudite, but also richly inventive, and for quite long stretches it is, in effect,a historical novel. It records incidents that might have happened in Milton’s life, but did not, and it adds fictitious details when recording those that did.
John Carey

The Madness of Grief by Richard Coles
W&N £9.99
As a clergyman and a celebrity, Coles is public property twice over — “a borderline national trinket”, as his partner of 12 years, the Rev David Coles, described him. This is his memoir of David’s death in 2019. The Madness of Grief is not a manual for the bereaved, but as a vivid account of how it feels when the world suddenly falls away, it performs another kind of service.
Victoria Segal

The Searchers by Robert Sackville-West
Bloomsbury £12.99
Robert Sackville-West’s new book is compelling and often horrifying. The “searchers” of his title were the bereaved of the First World War, who tried to get news of their lost loved ones (Where and how did they die? Were they perhaps taken prisoner and still alive?) by interviewing their surviving comrades, often in hospitals and casualty clearing stations.
John Carey

God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulou
Picador £12.99
Picturing God with a body is vulgar, or even blasphemous, to the more austere forms of Protestantism and in Islam. Yet this rivetingly fresh and stunning reading of the Hebrew Bible says something quite different. The Old Testament God loved, and buried, his dearest friends, he “raised children, took wives and had sex”.
Christopher Hart

Rationality by Steven Pinker
Penguin £10.99
This is an impassioned and zippy introduction to the tools of rational thought, covering logic, critical thinking, probability and game theory. Framing all that is a defence of reason itself, and a howl of anguish at the irrationality that sometimes seems on the verge of taking control. It’s punchy, funny and invigorating.
James McConnachie

Who Lost Russia? From the Collapse of the USSR to Putin’s War on Ukraine by Peter Conradi
Oneworld £10.99
This is a sober and skilfully constructed study of how America’s policies towards Russia and Russia’s obsession with America have shaped the world over the past quarter century. The new paperback version continues the narrative to take in the circ*mstances leading to the invasion of Ukraine in February and looks forward to what could happen next.
Arkady Ostrovsky

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner
Canongate £12.99
Mildred Harnack was the only known American leader in the German resistance. Rebecca Donner, her great-great-niece, uses Harnack’s letters to create life-writing that draws level with fiction. Written in a pacey present tense, it’s a superb, sure-footed work of historical detection.
Johanna Thomas-Corr

Sybil & Cyril: Cutting Through Time by Jenny Uglow
Faber £12.99
Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power may be familiar only to those with an interest in printmaking, but they revolutionised the linocut. In her biography of the pair, Uglow is wonderful at conjuring up the atmosphere of the art scene in Jazz Age London, with futurists, vorticists and surrealists spouting their manifestos.
John Carey

On the Cusp by David Kynaston
Bloomsbury £9.99
David Kynaston has already produced four books that chronicle the history of postwar Britain, but this is the first one that records the events of a single year: 1962. The prime minister was an Old Etonian who didn’t get on with his chancellor. There was a bad-tempered debate about Britain’s relationship with Europe, and worries about the dominance of private schools and Oxbridge in public life. How familiar it all sounds.
Roland White

Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
Simon & Schuster £9.99
Across 72 chapters, Woodward and Costa cover the first stretch of the Biden presidency as well as Trump’s final months in power. Their account reveals the extent to which the former president was indulged by Republican politicians and aides who knew the election wasn’t stolen, but have enabled him to bamboozle his base and rewrite the history of the Capitol riot.
Sarah Baxter

And Away . . . by Bob Mortimer
Gallery £8.99
In his delightful, quietly revelatory memoir, Bob Mortimer tells of how he shed his initial shyness and legal career to become a beloved comedian, podcaster and angler. There are insights into his father’s death, his depression and his heart surgery, but it is all written in his slightly off-balance raconteurial style.
Victoria Segal

Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain by Jeremy Paxman
Wm Collins £10.99
Given coal’s image, a popular history might seem a foolhardy undertaking. Yet Paxman’s book could hardly be more colourful, and I enjoyed every page enormously. He strikes a nice balance between proprietors and workers, emphasising not just the courage and solidarity of the men toiling below ground, but the extraordinarily lavish lifestyles of the colliery owners.
Dominic Sandbrook

The Anglo-Saxons by Marc Morris
Penguin £10.99
Morris guides us through the tricksy Anglo-Saxon world in this clever, lively book. Each chapter focuses on a known person or group and the themes that slot into the narrative. Around these tales fit intriguing glimpses into the everyday lives of the people — some dwelling in pit houses, a few in great halls like those described in Beowulf.
Dan Jones

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Penguin £12.99
The standard narrative goes: humans appeared 300,000 years ago, then nothing much happened until 288,000 years later when some bright spark invented agriculture. But this revolutionary book argues that pre-agricultural societies were complex, and that agriculture was not the sudden turning point it is claimed to be.
Bryan Appleyard

Free by Lea Ypi
Penguin £9.99
A deeply resonant memoir about growing up in Albania, in the final days of the last Stalinist outpost of the 20th century. What makes this Baillie Gifford-shortlisted book unforgettable is that we see this world, one about which we know so little, through the eyes of a child, as 11-year-old Lea tries to interpret the events unfolding around her.
Laura Hackett

Burning Man by Frances Wilson
Bloomsbury £12.99
Frances Wilson was told by her mother that she would not have Lawrence’s books in the house, and at university she found that her tutor refused to teach him. Wilson responded by making him the hero of this brilliant biography. Her great strength is the aliveness of her writing, which constantly interweaves glowing phrases from Lawrence into its fabric.
John Carey

How to Be a Rock Star by Shaun Ryder
Allen & Unwin £9.99
Ryder’s book is partly a repackaging of these well-polished tales of chaos for both devoted fans and younger newcomers who know Ryder best via stints on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! or Gogglebox, the secondary smoke of his pungent musical career in Happy Mondays and the hip-hop-inspired sequel Black Grape.
Victoria Segal

Aftermath by Harald Jahner
WH Allen £9.99
In this important, exemplary account of postwar life in the defeated Reich, Harald Jahner writes that most older Germans embraced a narrative of their own victimhood. This displaced compassion for others, notably for six million Jews.
Max Hastings

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
Bloomsbury £10.99
The Booker prizewinning novelist George Saunders gives a one-to-one tutorial in seven stories by four Russian novelists: Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol. He guides, prods, nudges, urges you to disagree. It’s better dipped into one essay at a time rather than read in a single deep dive, but it will stay with you and transform how you read story by story, sentence by sentence.
Lucy Atkins

Powers and Thrones by Dan Jones
Apollo £12
From AD410 to 1527: a thousand years race by in a colourful narrative history, with all the confidence, bravura and swift judgments essential to an overview of such a vast timespan. Jones explains the movements of the period with crystal clarity. This is now simply the best popular history of the Middle Ages there is.
Christopher Hart

Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me by John Sutherland
W&N £10.99
Philip Larkin’s lies and infidelities destroyed Monica Jones, as John Sutherland spells out in this eye-opening book. For Kingsley Amis Jones was a “grim old bag”; for Christopher Hitchens, “frigid, drab and hysterical”. Sutherland, however, liked and admired her as his tutor, supervisor and friend, and in his account she comes alive.
John Carey

The Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price
Penguin £14.99
Thousands of books have been published about the Vikings — this is one of the very best. Price may know more about medieval Scandinavia than anyone else alive, and he aims to show us these fascinating people as they saw themselves, not as they were perceived by those on the sharp end of their robbery.
Dan Jones

The Sleeping Beauties by Suzanne O’Sullivan
Picador £10.99
The “sleeping beauties” of this book’s title are hundreds of children who, since the early 2000s, have entered a comatose state with medical tests suggesting that they are conscious and healthy. They are just one example of mass psychogenic illness, the subject of this curious, compassionate and alluringly freakish book.
James McConnachie

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
Picador £9.99
Some books make you so angry you want to chuck rocks at the bad guys they expose. This Baillie Gifford-winning book, which tells the story of the Sackler family, who created and aggressively marketed the painkiller OxyContin that fuelled the opioid crisis, is one of those.
John Arlidge

Material Girls by Kathleen Stock
Fleet £9.99
Kathleen Stock’s controversial book takes issue with a new orthodoxy endorsed by trans activists, in which sex gives way to feeling, and feeling trumps facts. Don’t expect a barrel of laughs. You won’t find any stories, or much in the way of anecdote. What you will find is a methodical dismantling of weak, misleading and false arguments.
Christina Patterson

Women vs Hollywood by Helen O’Hara
Robinson £9.99
In 1917 Universal Studios released eight films with women credited as directors; 100 years later the same studio produced just one, Pitch Perfect 3. That is the surprising reality behind Helen O’Hara’s fascinating polemic.
Daisy Goodwin

Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel
TLS Books £7.99
This is an angry book, directed at the author’s own political home. It’s a convincing and even devastating charge sheet, in which various left-wing politicians, actors and writers are shown to have said things about Jews that, if they had been made about any other minority group, would have ended their careers on the spot.
Dominic Lawson

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
Vintage £14.99
This is the first full biography to draw on all Sylvia Plath’s surviving letters and to incorporate interview material from Harriet Rosenstein’s unfinished 1970s biography. Clark stays commendably even-handed when it comes to her relationship with Ted Hughes. She also makes use of fresh information to reconstruct Plath’s final days and argue convincingly that she did mean to take her own life.
Claire Lowdon

Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton
WH Allen £9.99
In 1897, almost 20 years before Shackleton’s Endurance, a man called Adrien de Gerlache sailed for the Antarctic. If his venture is hardly known (this is the first proper account in English) it must be because he was Belgian. But the story, told here by American journalist Sancton, is a gripping grade-A classic.
James McConnachie

Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn
HarperCollins £9.99
In beautiful, evocative prose, Flyn explores places that have been left behind by humans, and the ways in which nature has reasserted itself, from the slag heaps of West Lothian, which have become an unlikely natural haven, to emptied-out Detroit. Flyn peppers despair at human failures with belief in nature’s power.
Laura Hackett