Holiday reading tips: 20 non-fiction books for the summer
Various book recommendations for the beach and beyond.
Simon Kuper’s columns for the Financial Times are a breath of fresh air. He’s written some brilliant books on football. In Chums, he turns his gaze on the small, entitled set of people who run the UK. Many of them studied at Oxford in the 1980s like Kuper and share the boorish tactics of football hooligans no doubt familiar to the author.
The Russian Revolution is one of the most mysterious – and bloodiest – chapters in 20thcentury history. The peerless Antony Beevor unpicks the events which followed the collapse of the tsarist regime, examining an unholy tussle for power and the emergence of two extraordinary personalities: Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.
Coming from musical royalty might give you a head start in life, you’d think. Not so Martha Wainwright whose father wrote a song I’d Rather be Lonely about her which included the lines, “Every day you’re in my face/How can I get rid of you?”, while her mother told her she was “the definition of mediocrity”. Her acclaimed memoir is packed with her complex family life, celebrity anecdotes and periods of dissolute living.
Bryan Appleyard is one of the most original minds working in journalism. His book on the history and cultural impact of the automobile on society is typically offbeat and interesting, including insight into Japanese inventiveness and key figures like the despicable Henry Ford.
Even if you haven’t read earlier volumes, John Richardson’s monumental final volume on a key decade in the life of Picasso is worth it as a standalone experience: in it, the biographer covers the Spanish Civil War; the onset of the Second World War; and the lengths the artist went to feed his gargantuan sexual appetite.
Patrick Radden Keefe is an unrivalled investigative journalist whose non-fiction books include Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, an examination of the Sackler family’s role in America’s opioid epidemic. Rogues is a collection of his 12 best long-form articles for the New Yorker magazine about people behaving badly.
Minnie Driver, known for her roles in Circle of Friends and Good Will Hunting, has written a well-received memoir in which she calls out some absurdities of celebrity and the acting trade, as well as shining a light on its darker corners like the predatory behaviour of film mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Golf – and the lives of its rich, white male stars – isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but Saudi Arabia’s breakaway “pirate” golf tour is interesting for all kinds of reasons. A book about Phil Mickelson, the poster-boy at the heart of it, takes a look at this compelling character – a talented, deeply flawed American athlete.
Although published in 2020, Catherine Belton’s book on how Vladimir Putin and a clique of former KGB agents seized power in a post-Soviet world has been a mainstay in best-seller lists since the onset of the war in Ukraine. With extraordinary access to Kremlin insiders, spies and mobsters, Belton paints a picture of a pragmatic, ruthless leader.
There are few more popular comic writers than David Sedaris. In his latest collection of autobiographical vignettes, he mines more misanthropic laughs from the annoying people, calamities and irritations that befall him.
Margaret Atwood is one of the clearest-thinking people out there – and one of the world’s finest living novelists. Her third collection of non-fiction writing, which dates back to 2004, deals with her main preoccupations, including women’s issues, the world of writers, the environment and human rights.
Dave Grohl has led an enviable life: drummer with Nirvana followed by a garlanded career as the founder of Foo Fighters. His memoir is particularly interesting about his days in America’s post-punk scene before getting the call from Kurt Cobain.
Kathy Valentine was the bassist with all-girl band the Go-Go’s. Her memoir about the band’s five maniac years of chart success and hell-raising in the 1980s and her own wild Texan childhood has been roundly applauded.
The Italian American Stanley Tucci had an unremarkable upbringing in upstate New York, but if food is your thing, his well-regarded memoir is worth a bite, as it gives some insight into the life of the Emmy award-winning travel series presenter and actor.
Jarvis Cocker, the frontman of Pulp and one of the great pop stars of his generation, is a hoarder. He uses the objects – like letters, ticket stubs, clothes, souvenirs – gathered over a lifetime, and kept in his loft, to deconstruct his life and times. It’s an unusual tack to take for a memoir, but it provides rewarding jumping-off points.
Possibly the most extraordinary book you’ll read this year is the biography of IRA operative Rose Dugdale. She was presented to Queen Elizabeth as a debutante in 1958, but ended up joining the IRA in 1972 where she became a key figure in notorious bomb raids, art heists and the science of bomb-making.
In Bessborough, Deirdre Finnerty, an award-winning journalist with the BBC, tells the stories of three women incarcerated in the mother and baby institution on the outskirts of Cork City. Each woman arrived in a different decade: the 1960s, the ’70s and ’80s. Their stories – marked by pain, institutional lies and broken-up families – take the reader inside the walls of the secretive country mansion.
January 2020 was a different world. While China began to wrestle with a novel coronavirus, few people in Ireland had any idea what was in store. As news correspondent for Virgin Media, Richard Chambers had a front-row seat for what was about to unfold over the next two years. He delivers a pacy account of events with impressive access to key players involved.
The art critic Cristín Leach has written a well-received memoir, stitching together ideas and memories in eight essays about art, work and most compellingly the breakup of her marriage following the discovery that her husband was having an affair.
Elizabeth Boyle is an academic at Maynooth University. She has used her expertise in medieval Irish literature and life to fashion an unconventional memoir, drawing on fascinating (and often gory) detail from the middle ages to make sense of her own bohemian and at times troubling life.
