From the author of The 48 Laws of Power and The Laws of Human Nature. After seven years, Greene turns from power and social strategy to awe - reconnecting with nature, art, science, childhood perception, and the fringes of consciousness. Stories, exercises, and meditations. The same move Duckworth made with Situated: an author complicating his own reputation. 496 pages. Published by Viking.
- You finished The Laws of Human Nature and wanted the inner life, not another strategy manual
- You liked Mastery, Four Thousand Weeks, or The Denial of Death
- You want a long book that tries to change how you see, not how you win
First book from the Real Vision founder. The framework: demographics force debt-driven liquidity; that liquidity is the hidden chart under almost every major asset; technology and crypto are the life rafts. Thirty years of macro compressed into one thesis. Sits alongside The Bitcoin Standard and The Sovereign Individual - a builder's map of a broken monetary system, actionable without being a get-rich pamphlet. Published by Harriman House.
- You want the macro chart that supposedly explains why every asset rhymes
- You liked The Bitcoin Standard or The Sovereign Individual
- You think demographics-plus-debt is the story under the noise
Gleick wrote Chaos and The Information. Here the telephone becomes the instrument that remade intimacy, monopoly, Bell Labs, and the information age - speech at a distance as a civilisational break, not a gadget history. If October's The New Dark Ages diagnosed what screens are doing to us, this is the prequel: what the wire did before the screen existed. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- You liked The Information, Chaos, or The Shallows
- You want a technology understood as a change in human nature
- You want the prequel to October's New Dark Ages - what the wire did before the screen
When AI will happily think for you, critical thinking stops being optional. Peter H. Frank, a former New York Times business reporter and lecturer in critical thinking, makes the case for thinking from first principles - and gives you the tools to actually do it.
The authorized biography. Farmelo is a physicist and a Costa Award-winning biographer, and he works from his subject's family papers: letters and diaries from Hawking's parents that have never been seen before, plus interviews with family, friends and colleagues. Black holes, the early universe, global fame - and the decades Hawking lived after an ALS diagnosis in his early twenties that was supposed to leave him a few years. 608 pages. Already out in the UK (John Murray, September 24). US edition from Bantam.
- You read A Brief History of Time and want the person behind the book
- You liked Six Easy Pieces or The Beginning of Infinity
- You want physics told as a life story, not a lecture
Strogatz (Infinite Powers, The Joy of X, Cornell) and Townsend on the small set of ideas - mostly linear algebra - underneath Netflix recommendations, medical imaging, GPS, and AI. The sting: the maths is drifting beyond the grasp of the people who built it, and quantum makes it worse. The layer underneath the hype, for anyone who wants to know what "the model" actually is. 304 pages. Published by Little, Brown.
- You want to know what "the model" actually is, underneath the hype
- You liked Infinite Powers or The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- You suspect the discovery bottleneck is linear algebra, not magic
Harvard neuroscientist walks into the lab and shows the tools - implants, laser-controlled neurons - plus the grind of the actual work. How we know what we claim to know about the brain. Not another "your brain on X" airport book - the methods book underneath BookLab's usual ideas-first psychology lane. 288 pages. Published by Abrams Press.
- You want the lab, not the TED talk
- You liked Behave or Determined by Sapolsky
- You're suspicious of neuroscience headlines and want to see the methods
From the Stanford psychiatrist who wrote Dopamine Nation. The argument: anxiety, loneliness, boredom and shame grow from the same root - we can't tolerate uncertainty, so we try to control everything. Her answer is surrender: admitting willpower isn't enough, accepting a force bigger than yourself, and moving from mastery toward mystery. Built on her own experience of loss, plus neuroscience. It lands the same month Greene turns from strategy to awe at #01 - two authors arguing that more control isn't the answer. 272 pages. Published by Dutton.
- You read Dopamine Nation and wondered what comes after the detox
- You liked Four Thousand Weeks, limits accepted, not fought
- You suspect more willpower isn't the answer
In 1973, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia cut off oil to the United States, and the world found out how much of its prosperity ran through the Middle East. Broughton - former Telegraph correspondent, FT and Wall Street Journal writer, Harvard MBA - tells it through the people in the room: Faisal, oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Henry Kissinger and William Simon. Secret negotiations, diplomacy, violence. Read it next to Pal at #02: one shock that showed who really runs the economic operating system. 384 pages. Published by Simon & Schuster.
- You want geopolitics through one event, not a grand theory
- You liked Energy and Civilization or The Bitcoin Standard
- You want the backstory to every oil-price headline since 1973
A Japanese bestseller from 1983, in English for the first time. Toyama's claim: thinking is a skill you build on purpose, and piling up knowledge doesn't turn into wisdom by itself. He splits people into gliders, who only move when something tows them, and airplanes, who fly under their own power. The habits are slow on purpose - let ideas mature, sleep on problems, forget selectively. 272 pages. Published by Ten Speed Press.
- You liked Deep Work or The Shallows
- You take in a lot of information and want to do more with it
- You want an antidote to hustle culture that isn't another productivity system