Runaway hits

Between the World and Me
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Structured as a letter to his teenage son, this slender, urgent volume is a searching exploration of what it is to grow up black in a country built on slave labour and “the destruction of black bodies”.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History
By Sven Beckert
In this ambitious and disturbing survey, Beckert takes us through every phase of a global industry that has relied on millions of miserably treated slaves, sharecroppers and millworkers to turn out its product.

H is for Hawk  
By Helen Macdonald
Macdonald, a poet, historian and falconer, renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence in this memoir. After the death of her father, she decides to raise a young goshawk, a brutal predator, in solitude.

The Invention of Nature:
Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
By Andrea Wulf
Wulf revives our appreciation of this ecological
visionary, reminding us of his insight: that the Earth is a single, interconnected organism.

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik
and the Massacre in Norway
By Asne Seierstad, translated by Sarah Death
In this masterpiece of reportage, Seierstad, a Norwegian journalist, explores the dark side of Scandinavia through the life and crimes of Anders Behring Breivik.

The Door
By Magda Szabo, translated by Len Rix
In Szabo’s haunting novel, a writer’s intense relationship with her servant teaches her more about people and the world than her long days spent alone, in front of her typewriter.

A Manual for Cleaning
Women: Selected Stories
By Lucia Berlin, edited by Stephen Emerson
This collection gathers 43 of Berlin’s stories, introducing her as a largehearted observer of life whose sympathies favour smart, mouthy women.

Outline 
By Rachel Cusk
Outline is a string of one-sided conversations. A divorced woman travelling in Greece, our narrator, talks to the people she meets, absorbing their stories of love and loss, deception, pride and folly.

The Story of the Lost Child
By Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein
Like the three books that precede it in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, this brilliant conclusion offers a clamorous exploration of female friendship set against a backdrop of poverty, ambition & violence.

The Sellout 
By Paul Beatty
This satire takes as its subject a young black man’s desire to segregate his local school and to reinstate slavery in his home — before careening off to consider almost 400 years of black survival in America.