Sophie Bakalar

A novel of a clerk who rewrites history under a totalitarian state that watches all.

A novel of a feudal space empire fighting over a desert planet and its spice.

A novel of a planned Ohio suburb upset by the arrival of an artist and her daughter.

Greek myths retold, from Pandora's box to Prometheus's fire.

The Norse myths retold, with Odin and the other major gods of the northern pantheon.

A British nurse in 1945 walks through a standing stone into the Scotland of 1743.

A novel of a sixteen-year-old's days alone in New York after his school expels him.

A novel of a rich man of unknown origin on Long Island and the woman he wants back.

In the post-apocalyptic nation of Panem, sixteen-year-old Katniss fights to survive.

A novel of the quest to destroy a ring of power that corrupts all who use it.

A novel of nine people whose lives are bound up with trees and their defence.

A novel in which a scientist answers an alien warning and invites first contact.

Musk's life from South Africa and PayPal to running SpaceX and Tesla at once.

Leonardo's life read through his notebooks, where art and science were one pursuit.

Comic essays on a life from a Raleigh childhood to drink- and drug-filled college.

Theodore Roosevelt's life from his birth in 1858 to the presidency in 1901.

The 1893 Chicago World's Fair: its architect, and a serial killer working beside it.

Subtitled 'Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers'

Build, measure, learn: test what customers want with small experiments.

A step-by-step guide to finding customers, a market and product-market fit.

Why startups should build something new and own a small market before growing.

Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths translate classical computer science results — optimal stopping, explore/exploit tradeoffs, scheduling — into guidance for human decisions. The 37% rule for when to stop searching and commit is the most cited single insight.

Why some forecasts succeed and most fail, from weather to earthquakes and economics.

How scientists came to know what they know, from cosmology and geology to biology.

Einstein's life and science, from the Bern patent office to relativity.

How Google hired and managed smart creatives, people who can't be told what to do.

Why few women reach senior roles, and what women and firms can do about it.

Why well-run firms lose to cheaper, worse products that enter at the market's bottom.

The history and revival of psychedelic research, and the author's own trips.

Investigations into Ebola and other African viruses, their strains and outbreaks.

A method for finding the few activities that matter and dropping the rest.

Tim Ferriss's book belongs on a personal-finance list not for its investment advice but for its income argument: the fastest way to reach financial independence may be redesigning how and where you work rather than cutting spending to the bone. The 'new rich' framework is deliberately provocative, and the specific tactics age poorly, but the income-side case remains underweighted in most FIRE writing.

The habit loop of cue, routine and reward, and how to change a habit by its routine.

A journalist learns memory techniques and wins the US Memory Championship.

How timing, culture and accumulated advantage explain exceptional success.

Kahneman's synthesis of behavioral economics is the cognitive science underpinning every negotiation tactic. Anchoring, loss aversion, framing effects, and the planning fallacy — understanding why these biases operate, not just that they exist, makes you harder to exploit and more honest about your own irrationality.

Tech firms' puzzle interview questions, and whether they pick good hires.

A fable of a failing executive team and a five-level model of what goes wrong.

FBI hostage-negotiation tactics: labelling, mirroring and calibrated questions.

Marketing happens in the buyer's mind: find an open position there and own it.

A four-step model for habit-forming products: trigger, action, reward, investment.

Numbered rules of English usage and composition, with examples, under 100 pages.