By Sebastian Mallaby (2026)
Pages: 480, Final verdict: Must-read
Chess prodigies are common enough that we have a template for them: the brilliant, socially awkward child who masters the board and then struggles to find a second act. Demis Hassabis didn't follow any of that template. He...
Read more
By Covadonga O'Shea (2011)
Pages: 272, Final verdict: Great-read
How does a fashion company manage to sense a trend, design a garment, manufacture it, and deliver it to stores around the world in a matter of weeks?
(Almost) only Zara knows. They did this long before “fast...
Read more
By Stijn Bronzwaer, Merijn Rengers, Joris Kooiman (2022)
Pages: 370, Final verdict: Great-read
Ask someone on a Paris street where Instagram is from, and you will likely get a confident answer. Do the same for Spotify, and Sweden comes up quickly. Ask about Booking.com, and you'll...
Read more
By Anna Funder (2003)
Pages: 288, Final verdict: Great-read
East Germany no longer exists, but its stories are still present everywhere in Berlin if you know where to look. When Anna Funder moved here in the late 1990s, she found that the most revealing parts of the former GDR...
Read more
By Eva Dou (2025)
Pages: 448 , Final verdict: Great-read
This story has it all: UN sanctions, Deng Xiaoping, the Iraq war, the smartphone market, and Trump. A lot of Trump.
In House of Huawei, longtime Washington Post (and former Wall Street Journal) journalist Eva Dou pieces together the story...
Read more
By Marc Hijink (2024)
Pages: 426 , Final verdict: Great-read
Imagine a machine the size of a double-decker bus. It costs more than a Boeing 787, is built from over 100,000 precision-engineered parts, and can only be put together in a room that’s 1,000 times...
Read more
By Angela Merkel (2024)
Pages: 720 , Final verdict: Great-read
Angela Merkel is the longest-serving leader of a democratic nation in the 21st century, holding office for 16 years, from 2005 to 2021. In Freedom, her memoir, she reflects on her journey from an unlikely political outsider to one...
Read more
By Nuno Palma (2023)
Pages: 405, Final verdict: Must-read
Why do some countries become richer, and others don't? That is the question that economic historians—and not too many other people—obsess about.
Nuno Palma is one of those people. A Professor of Economics at the University...
Read more
By Hein de Haas (2023)
Pages: 464, Final verdict: Must-read
Migration is at the center of political discussions and public opinion. We hear about it constantly in the news, in political debates, and across social media feeds. But beneath the shouting matches and clickbait headlines, how much do we...
Read more
By Steven Levy (2007)
Pages: 286, Final verdict: Great-read
If you’ve ever owned one, you know: the iPod was special.
From 2001 to 2022, Apple sold more than 450 million of them. Along the way, it morphed from a music player into a social phenomenon. If you had...
Read more
