Women's Non-Fiction 2026

In 2000, a Chinese woman gave birth to twins in a bamboo grove, trying to avoid detection by the government because she already had two daughters. Two years later, an American couple travelled to Shaoyang to adopt a Chinese toddler they thought had been abandoned.Their understanding had been that China's brutal one-child policy was leading to hundreds of abandoned girls, desperate for the care of adopted parents. What they didn't know — and what award-winning journalist Barbara Demick uncovered in 2007, while working as a correspondent in Beijing — was that their daughter had been snatched from her beloved family and her identical twin. Under China's one-child policy, hundreds of poor Chinese families were giving up their children due to soaring fines and threats of violence. More sinister still, international demand for adoptees was skyrocketing, and local officials were forcibly seizing children and trafficking them to orphanages that were selling them abroad.Daughters of the Bamboo Grove tells the gripping story of separated twins, their respective fates in China and the USA, and Barbara Demick's role in reuniting them against huge odds. Painting a rich portrait of China's history and culture, it asks questions about the roots, impact and consequences of China's one-child policy, the ethics of international adoption, and, ultimately, the assumptions and narratives we hold about the quality of lives lived in the East and the West.

Cast in a feature film at the age of eighteen, Jenny Evans was on the cusp of something extraordinary; a route out of her hometown, a future of promise. But the new world she was exploring crumbled around her when she was assaulted at a party by a high-profile figure.Jenny reported this crime to the police when she became aware of other allegations of violence against The Famous Man. Shortly after doing so, details of what she had experienced were printed in a tabloid newspaper.Jenny trained as a journalist herself to try to find out how this happened. In the aftermath of devastation, she picked up the pieces and fought back against the systems that caused her harm. Her investigation helped expose the jaw-dropping press abuse and police corruption we now call the 'phone-hacking scandal'. Now training as a lawyer, Jenny is still working to fight for justice in a system that so horrifically fails its victims.Don't Let it Break You, Honey is a personal, fiercely compelling account of power — who holds it, who wields it, who is silenced in the process. It asks urgent questions about fame, justice, and the institutions we have no choice but to trust, while offering, above all, hope.Because this is, above all, a story about resilience. About finding your voice when the world wants to silence you. And refusing to let them win.

In the early hours of dawn in Amsterdam, Deepa Paul rises from her boyfriend’s bed. She gets dressed, slips away with a kiss and cycles home, where she is welcomed into the arms of her husband, whose contentment is mellow alongside her own. There isn’t a glimmer of shame, deception or guilt, only the honesty and compassion needed to make this kind of life possible — even if it wasn’t always this easy.You might have questions. Whose idea was it? What are the rules? Are you ever jealous? In this memoir, Deepa offers her answers openly and tenderly, as she explores the truth to questions of her own. Can I ask for what I want, and still honour the life I have chosen? Do I deserve it? Is it worth it?Unexpectedly relatable and joyfully vibrant, this is one woman’s story of discovering her own desires and how to liberate them, of shifting identities from mother to lover and back again, and of finding the courage to ask for the marriage she wanted, beyond the marriage she had.One question at a time.

When the Inter-Continental Kabul opened in 1969, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel symbolised a dream of a modernising country connected to the world.More than fifty years on, the Inter-Continental is still standing. It has endured Soviet occupation, multiple coups, a grievous civil war, a US invasion and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban. History lives within its scarred windows and walls.Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, has been checking into the Inter-Continental since 1988. And here, she uses its story to craft a richly immersive history of modern Afghanistan.It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper who still holds fast to his Inter-Continental training from the hotel’s 1970s glory days—an era of haute cuisine and high fashion, when Afghanistan was a kingdom and Kabul was the ‘Paris of Asia’. It is the story of Abida, who became the first female chef to cook in the Inter-Con’s famous kitchen after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And it is the story of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-something staff who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy—only to witness the Taliban roaring back in 2021.The result is a remarkably vivid history of how Afghans have survived a half century of destruction and disruption.The story of a hotel. The story of a nation. It is the story of a hotel but also the story of a people.

A groundbreaking exposé showing how the arts—alongside diet, sleep, exercise and nature—are the forgotten fifth pillar of health.From cradle to grave, engaging in the arts has remarkable effects on our health and well-being. Music supports the architectural development of children’s brains. Artistic hobbies help our brains to stay resilient against dementia. Dance and magic tricks build new neural pathways for people with brain injuries. Arts and music act like drugs to decrease depression, stress, and pain, reducing our dependence on medication. Going to live music events, museums, exhibitions, and the theater decreases our risk of future loneliness and frailty. Engaging in the arts improves the functioning of every major organ system in the body, even helping us to live longer.This isn’t sensationalism; it’s the result of decades of study, gathering data from neuroimaging, molecular biomarkers, wearable sensors, cognitive assessments, and electronic health records. Written by Professor Daisy Fancourt, director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Arts and Health, this book will fundamentally change the way you value and engage with the arts in your daily life and give you the tools to optimize how, when, and what arts you engage in to achieve your health goals. The arts are not a luxury in our lives. They are essential.

Our laws and justice system might touch our lives when we have an accident, a wrong is done to us, or we have a family difficulty. They are vast, ancient and cover everything from the personal to the regulation of our government. But to most of us, they are a web of intimidating institutions and practices.Lady Hale — an inspirational figure admired for her historic achievements and activism — shows us how the law is on our side. Taking us into the complexities of real courts and real decisions, we see that we all have schoolchildren, disabled people, workers, minorities and patients.Here are true stories from every part of the justice system, from lowly benefits tribunals and magistrates’ courts to the lofty heights of the Royal Courts of Justice and the Old Bailey; stories about the dilemmas of deciding what is right and just, and which invite you to say where justice lies before knowing what the courts decided. We see first-hand how the people whose needs the law is designed to protect actually experience it.With the Law on Our Side is a citizen’s guidebook to the law in our land, a top-to-bottom tour with a supremely expert guide. In captivating stories, it tells us what the law is about, how it works and most importantly why we should all care about it.Told through captivating real cases in real courts, the former President of the Supreme Court leads us on a deeply entertaining and vitally important top-to-bottom tour of the law in our land.EndorsementsLonglisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction 2026'A principled, timely and vital reminder of why justice matters' — Philippe Sands'Accessible, forensic and breathtakingly humane' — Shami Chakrabarti'Brenda Hale is a national treasure. If this country made any sense, we'd make this book part of the syllabus' — Ian Dunt

The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only ‘grand’ hotel on the city’s bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. It has a darker history, too. During one short period, it became a focus for some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history.In the 1930s the Hotel Lutetia attracted intellectuals and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, who met here with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service — and the centre of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich. In 1945, the Lutetia was requisitioned once more, this time transformed into a reception centre for deportees returning from concentration camps.Hotel Exile is about what happens on the edges of a war. At its heart are three groups of people connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology which dictates the course of their lives.A meeting place for Europe’s bohemian artists. A headquarters of the Nazi occupation. A shelter for camp survivors. This is the true story of how one Paris hotel came to hold the weight of a century.

A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces the complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer.Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”“Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.” And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today.With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.

When Lea Ypi discovers that a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Italian Alps in 1941 has been posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with deeply unsettling questions. Growing up, she had been told all records of her grandmother’s youth were destroyed “when the police came and took everything” in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan, glamorous newlyweds while World War II was raging in the background.What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past as we are transported to the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy in Salonica, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans, through secret police archives and muddied memories. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi? If her family lived in the Ottoman Empire, why did she speak French? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and meet a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And, above all, why was she smiling in the winter of 1941? All these questions were also asked by the Albanian secret police.As much a sweeping story about lost worlds as it is a philosophical inquiry, Indignity shows what it is like to make choices against the tide of history. Through reports of communist spies, court depositions, anecdotes and characters that live on in Ypi’s memory, we move between "now" and "then", fact and fiction, what we learn from archives and what we can imagine, to reckon with the injustices of the past.By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity is a meditation on the fragility of truth, both personal and political. Ultimately, Ypi asks, with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations? And what do we really know about the people closest to us?

In her first play, the now-classic A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry introduced the lives of ordinary African Americans into our national theatrical repertory. Now, Hansberry tells her own life story in an autobiography that rings with the voice of its creator.

'Judith Mackrell has done an incredible job in bringing to life the stories of these two great artists' - Anthony D’Offay'This is a must read . . . a deeply moving account of a family bursting with talent' - Anne SebbaIn Artists, Siblings, Visionaries, acclaimed biographer Judith Mackrell turns her attention to British brother and sister artists Gwen and Augustus John.In many ways they were polar opposites. Augustus was the larger of the two; vivid, volatile and promiscuous, he was a hero among romantics and bohemians, celebrated as one of the great British talents of his generation.As a woman, Gwen's place in the art world was much smaller, and her private way of working and reserved nature meant it was only long after her death that her tremendous gifts were fully acknowledged. But her temperament was as turbulent as her brother's. She formed passionate attachments to men and woman, including a long affair with the sculptor Rodin.And there were other ways in which the two Johns were remarkably alike, as Mackrell vividly reveals. The result is a powerful portrait of two prodigiously talented artists and visionaries, whose experiments with form and colour created some of the most memorable work of the early twentieth century.

Sarah Perry's father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he'd been a healthy and happy man. He loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was.Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home, eventually with the help of carers and visiting nurses. They bathed, cleaned, and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, and prayed with him.Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives.Death of an Ordinary Man is an unforgettable account of this universal aspect of life. It is not a book about death; it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, care, and love.

Zakia Sewell is on a quest for another Britain. Traversing the length and breadth of our island from Somerset to Scotland, she's seeking out a different story — one that lies beyond divisive national myths and symbols.In Finding Albion, Zakia uncovers an alternative spirit of Britain that is vividly alive today. It is found in otherworldly folk songs, ancient legends, Celtic seasonal rites and mystic stone circles that punctuate our landscape. Her journey begins as the sun rises on the spring equinox over Glastonbury Tor, where she meets neopagans reclaiming traditions from our pre-Christian past. At summer's peak, at Notting Hill Carnival, she hears cultural echoes that were carried along the slave trade routes from the Caribbean. On All Hallows' Eve she encounters the ghosts of Empire that are still haunting the nation, and in the depths of a Cornish winter she asks if today's new folk revival could unite our increasingly divided country?Finding Albion brings a hopeful story of Britain out from the shadows, giving us a deeper sense of who we are, and heralding the promise of a brighter future.

A mind-expanding exploration of how trees learned to shape our world by manipulating the elements, other species, and even humankind, possessing agency beyond anything we might have imaginedFor a supposedly stationary life form, trees have demonstrated an astonishing mastery over the environment around them. They've been using fire since prehistoric times. Some tree species have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure their fruits reach large primates, who can spread their seeds over vast distances, while poisoning smaller and less useful mammals. Others can split solid rock and create fertile ground in barren landscapes, effectively building entire ecosystems from scratch.In The Genius of Trees, tree scientist Harriet Rix reveals the inventive ways trees sculpt their environment and explains the science of how they achieve these incredible feats. Taking us on an awe-inspiring journey through deep history and across the globe, Rix restores trees to their rightful position not as victims of our negligence, but as ingenious, stunningly inventive agents in a grand ecological narrative.Trees manipulate fundamental elements, other species, and even humankind to achieve their ends, as seen with oaks in Devon, UK, which shape ecosystems through root networks and fungi; trees in Amedi, Iraq, that can change sex as they reach a certain age; the laurel rainforests of the Canary Islands, which regulate water cycles; and metasequoias in California that influence microclimates.A recent surprise showed that trees have an even greater role in preventing global warming: trees that were thought to produce methane actually consume it. We share one world with trees and the same need for survival.This eye-opening journey into the inner lives of nature’s most powerful plant is a profoundly new and original way of understanding both the miracles trees perform and the glories of our natural world.

It wasn't a car crash, but there was a collision. He fell from the third floor. At the age of twenty-two, Grace Spence Green's spine was broken at the fourth thoracic vertebra, and her life changed tracks. One day, she was in hospital supporting patients, the next she was one. To Exist As I Am traces Grace's journey back to the wards and back to herself. Through her extraordinary story, she asks how we might fight for change, and shift how we think about disability — while joyously embracing life exactly as we are.

Dear stranger. Are you home? Do you feel at home? For how much longer?Across the world the number of refugees and exiles, the dispossessed and displaced, the politically homeless and the economically excluded is growing. In the decade since she left her own home, Ece Temelkuran has been a political Cassandra, warning those convinced it couldn’t happen in their country that fascism is coming.Now, as oppression spreads and temperatures rise – as we face competing crises and learn, again and again, that no institution is so concrete it can’t turn to dust, and no home is too strong to be destroyed – she has written Nation of Strangers: a series of letters from one stranger to another.Politically attuned and deeply personal, this extraordinary, heartening correspondence is a gift to treasure in uncertain times. As poetic as it is precise, it is a book for anyone who feels alienated by an ever-more monstrous world. It shows how, as we all become strangers, our home will depend on the strength we find with one another.EndorsementsLonglisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction.‘Her most ambitious and dazzling book yet’ — Brian Eno‘Perhaps the most urgent and necessary book of our times’ — Michael Morpurgo‘Ece Temelkuran is a brilliant thinker’ — Omar El Akkad