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This year hasn’t been a great one for the environment, so a book about the long history of environmental damage may be a hard sell. However, this isn’t just a litany of woe. It unpicks the ways environmental harms have been driven by social systems and individual mentalities. In doing so, it points the way to a better society: one that no longer wages war on nature. Michael Marshall
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Earlier this year, I brought Our Moon along on a trip to see that moon eclipse the sun. There are plenty of books about the moon, some grounded in science and others in poetry. Boyle’s combines both, weaving science, history and archaeological exploration into a lyrical portrait of the relationship between all life on Earth and its satellite. I felt that kinship with our moon when I watched it slowly block out the light and bring on the eerie hush of totality. Sophie Bushwick
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This is the tale of 9-year-old Max, in desperate need of a heart transplant, and Keira, a 9-year-old girl left with catastrophic injuries after a car crash and whose parents agreed that she would have wanted to be an organ donor. With great compassion, Clarke tells both of their stories in the lead up to the transplant of Keira’s heart that will save Max’s life. Also a history of the innovations that led to heart transplantation being possible, this book is beautifully written and completely heartbreaking, a testament to the generosity of the human spirit in the face of unbearable grief. Alison Flood
As a long-standing fan of Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, I greatly enjoyed this new posthumous work, released to celebrate the centenary in 2025 of the great conservationist’s birth. The title did make me raise an eyebrow, but I was soon won over by the many escapades with animals and the keen, amusing observations of behaviour from all species. Extracts from an unpublished new memoir that Durrell started, from letters to members of his family and from previous and unfinished books are tied together with notes from his widow Lee Durrell. As you read each section, you feel a little like an archaeologist uncovering the colourful sparkle of another fragment in the mosaic picture that is created of Durrell’s life. Chris Simms
This is the story of how DNA’s sister molecule RNA rose to prominence as a key player in fundamental biology and an indispensable tool for biotechnology. Just last month, , tiny pieces of RNA that regulate gene activity in animals and plants. This marks the second year running that RNA research has taken home the award, and in 2020 it also  as the driving force behind CRISPR gene editing. Cech’s book is a perfect explainer that captures the blend of serendipity and hard work behind this series of breakthroughs. Thomas Leslie
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There is plenty of heat and precious little light in the debate around whether social media and smartphones are bad for young people. It is why, in a world where we are increasingly regulating based on vibes, I recommend this book. Etchells is a realist, shying away from the easy analogies of dopamine hits and drug-like addiction and sticking to the science. Too often, “scientifically rigorous” means “boring”, but not in Etchells’s hands. The prose is pure pop science, but unlike many such books, it is rigorously researched. Chris Stokel-Walker
Teenagers work in mysterious ways. Or do they? In this book, psychologist Foulkes calmly reveals the rules and reasoning that drive many adolescents to behave the way they do. Punctuated by case study interviews, it is a deeply personal reminder of what it is like to go through this life change – and that while everyone has their own tale, there are common threads that unite them all. This is reassuring not only to parents, but also to the many adults who have been left hurt, confused or otherwise marked by their teenage experiences. Catherine de Lange
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For the past few years, pop culture has been obsessed with parallel worlds and alternate timelines – so thank God for a physicist’s handy guide to the real science behind the mind-bending concept of the multiverse. Halpern explains why ideas like the many-worlds interpretation might answer some of the biggest questions in physics. He is an entertaining writer with a knack for untangling tricky concepts and theories, while never shying away from the complexities that attract so many to this area of science. Bethan Ackerley
This is an excellent account of facial recognition tech and what it is doing – and will do – to our lives. In rollercoaster style, Hill tells the story of her investigation into Clearview AI, a facial recognition platform with a claimed 98.6 per cent accuracy rate, as she digs into its origins, is fobbed off and gets to know the company’s shadowy founders. A thrilling story with a frightening message about the inroads artificial intelligence is making into our lives. Alison Flood
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Laying out, minute by minute, what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear missile at the US, this is meticulously researched through interviews with military experts and scientists – and utterly terrifying. How would the US react to the attack? How would Russia react to the US’s reaction? Is there any way for the world to survive? Not in this scenario. This pick for our Â鶹´«Ă˝ Book Club should be a must-read for all. Alison Flood
This is a thought-provoking and, at times, shocking book by Layal Liverpool, who used to work at Â鶹´«Ă˝. Opening with the disparity in maternal mortality rates between Black and white women in the US, it lays out how health is harmed by pseudoscience and racial bias, from assumptions about higher pain thresholds that can be traced back to experiments on enslaved people to the controversial use of “race adjustments” in some medical test results. Interviews and personal anecdotes bring humanity to the studies and statistics, ensuring this has an emotional as well as scholarly heart. Eleanor Parsons
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I am fascinated by the human body and how each cell, tissue and organ works in tandem. Nowhere is this biological frontier more prevalent than when it comes to neuroimmunology, or the study of how the brain and the immune system interact. Lyman unravels this remarkable connection. He delves into how an overreactive immune system can contribute to mental health conditions, how the mind can make us more susceptible to infection and the ways in which we can strengthen our body’s defence system. It is one of the best popular health books I have read in the past few years. Grace Wade
It is undeniable that the world changed in November 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, though we are still wrestling with whether it was for good or ill. If you want to know how we got to this moment, look no further than this deeply reported book. Olson follows the story of OpenAI’s Sam Altman and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis on the road to developing their AI products, with fascinating insights along the way. Jacob Aron
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The Nobel laureate asks why we age in the first place, and looks into the cutting-edge science that is being done to extend the human lifespan. As someone who “works in molecular biology, but has no real skin in the game” when it comes to research on ageing, he is the perfect guide to this booming area, also interrogating the important question of what it will mean for us all if people start living longer. Alison Flood
Amid the climate gloom, Ritchie provides a ray of hope, arguing that we are far from doomed. From climate change to air pollution, we know how to solve almost all of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. In many cases, change is well under way. This is a deliberately upbeat take on a huge problem and Ritchie’s enthusiasm for the challenge is infectious. Madeleine Cuff
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Starting half a billion years ago, when Earth’s waters were full of trilobites, Scales tells the story of our oceans and the animals that live there, from orcas to emperor penguins. Scales writes like a dream and makes an impassioned call to protect our seas and coastlines, inviting readers to share in her love for the oceans. As she puts it: “Living together on this blue planet, we are all ocean people.” Alison Flood
If you were looking for a book celebrating the extraordinary powers of plants, look no further than this. If you weren’t looking for such a book, you really ought to be. Plants can learn and memorise information, they can summon predators to come to their aid, they can communicate with each other. And don’t get me started on their sex lives – there is enough variation and intrigue in plant sex to satisfy anyone. Plants, you will learn from this expansive and beautiful book, have a form of intelligence, even consciousness, that, until recently, we would have been unwilling to even consider. Rowan Hooper
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I am obsessed with the hidden world of supply chains and logistics, so this book was a real treat. Twilley details how the chilly tendrils of refrigeration infiltrated the world to transform both our diets and our societies – well, at least in richer nations, because the benefits of cold aren’t evenly distributed. You will learn the history of keeping food cold, which started as an expensive novelty viewed with suspicion by the masses, along with what it takes to work in the Arctic temperatures that keep our food fresh. Jacob Aron
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As an evolutionary biologist, I was raised on a diet of selfish genes and cutthroat competition. But life is much more than that. It is about cooperation and symbiosis as much as it is about fighting and cheating. This book restores cooperation to its rightful place in the evolutionary story. Cooperation is still driven by selfish genes, from the origin of life to the evolution of complex ecosystems. Fascinating and timely, this is a survey across all of biology – a history of ideas – and it tells how the story of life is one of teamwork from the gene level upwards. Rowan Hooper
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I judged the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize this year, and the Weinersmiths’s hilarious and brilliant look at the reality of living on Mars was our winner. The authors lay out all the reasons why a Martian colony would be a bad call, from the complexities of having space kids, to just how awful life would be as an indentured worker on Mars. They even make space law fascinating. And there are cartoons! Alison Flood
Â鶹´«Ă˝ book club
Love reading? Come and join our friendly group of fellow book lovers. Every six weeks, we delve into an exciting new title, with members given free access to extracts from our books, articles from our authors and video interviews.
