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Non-Fiction & Biography February 2026 |
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Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour
by Mark Haddon
An unflinching, brilliantly written, darkly funny, lavishly illustrated memoir by the acclaimed author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time A ringing testament about how one artist sees the world, and how his experiences have shaped his vision Tender, addictive, informative and unlike anything elseand brilliantly illustrated. It's a gem. Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry Simultaneously heart-breaking and hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult. His parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least he had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham. Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It's about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It's about family. It's about knickerbocker glories and heart surgery, about papier m ch and mental breakdown and great white sharks. It's about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. It's richly illustrated throughout with images from the author's childhood, some of them altered in unforgiveable ways. As bracing as it is embracing, Leaving Home is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does.
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The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future
by Stephen E. Hanson
What if the state as we know it didn't exist? Our air would be poisonous, our votes uncounted, and our markets dysfunctional. Yet across the world, in countries as diverse as Hungary, Israel, the U.K., and the U.S., attacks on the modern state and its workforce are intensifying. They are morphing into power grabs by self-aggrandizing politicians who attempt to seize control of the state for themselves and their cronies. What replaces the modern state once it is fatally undermined is not the free market and the flowering of personal liberty. Instead, the death of government agencies organized under the rule of law inevitably leads to the only realistic alternative: the rule of men.In The Assault on the State, political scientists Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein offer an impassioned plea to defend modern government against those who seek to destroy it. They dissect the attack on the machinery of government from its origins in post-Soviet Russia to the core powers of Western democracy. The dangers of state erosion imperil every aspect of our lives. Hanson and Kopstein outline a strategy that can reverse this destructive trend before humanity is plunged back into the pathological personalistic politics of premodern times.Also available as an audiobook.
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Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
by Karen Hao
From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy. When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong? Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the compute power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans cleaning up that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations? Spoiler alert: it didn't. Armed with Microsoft's billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history--toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry--Altman's sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn't just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too--as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they're the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we've seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.
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Don't Think about Dinner: Save Time and Money with 125+ Easy, Nourishing, Delicious Recipes for Every Meal
by Jenn Lueke
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Save time, money, and energy with strategic meal planning, grocery lists, and kitchen prep. With over 125 recipes, Don't Think About Dinner eliminates decision fatigue and makes healthy living effortless, delicious, and even fun Whether you want to improve your health, cut down food waste (and spending), reduce your mental load, or build new kitchen skills, Don't Think About Dinner provides everything you need to confidently approach every meal of the day--from shopping and stocking the pantry to storing and reheating leftovers, and everything in between.As a college student, Jenn was struggling with health problems and tired of quick-fix healthy recipes that relied on obscure, expensive ingredients that often spoiled before she could finish them. Overwhelmed and frustrated, she felt further from her health goals. So, she made a plan. Or rather, a list--filled with plants and proteins, plus simple recipes to make the most of them. This became the framework for her hugely successful business--and transformed her life.In this engaging, cleverly organized book, Jenn expands on the content that has captivated millions of devoted follows. Unlike a typical cookbook, this comprehensive handbook offers strategies, tools, tips, meal plans, and more, plus over 125 delicious recipes. Jenn includes a wide range of adaptable dishes that suit any vibe, budget, or dietary need, from breakfast and lunch to appetizers, dinner, drinks, snacks, and desserts, including: Goat Cheese and Kale High-Protein Egg Muffins, a quick, satisfying reheatable breakfastBarbecue Chicken Chopped Salad, more filling and budget-friendly than the one from your favorite food chainStreet Corn-Inspired Shrimp Skillet, a high-protein dinner done in 30 minutesSheet Pan Butternut Squash Mac and Cheese, a delicious, plant-powered wonderFudgy Sweet Potato Brownies--so good you'll forget about the box mix Don't Think About Dinner is designed to streamline the way you cook and think about your meals. With a fully stocked kitchen and plan in place, you'll be amazed at how much easier it is to cook nourishing, budget-conscious, standout meals.
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Chetna's 30 Minute Indian: Quick and Easy Everyday Meals
by Chetna Makan
Chetna Makan's bestselling cookbooks combine her creative flavour twists with a love of simple Indian home cooking. Taking inspiration from the eclectic tastes of Indian cuisine, these tempting recipes can all be on the table and ready to eat in less than 30 minutes. Featuring fabulous salads, traditional fast snacks, imaginative toppings for toasts, delicious dals, comforting veggie, fish and meat curries, all-in-one rice dishes, surprising raitas and dips as well as indulgent desserts, there are speedy options for every occasion. With brilliantly useful meal plans included, dishes can be enjoyed on their own or paired together and cooked quickly for an easy feast to enjoy with friends. No complicated methods, just delicious, vibrant and varied food that the whole family can enjoy every single night of the week and in little to no time at all.--Provided by publisher.
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A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness
by Michael Pollan
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The New York Times, TIME, and Oprah Daily From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, a panoptic exploration of consciousness--what it is, who has it, and why--and a meditation on the essence of our humanity When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact that we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature's greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, when we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives--scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic--to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life. When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy gray matter could generate a subjective point of view--assuming that the brain is the source of our perceived reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to plant neurobiologists searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants, scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness. In Pollan's dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with the world and our deepest selves.
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Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster
by Jacob Soboroff
A gripping, unshakeable firsthand account (San Francisco Chronicle) of the firestorm that consumed Los Angeles, from the reporter who covered the fires on the ground as an LA native.On the morning of January 7, 2025, a message pinged the phone of Jacob Soboroff, a national reporter for MS NOW. Big Palisades fire. We are evacuating, his brother texted within minutes of the blaze engulfing the hillside behind his home. Jacob rushed to the office of the bureau chief. I should go. I grew up in the Palisades.Soon he was on the front line of the blaze--his first live report of what would turn out to be weeks covering unimaginable destruction, from both the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire, in Altadena. In the days to come, Soboroff appeared across the networks of NBC News as Los Angeles was ablaze, met with displaced residents and workers, and interviews Governor Gavin Newsom on Meet the Press. But no story Soboroff had previously covered at home or abroad could prepare him for reporting live as the hallmarks of his childhood were engulfed in flames around him while his hometown burned to the ground.But for Soboroff, questions remained. How could it have happened? Is it inevitable something like it will happen again? This set Soboroff off on months of reporting--with firefighters, fire victims, political leaders, academics, earth scientists, wildlife biologists, meteorologists and more--that made him keenly aware that the 2025 Los Angeles fires were not an isolated tragedy. They are a harbinger--the fire of the future, in the words of one senior emergency--management official.Firestorm is the story of the costliest wildfire in American history, the people it affected, and the deeply personal connection to one journalist covering it. It is a love letter to Los Angeles, a yearning to understand the fires, and why America's new age of disaster we are living through portends that--without a reckoning of how Los Angeles burned--there is more yet, and worse, to come.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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