If you’re looking to make positive changes this year, these reads offer insight, motivation and clear steps toward building the life you want. Think of them as companions for the journey: encouraging, energising and full of ideas you can carry forward.
Reinforce new habits with
Implementing a new habit can be hard in the beginning, so the first book we recommend picking up in 2026 is from Sunday Times -bestselling author Oliver Burkeman.
While you may feel like you need to turn a completely new leaf right away – discarding the person you were in 2025 on 31 December – Oliver Burkeman shows us in Four Thousand Weeks embrace our limits rather than deny them.
Foster creativity with
Britain has always been a craft land. For generations what we made with our hands defined our identities, built our communities and shaped our regions. Craftland chronicles the vanishing skills and traditions that once governed every aspect of life on these shores.
A celebration of that deeply necessary connection between our creative instincts and the material world we inhabit, it reveals a richer and more connected way of living.
For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights.
Attention brings Anne Enright’s wide-ranging cultural criticism, literary and autobiographical writing together for the first time. In Enright’s fiction, speech can transform, rupture, enliven and liberate. In these essays, she speaks to us directly. Electrifying, probing and exuberant, this is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.
Encourage self-improvement with
Are you constantly worried about what people think of you, if they like you, if they’re mad at you?
In Are You Mad at Me? , Meg explodes the idea that people-pleasing is a personality trait, exposing it to be an instinct learned in childhood to become more appealing to a perceived threat in order to feel safe.
Meg will show you how to identify your needs, rethink conflict and build stronger connections: empowering you to stop focusing on what others think and start living for you.
When it comes to love why do we find things so difficult? Drawing on over forty years of candid and surprising conversations with his patients, Stephen Grosz asks, what gets in the way of our falling in love? And what must we do to stay there?
The labour of love is the work of a lifetime but in finally learning to see ourselves and our world clearly, we find we are truly ready to love one another.
Find inspiration and hope in
A captivating portrait of number-one bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis’s political awakening, told through the extraordinary lives of five women, and the West’s tumultuous history from 1924 to the present.
Through their lives, Varoufakis not only lays bare his own political soul, but confronts the dark forces of authoritarianism that still haunt Europe and beyond, reigniting hope in all of us that we can rise once more.
Sarah Perry's father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. 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. 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 grief: it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, and care and love.
PATRIOT by Alexei Navalny
The unforgettable life story of one of the most fearless and inspiring figures of our time.
A beacon to millions, Alexei Navalny became the sole political threat to Vladimir Putin. This is his life in his own words: his political awakening, his marriage and beloved family, his total commitment to taking on a corrupt regime and his enduring love of Russia and its people.
Patriot is as dramatic as Navalny’s life – and full of the passionate belief that good and freedom will prevail. It is an astonishingly positive account of a heroic life.
Improve your wellbeing with
From the world-leading gut scientist and no. 1 bestselling author of Food for Life, comes an introduction to the life-changing benefits of fermentation.
Drawing on his own cutting-edge research, and including practical tips for buying and making fermented foods, Tim demystifies the world of ferments, and introduces us to some of his favourites. He explores the extraordinary science of fermentation and the transformative role of microbes, in our kitchens and in our guts – and reveals why fermenting is the key to good food and good health.
Ferment is the perfect book for anyone who wants to eat better and feel better.
Learn something new with
For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has brought us here.
Information is not the raw material of truth, nor is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes and, in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.
