10 new non-fiction books everyone should read for Summer 2026
Cool down in the shade this summer with our top picks of new non-fic and memoirs
This summer’s must-read non-fiction goes to a few intriguing places.
A binman in Montreal quotes Victor Hugo. An Amazon worker wants to change the world. And a journalist investigating online scams in Nigeria finds teenage boys with phones and night-time data plans.
Plus: the psychology of tennis, our new cloud overlords, a fresh lens on Hitchcock & heaps more.
Trash! A Garbageman’s Story (Simon Paré-Poupart)
Simon Paré-Poupart’s Trash! has really made us re-think our bin situation. His refreshing and brilliant memoir/treatise on life as a garbageman in Montreal has already become a best-seller in Canada. Why? Because he takes us right into the clanking truck, as he and his teammates run through the streets, hauling bags, recycling and food waste in sweaty heatwaves, ten feet of snow and just about everything in between. He captures the characters, the stigma, the smells, the men who turn up for a shift drunk or high and the brokers who exploit workers’ debts.
He also quotes and references Hugo, Balzac, Zola, David Graeber and poet Jacques Prevert as he considers how class, race, unions, conglomerates and the environment intersect with his chosen profession. Paré-Poupart went to university and worked for a while as a journalist and in offices before returning to this subculture. And at times he turns our dirty, stinking rubbish back on us to say: look at all your overconsumption. Pair Trash! with George Bass’ recent book What The Bouncer Saw. More working-class stories like these, please.
The Common Good Economy
The star economist Mariana Mazzucato has a book out and it’s a big picture argument full of positive, constructive strategies around rebuilding our economies to work for all citizens. Mazzucato has noted recently that Keir Starmer used her language about being a mission-driven government but couldn’t get it done. Here, she takes ideas from the history of political philosophy, indigenous knowledge and even biological ecosystems to construct her definition of what a ‘common good’ economy actually looks like. She then provides a detailed framework to help us actually get there. Mazzucato has worked with policymakers all around the world and her case studies range from Barcelona’s data commons and Camden’s public wealth funds to the Amazon Fund, the Seed Treaty and dynamic spillovers from school meals in Sweden.
A key principle informing Mazzucato’s toolkit is that policy can be used to *shape* markets, not just swoop in when they fail - firstly, by setting the direction for ‘good growth’ to align with bold, long-term priorities. Another, that we should aim for ‘pre-distribution’ of the benefits, securing it in public investments and procurement, since value is co-created by all sorts of workers and communities (not just private companies) and risks are taken on by various stakeholders, including the state, too. With climate change, healthcare and the future of AI on her mind, she argues for co-creation and participation (vs; collective learning and knowledge sharing, and vs; strong, wide IP and patents) and suggests how transparency and accountability could work in practice. Sign us up for a Mazzucato-planned world.
The Cruelest Game (Matthew Futterman)
Oof, being a top-tier tennis player sounds rough. This is a deeply reported, wonderfully insider-y book by veteran US sports writer Matthew Futterman, who’s currently at The Athletic. It’s full of conversations with Alcaraz, Sinner, Djokovic, Gauff and Osaka, at Grand Slams, in stadium tunnels and on practice courts. It’ll serve (...) readers best who already follow tennis but regardless, it’s perfectly timed as we move from one generation of sports stars to the next.
Futterman writes with drama and suspense about shot-making, ball striking and the body maintenance required for top ten athletes to pick up the trophies. But he’s particularly obsessed with the psychological side of things. He closes in on the minds of say, Świątek and Sabalenka - the toll, the tool-kits, the breaking points and light-bulb moments - all based on countless chats with players, coaches, therapists and family members. He also deploys conversations with legends like Federer, Agassi and even Björn Borg to illuminate what this current cohort is going through. So infectious, this will have you looking up the latest Tour dates late into the night.
The Yahoo Boys (Carlos Barragan)
Stories about internet scams tend to lean on dry stats, dollar amounts and anonymous victims. Carlos Barragan’s propulsive page-turner The Yahoo Boys couldn’t be more different. The Spanish journalist originally went to Lagos, Nigeria, to try to track down ‘Brian’, who romance-scammed Barragan’s unsuspecting mother, and whatever sophisticated operation was behind him. Instead, he ends up embedding with a bunch of young men in their teens and twenties, who stay up all night, chatting and sexting with lonely Americans, coming up with any excuse to ask for gift cards.
Barragan, and his fixer Bukola, take us right into the heady mix of the Ikotun neighbourhood, by focusing on four “Yahoo Boys”, their wild scams and everyday struggles. (Yep, that Yahoo - the name comes from the original email scams pre-social media.) Victims are ‘clients’, getting cards or Bitcoin from them is ‘cashing out’, copy-and-pasted scripts are ‘formats’ and the proceeds go on swag, gifts, hotels and bottle service. Barragan weaves Nigeria’s current inflation crisis, colonial history and spiritual ‘juju’ customs into the story, making clear just how much a couple of hundred dollars can get a Lagosian boy used to living in poverty. The Yahoo Boys often hand out money, drinks and food to neighbours and friends who can’t afford proper meals every time they ‘cash out’. Jaw-dropping stuff.
When The Revolution Comes (Chris Smalls)
A few years ago, we were standing at the back of a tent listening to a talk by writer Gary Younge when who rocks up but this undeniable superstar, radiating charisma, with sunglasses on and dripping in gold jewellery. Younge spotted the heads turning and shouted him out: it was Chris Smalls. He’s the guy who spear-headed the first ever Amazon warehouse union in the US, JFK8 in Staten Island in 2022, and his new book is all about making labour organising 1) cool as hell and 2) actually work for the people who need it most.
Smalls nicely blends the personal and the political throughout. It all just flows as he gets into stories of visiting his father in prison, playing sports and running from bullets then working a huge range of blue-collar jobs, putting on parties and even being functionally homeless at points. But the real juice is how it all started with a walkout against Amazon’s non-existent Covid safety policies, his Union Drip fits on Capitol Hill, the union busting, the in-fighting and, most importantly, the slog and grind of showing up with music and food day after day, getting signatures and battling million-dollar lawyers. Potent, inspiring stuff. Chris Smalls for president and we’re not even joking.
A British Childhood (Frank Cottrell-Boyce)
Frank Cottrell-Boyce has used his two years as Children’s Laureate going round the country with the charity BookTrust, championing reading in schools, libraries and prisons, and he’s come back with a lot of stories. He’s using this unique position - and book - to call for more attention to, and action on, what austerity has done to harm many kids’ day to day lives. There’s plenty to make you angry here: bed poverty, hygiene poverty, children not knowing how to ‘work’ a book, temporary accommodation and in one heart-breaking case in Barrow-in-Furness, a whole temporary, site-less primary school.
Cottrell-Boyce is a generous guide, corralling these stories with tales of his own upbringing, quotes from literary classics, thoughts on TV, YouTube and a nuanced take on riots. He also shines a light on some incredible teachers, carers, volunteers and librarians. Cottrell-Boyce is now squarely in the category of national treasure and so his anecdotes include delightful encounters such as a small girl coming up to him in Liverpool, reciting the Jabberwocky and then walking off. It’s a beautiful book. We’d quite like this to land on the desk of Lucy Powell, newly running education (and the new chancellor and housing ministers etc etc..)
The Polyester Book of (Bad) Taste (Ione Gamble)
This essay collection is such a joy. Put together by Ione Gamble, founding editor of ace feminist zine Polyester, we raced through it. Zarina Muhammad’s ‘Notes on Kitsch xoxo’ is outstanding: a whirling tour de force on avant garde vs kitsch art via cringey WhatsApps, Biedermeier decorative arts and.. a whole lot of other stuff. But there are no weak links here and with one-page scribbled lists, alt-mantras and drawings throughout, (Bad) Taste is full of fun, zine-y energy.
Tavi Gevinson looks at problematic faves, including one she dated. Kieran Yates takes us to Poundland. Gina Tonic hates poetry (or does she?). Annie Lord riffs on OTT glam and Nicola Dinan puts a nice spin on what the algorithms are feeding us. Gamble and her conspirators beautifully capture the spirit of the legend Diana Vreeland, who she quotes in one of her essays: “no taste is what I’m against”. Volume 2, when?
The Next Fix (Kojo Koram)
We picked this one up on the strength of Kojo Koram’s last book, the must-read Uncommon Wealth, and The Next Fix did not disappoint. Koram is a law professor at Loughborough University and if you get the chance to see him speak live, take it! Here, he manages to make a book about the past, present and near-future of drug policy reforms vital and human and fascinating. From an overdose prevention van in Glasgow to transitional justice for those affected by the ‘War on Drugs’ in Colombia, Koram travels around the world, modelling a curiosity-led open mind when it comes to all sorts of possible paths forward.
This isn’t a survey of the latest science, clinical trials and case studies. Instead, it’s a convincing argument around why — at a point when the legalisation of cannabis and psychedelics is becoming more mainstream, commoditised and financialised — we need drug policy reforms that work for everyone, including Ghanaian farmers, British patients and Americans with criminal records, i.e. not just Big Pharma and VC investors. An important book from an expert who sees the patterns clearly and offers an alternative roadmap for what’s next.
The Rulers (Cecilia Rikap)
Try saying this in Alex Turner’s voice: epistemic totalitarianism. Cecilia Rikap is an economics professor and head of research at UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose - working alongside Mazzucato (above). And in The Rulers, she methodically lays out how Big Tech — particularly the ‘cloud hegemons’ of Microsoft, Google and Amazon — wield control of satellite startups and other large corporations. Even OpenAI and Anthropic! ~Even 20th century mega-brands! In other words, large chunks of economies, via their intellectual monopolies and subordinated supply chains. Basically, everyone has already locked in to renting more and more cloud-picks-and-shovels forever, or else their data-gold and AI-gold will become worthless pretty quickly.
Back to those long words: epistemic totalitarianism refers to Rikap’s argument that Microsoft, Amazon and Google control what gets researched, published, prioritised and ignored in university AI departments and seemingly independent institutions via funding, dual-staffing, brand-building and partnerships. That means ethics and safety, too. She uses dozens of honest, anonymous industry insider accounts to illuminate her thoughts on AI and cloud chokepoints, panopticons, ‘bullshit innovation’, automation and sovereignty. If you thought Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism was terrifying, this is just as brutal. Required reading for anyone interested in tech policy and the future.
A Century of Hitchcock (Tony Lee Moral)
If you want a straight biography or critical analysis of filmography and craft, you can get those elsewhere: Tony Lee Moral has previously written four books on Alfred Hitchcock. No, this one’s for the real Hitch-heads. Because, while we do get rich detail on the director’s early cinema work, key collaborators and influence on subsequent auteurs, the bulk of A Century of... hones in on the ‘myths’ and ‘legacy’ of the subtitle. Specifically, Moral set himself the task of investigating and debunking the accounts of actress Tippi Hedren, who starred in The Birds and Marnie, as told to (and seemingly warped by) the late, sensationalist biographer Donald Spoto.
That’s because this one pairing of source and writer has clouded the reputation of the Master of Suspense since his death, despite family, friends and Hollywood dismissing it. Now, obviously, believe women. Hitchcock may have been ‘obsessed’ with making Hedren into his new Grace Kelly, kissed her in the back of a car, even ‘put his hands’ on her, as alleged: we’ll never know for sure. And all of Moral’s meticulous research into Hedren’s and Spoto’s motives, together with shifting memories and numerous other offences, that Hitchcock blocked Hedren from getting work or Oscar noms, could still stand. As readers, we can make up our own minds. The drama on the set of The Birds alone, which Moral colours in via many interviews with cast and crew, makes this one worth a read.
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