Michael Finkel

The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
Michael Finkel

One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first century: the story of the world’s most prolific art thief, Stéphane Breitwieser.

In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, the best-selling author of The Stranger in the Woods brings us into Breitwieser’s strange world—unlike most thieves, he never stole for money, keeping all his treasures in a single room where he could admire them.

For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years—in museums and cathedrals all over Europe—Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.

In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel brings us into Breitwieser’s strange and fascinating world. Unlike most thieves, Breitwieser never stole for money. Instead, he displayed all his treasures in a pair of secret rooms where he could admire them to his heart’s content. Possessed of a remarkable athleticism and an innate ability to circumvent practically any security system, Breitwieser managed to pull off a breathtaking number of audacious thefts. Yet these strange talents bred a growing disregard for risk and an addict’s need to score, leading Breitwieser to ignore his girlfriend’s pleas to stop—until one final act of hubris brought everything crashing down.

This is a riveting story of art, crime, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.

Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home
Susan Hill


This is a year of reading from home, by one of Britain's most distinguished authors.

Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time.

The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again.

A book which is left on a shelf for a decade is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, packed with the potential to burst into new life. Wandering through her house that day, Hill's eyes were opened to how much of that life was stored in her home, neglected for years.

'Howards End is on the Landing' charts the journey of one of the nation's most accomplished authors as she revisits the conversations, libraries and bookshelves of the past that have informed a lifetime of reading and writing.

All the Living and the Dead
Hayley Campbell

A compelling and compassionate exploration of the death industry and the people—embalmers, detectives, crime scene cleaners, executioners—who work in it and what led them there.

Embarking on a three-year trip across the US and the UK, journalist Hayley Campbell—inspired by her longtime fascination with death, thanks to a childhood surrounded by her father’s Jack the Ripper cartoons—met with a variety of professionals in the death industry to see how they work.

Along the way, Campbell encountered funeral directors, embalmers, a man who dissects cadavers for anatomy students, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending 62 lives. She sat in a van with old gravediggers who have already dug their own graves. She raked out bones and ash with a man who works in a crematorium. She dressed a dead man for his coffin, held a brain at an autopsy, visited a cryonics facility in Michigan, and went for late-night Chinese with a homicide detective. Through Campbell’s prodding, reverent interviews with these people who see death every day, Campbell pieces together the psychic jigsaw to ask: Why would someone choose a life of working with the dead? Does being so near to lifeless bodies alter your perspective? Does an antidote to the fear of death exist?

A dazzling work of cultural criticism, All the Living and the Dead weaves together reportage with memoir, history, and philosophy, to offer readers a fascinating look into the psychology of Western death. And in the vein of Caitlin Doughty and Mary Roach, Campbell sharply investigates her—and our—own fascinations and fears through her encounters with this series of extraordinary people.

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
John Vaillant



A stunning account of a colossal wildfire that collided with a city and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

Fire has been a partner in our evolution for millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.

With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation that modern forest fires wreak, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. His urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.

I, Tina
Tina Turner

The popular recording star recounts her modest beginnings, her rise to fame with Ike Turner, the heartaches of disappointment that led her to strike out on her own, and her sweep of the Grammy Awards in 1985

Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future
Oliver Franklin-Wallis

An award-winning investigative journalist takes a deep dive into the global waste crisis, exposing the hidden world that enables our modern economy — and finds out the dirty truth behind a simple what really happens to what we throw away?

In Wasteland , journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis takes us on a shocking journey inside the waste industry—the secretive multi-billion dollar world that underpins the modern economy, quietly profiting from what we leave behind. In India, he meets the waste-pickers on the front line of the plastic crisis. In the UK, he journeys down sewers to confront our oldest—and newest—waste crisis, and comes face-to-face with nuclear waste. In Ghana, he follows the after-life of our technology and explores the global export network that results in goodwill donations clogging African landfills. From an incinerator to an Oklahoma ghost-town, Franklin-Wallis travels in search of the people and companies that really handle waste—and on the way, meets the innovators and campaigners pushing for a cleaner and less wasteful future.

With this mesmerizing, thought-provoking, and occasionally terrifying investigation, Oliver Franklin-Wallis tells a new story of humanity based on what we leave behind, and along the way, he shares a blueprint for building a healthier, more sustainable world—before we’re all buried in trash.