Is a River Alive?
Robert Macfarlane Penguin (2026)
Switch off your headlamp in Ecuador’s Los Cedros cloud forest and the darkness begins to glow. The fallen branches and tree stumps shine a soft yellow-silver, lit by webs of fungus beneath the forest floor. It’s an arresting opening to writer Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? — a slim, lyrical book that revisits an old question with fresh urgency. His answer is a clear, resounding yes.
Macfarlane follows three threatened rivers: the Río Los Cedros in Ecuador’s cloud forest, under pressure from gold mining; the creeks of Chennai, India, where waters, alive with bird life at their source, become polluted as they approach the city; and Mutehekau Shipu (the Magpie River) in Quebec, Canada, which has been granted legal personhood by local governments.
I didn’t expect a book on water to breathe life into my own vocation. I have spent my career as a space environmentalist arguing that Earth’s orbit is not a void but a fragile ecosystem — a shared commons that we are filling, fragmenting and abandoning, in exactly how, as Macfarlane shows, we treat rivers. This book reinforced my belief that stewardship begins not with measurement, but with the decision to grant a thing its aliveness: to treat it as kin. — Moriba Jah
My Head for a Tree
Martin Goodman Profile (2025)
Would you give your life to save a tree? Probably not. But you might be surprised to know that there are people in India who would. This book opens in 1730, with a striking account of members of the Bishnoi community embracing trees marked for felling and being killed by soldiers of the Maharajah of Jodhpur. Their extraordinary sacrifice stems from the teachings of their guru, Jambhoji, whose 29 principles — many centred on living in harmony with nature — still guide the community.
The Bishnoi people invited writer Martin Goodman to tell their story — a privilege he does not take lightly. He entwines centuries-old episodes with present-day experiences, showing how the Bishnoi’s conservation ethic has endured.
There are tensions, of course. As one member of the community puts it: “I work in agriculture. I have a petrol pump. And I do social service. Service for animals and khejri trees.” It’s a reminder that the Bishnoi relationship with nature is not simple or pure, but a blend of conservation and compromise.
What relevance does this chronicle of a community have in today’s world? It provides a glimmer of hope — and inspiration to act. — Seema Mundoli
The Power of Life
Jessica Riskin Riverhead (2026)
There’s a story many of us learnt at school: that Jean‑Baptiste Lamarck, the French Enlightenment naturalist who preceded Charles Darwin with a theory of evolution through inheritance, was a misguided thinker who believed that giraffes stretched their necks into existence by reaching for ever-higher leaves on the trees of the savannah.
Although Lamarck was among the first people to use the term biology, the central dogma of the field is a repudiation of his evolutionary ideas in favour of the Darwinian model: genetic information flows only from DNA to RNA, and from there to the proteins that form our bodies. A person’s behaviour, in other words, can have no effect on the genetic make-up of their descendants. If this all sounds right, prepare for Riskin to upend your world.
In this entertaining and richly researched book, she doesn’t just give us a long-overdue biography of a towering figure; she also sheds light on the ideological battles that smuggled eugenics and Christian doctrine into the heart of evolutionary theory.
Her argument, and Lamarck’s, is quietly radical: that life is not merely shaped by external forces, but is actively, continuously involved in its own making. Experiments on artificial intelligence have put me in their corner. — Blaise Agüera y Arcas
Living Medicine
Fred Appelbaum Mayo Clinic Press (2023)
Each year, around 22,000 people in the United States receive bone-marrow transplants to treat cancer or genetic disease. Physician Fred Appelbaum’s superb book tells the gripping story of how this once-impossible procedure became standard care.
It’s a compelling read, braiding together three narrative strands. First, the decades-long effort led by Don Thomas and his team at the University of Washington in Seattle and then the nearby Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center — a 20-year journey marked by many more failures and people dying than successes before the breakthrough emerged. Thomas won a share of the 1990 medicine Nobel prize. Second, a clear, illuminating account of the immune system, and how hard-won scientific insight made transplants viable. Third, a moving tribute to the many clinicians, nurses and researchers whose skill and compassion gave us this miracle of medicine.
More than a history of a medical breakthrough, it’s also a study in persistence, demonstrating how progress in medicine is rarely linear, but built on decades of trial and error. It leaves you with a renewed appreciation for both the fragility of the human body and the extraordinary ingenuity required to heal it.
Appelbaum is a distinguished physician-scientist. This book shows that he is an equally accomplished storyteller. — Fyodor Urnov
The Scaling Era
Dwarkesh Patel & Gavin Leech Stripe (2025)
At times, The Scaling Era reads like science fiction — yet the book is a compilation of conversations that have already happened. Writer and podcaster Dwarkesh Patel and consultant Gavin Leech have assembled interviews with leading thinkers on artificial intelligence into an oral history, organized around themes such as AI safety and timelines for achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI).
These conversations capture a phenomenon that we don’t yet understand fully. The fact that an AI model improves as you add more data and computing power — the scaling law — is, on reflection, unremarkable. The real shock is that systems based on a single objective, predicting the next token in a sequence, can have such varied abilities: proving mathematical theorems, debugging code or composing sonnets. A decade ago, I would have bet against the idea that intelligence should be this compressible and could be reached by implementing one simple rule at scale.
Read it today and the book lets you score the interviewees’ predictions for AI progress. Some already look too conservative: by many measures, we have crossed into AGI already. However, the deeper questions remain open. What is really going on behind the scaling phenomenon and how should the scientific community and society anticipate what comes next if it continues to hold true? — Eddy Keming Chen
Global Higher Education in Times of Upheaval
Simon Marginson Bloomsbury Academic (2026)
Each year, seven million students cross national borders for educational programmes. One-quarter of published research papers have authors in multiple countries. These collaborations are, academic Simon Marginson argues, essential to how knowledge is produced and what universities are for.
Marginson identifies two connected forces reshaping higher education. The first, sovereign individualism, is the reduction of higher education to private economic gain: a decades-long project that, he argues,has stripped universities of their contributions to collective life and treated knowledge as a commodity. The second, sovereign nationalism, operates at the global scale: the treatment of cross-border students as revenue streams or security threats and the deliberate fracturing of research collaboration in the name of national interest.
The book discusses the changing geography of science. Between 2003 and 2022, the share of papers indexed in the Scopus database that were produced in non-Western countries doubled, from around 28% to 55% of the global total. Marginson welcomes the shift as part of a move towards a more plural knowledge system.
Against sovereign individualism and sovereign nationalism, he argues for treating higher education as a common good, sustained by interdependence. — Maia Chankseliani
The Covenant of Water
Abraham Verghese Grove (2023)
This sweeping novel, set in southern India between 1900 and 1977, traces several generations of a Malayali Christian family as the country moves from colonial rule to independence. Physician and author Abraham Verghese renders their world in rich, sensory detail, drawing on local language and custom.
At its heart is a haunting, unexplained medical condition: across generations, otherwise apparently healthy family members are prone to drowning, often without warning, giving rise to a belief that the family is cursed by water. This fear shapes marriages, daily life and even where people dare to go.
It’s a richly layered book, part family saga and part medical mystery. Verghese sees writing as a way to see beyond symptoms, to capture the whole person and to give shape to the stories and emotions that surround illness.
His first book, which I read nearly 30 years ago, was My Own Country (1994), a memoir about caring for people with AIDS in Tennessee in the disease’s early days before treatment options were available. It was so moving that I bought ten copies to give to friends and colleagues. The Covenant of Water is difficult to put down. It’s long, but it’s the kind of book you don’t want to end. — Heidi J. Larson
Prescription: Ice Cream
Alastair McAlpine Pan Macmillan South Africa (2024)
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