The passage of powerRobert A Caro
In the latest installment of his magisterial, multivolume biography, Caro uses wondrous narrative gifts to tell the dramatic story of how Johnson was catapulted to the White House in the wake of the assassination of John F Kennedy.
A hologram for the king
Dave Eggers
Using a new, pared down voice in this sad-funny-moving novel, Eggers recounts the tale of a penny-ante Job named Alan Clay, who's betting everything on a quixotic scheme to sell the king of Saudi Arabia a new technology contract.
The yellow birds
Kevin Powers
Kevin joined the Army when he was 17 and served as a machine-gunner in Iraq. He has written a deeply affecting book that conveys the friendship of two soldiers struggling to stay alive, and the horrors of combat, with harrowing poetry.
Telegraph avenue
Michael Chabon
Taking its title from the famous thoroughfare that bridges Berkeley and Oakland, this novel is about Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, the proprietors of a struggling vinyl-record store that's threatened by a new megastore opening down the street.
The idea factory: Bell labs and the great age of american innovation
Jon Gertner
From the 1920s through the '80s, Bell Labs was the most innovative scientific organisation in the world, pioneering the development of the transistor, the laser and digital communications. This book gives us portraits of scientists behind such transformative products.
The twelve tribes of hattie
Ayana Mathis
This novel chronicles the many sorrows visited upon one Hattie Shepherd, a woman who left the Jim Crow South to start a new life in Philadelphia, and who, at 16, lost her twin babies to pneumonia. That loss hardens Hattie's heart.
The revolution was televised
Alan Sepinwall
In this book, the television critic for hitfix.com provides an observant look at 12 great millennial dramas that transformed the TV landscape and moved the small screen out from under the shadow of the movies.
Every love story is a ghost story
D T Max
This revealing biography of Wallace traces the connections between his life and art, mapping the sources of his philosophical vision, while chronicling the heartbreaking struggle he waged throughout his adult life with severe depression.
Hello goodbye hello
Craig Brown
Frank Lloyd Wright meets Marilyn Monroe who meets Nikita Khrushchev. Tolstoy meets Tchaikovsky who meets Rachmaninoff who meets Harpo Marx who meets George Bernard Shaw. Brown's sketches of these incongruous meetings possess the historical resonance of reportage, the surreal fizz of fiction.
Hallucinations
Oliver Sacks
This book is a fascinating natural history of hallucinations. Dr Sacks's compassion for his patients and philosophical outlook transform what might have been clinical case studies into humanely written short stories that illuminate the complexities and mysteries of the human mind.