BOOK OF THE DAY

In 2024, award-winning reporters Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf bring us the definitive, inside story of the most tumultuous and consequential presidential campaign in our history.

"An immersive and philosophical tour of an election whose outcome, [the authors] argue, was anything but inevitable.” —The New York Times

“The whole world was against me, and I won,” said Donald Trump in an exclusive interview, ten days before his second inauguration. Nearly four years after Trump’s first turbulent presidency concluded in a violent attempt to overturn the election, he made a political comeback on a scale that stunned the nation. How did the first U.S. president to become a convicted felon regain control of the White House? And at what cost? 2024 is the explosive account of how Trump and his advisers overcame a dozen primary challengers, four indictments, two assassination attempts, and his own past mistakes to defeat the Democrats, and pave the way for a second term that would be far more aggressive and ruthless than the first.

Drawing on extraordinary access to the Trump, Biden, and Harris teams, 2024 takes readers beyond the speeches, rallies, and debates to reveal the innermost workings of the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns. Beginning in August 2022 with the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents, and Trump’s subsequent decision to run once again for president, Dawsey, Pager, and Arnsdorf chart how Trump stifled the rise of Republican opponents, including Ron DeSantis, and how his campaign, led by Susie Wiles, landed on a winning strategy. They reveal in unrivaled detail how Joe Biden and his team brushed off concerns about his age, ignored polling numbers, and held off the next generation of eager Democratic hopefuls—even as Biden was dealing with his own special counsel investigation and the trial of his son Hunter. After his disastrous debate performance forced him to withdraw, Biden anointed Vice President Kamala Harris as the candidate and tasked her with running the shortest presidential campaign in modern U.S. history. With only 107 days to distinguish herself from the past four years, Harris lacked the time or space to outrun Biden’s shadow—a challenge in and of itself, but one which Biden would make even more difficult. On November 5th, 2024, Trump was elected the nation’s forty-seventh president, and would return to power vindicated, emboldened, unrestrained, and burning for revenge.

Gripping, revelatory, and deeply reported, 2024 is the shocking inside story of the election that tested American democracy and would go on to shape the future of the free world.

BOOK OF THE DAY

About Something in the Water: Reese’s Book Club

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK WITH MORE THAN A MILLION COPIES SOLD

“A psychological thriller that captivated me from page one. What unfolds makes for a wild, page-turning ride! It’s the perfect beach read!”—Reese Witherspoon

A shocking discovery on a honeymoon in paradise changes the lives of a picture-perfect couple in this taut psychological thriller from the author of Mr. Nobody and The Disappearing Act.

“Steadman keeps the suspense ratcheted up.”—The New York Times

ITW THRILLER AWARD FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY GLAMOUR AND NEWSWEEK

If you could make one simple choice that would change your life forever, would you?

Erin is a documentary filmmaker on the brink of a professional breakthrough, Mark a handsome investment banker with big plans. Passionately in love, they embark on a dream honeymoon to the tropical island of Bora Bora, where they enjoy the sun, the sand, and each other. Then, while scuba diving in the crystal blue sea, they find something in the water. . . .

Could the life of your dreams be the stuff of nightmares?

Suddenly the newlyweds must make a dangerous choice: to speak out or to protect their secret. After all, if no one else knows, who would be hurt? Their decision will trigger a devastating chain of events. . . .

Have you ever wondered how long it takes to dig a grave?

Wonder no longer. Catherine Steadman’s enthralling voice shines throughout this spellbinding debut novel. With piercing insight and fascinating twists, Something in the Water challenges the reader to confront the hopes we desperately cling to, the ideals we’re tempted to abandon, and the perfect lies we tell ourselves.

BOOK OF THE DAY

'A thrilling, immersive and beautifully written historical novel that will resonate long after the last page is turned. Highly recommended' MARIUS GABRIEL

'Taut, compelling and beautifully written – I loved it!’ DAISY WOOD

'I seldom give books of this type five stars, but this one fully deserves it for bringing something new and refreshing to the genre.' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

A moving, page-turning story about a little-known chapter of World War II. Perfect for fans of Kate Quinn and Anna Stuart.

1940. As Soviet forces storm Lithuania, Zofia and her brother Jacek must flee to survive.

A lifeline appears when Japanese consul Sugihara offers them visas on one condition: they must deliver a parcel to Tokyo. Inside lies intelligence on Nazi atrocities, evidence so explosive that Nazi and Soviet agents will stop at nothing to possess it.

Pursued across Siberia on the Trans-Siberian Express, Zofia faces danger at every turn, racing to expose the truth as Japan edges closer to allying with the Nazis. With the fate of countless lives hanging in the balance, can she complete her mission before time runs out?

Readers love Last Train to Freedom:

'Tense and thought-provoking' CATHERINE LAW

'A fascinating and original read' CATHERINE HOKIN

'Real history in the raw, heart-pounding drama, bone-chilling danger, intrigue, romance, and characters to love and fear…Last Train to Freedom has it all. Don’t miss the ride!' LANCASHIRE POST

'This is the kind of book that keeps you up until the middle of the night, or that you fall asleep reading, because you just can’t put it down… One of the best books I have read this year.' Reader review

'An epic journey across the Siberian wilderness that will keep you guessing until the end. Readers interested in the less well known events of World War II will find this book captivating and unforgettable' Reader review⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'Ms Swift is a talented writer… Captivating and compulsive reading' Reader review⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'What a fantastic read this was' Reader review⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'Another stunning achievement in historical fiction from Deborah Swift' Reader review⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'Grips you from the beginning and does not let go until the end' Reader review⭐

BOOK OF THE DAY

A “detailed, often gritty, picture of a fragile world” (The Wall Street Journal) that tells the history of the Sahara from prehistory to the present, showing how Saharans have navigated scarcity, conquest, and the relentless challenges of the desert environment

What comes to mind when we think about the Sahara? Rippling sand dunes, sun-blasted expanses, camel drivers and their caravans perhaps. Or famine, climate change, civil war, desperate migrants stuck in a hostile environment. The Sahara stretches across 3.2 million square miles, hosting several million inhabitants and a corresponding variety of languages, cultures, and livelihoods. But beyond ready-made images of exoticism and squalor, we know surprisingly little about its history and the people who call it home.   

Shifting Sands is about that other Sahara, not the empty wasteland of the romantic imagination but the vast and highly differentiated space in which Saharan peoples and, increasingly, new arrivals from other parts of Africa live, work, and move. It takes us from the ancient Roman Empire through the bloody colonial era to the geopolitics of the present, questioning easy clichés and exposing fascinating truths along the way. From the geology of the region to the religions, languages, and cultural and political forces that shape and fracture it, this landmark book tells the compelling story of a place that sits at the heart of our world, and whose future holds implications for us all.

BOOK OF THE DAY

In this sweeping epic of the northernmost American frontier, James A. Michener guides us through Alaska’s fierce terrain and history, from the long-forgotten past to the bustling present. As his characters struggle for survival, Michener weaves together the exciting high points of Alaska’s story: its brutal origins; the American acquisition; the gold rush; the tremendous growth and exploitation of the salmon industry; the arduous construction of the Alcan Highway, undertaken to defend the territory during World War II. A spellbinding portrait of a human community fighting to establish its place in the world, Alaska traces a bold and majestic saga of the enduring spirit of a land and its people.

BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. Michener's Hawaii.
 
Praise for Alaska
 
“Few will escape the allure of the land and people [Michener] describes. . . . Alaska takes the reader on a journey through one of the bleakest, richest, most foreboding, and highly inviting territories in our Republic, if not the world. . . . The characters that Michener creates are bigger than life.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
 
“Always the master of exhaustive historical research, Michener tracks the settling of Alaska [in] vividly detailed scenes and well-developed characters.”—Boston Herald
 
“Michener is still, sentence for sentence, writing’s fastest attention grabber.”—The New York Times

BOOK OF THE DAY

The remarkable new work of fiction from the Booker Prize-winning author of Last Orders, Waterland and Mothering Sunday

'His archly modulated, precise prose, reminiscent at times of his friend Kazuo Ishiguro’s, has lost none of its power ... immensely readable late-career Swift from start to finish, Twelve Post-War Tales is a marvel of the storyteller's art.' Financial Times

‘There can surely be no better contemporary writer to take on history’s circularities that Graham Swift. … “Growing up in the 1950s there was all the evidence of war.” Swift has said. This beautiful cluster of stories shows how vital it remains in recollection.’ Observer

‘The characters in this collection share their thoughts and memories with the reader as though with a close friend, and the warmth of their confidences balances against their sadness. We feel we’ve been in the trenches with them, even when a story has gone no farther than the living room.’ Wall Street Journal

‘[A] subtle, empathic collection written with tenderness and gentle humour’, Sydney Morning Herald

‘[S]ome of Graham Swift’s finest stories. … A clever, subtle and satisfying collection’, NZ Listener

'A brilliant, illuminating collection of short fiction, perhaps the author's best’, Kirkus

'Humane, deceptively simple and utterly compelling, this might well be Swift's best book.' Daunt Books 

'These stories, depth charges of love, anguish, resentment, each in their way relating to the effects of WW2, are so good. Swift at his best – and he’s on top form here – has the humanity and wry humour of William Trevor’, Patrick Gale

'Quite wonderful. Such grace and clarity - I'm filled with admiration', Philip Pullman

In the aftermath of the Second World War Private Joseph Caan, a young Jewish soldier stationed in Germany, seeks the truth about lost family members; in the 1960s a father focuses on his daughter’s wedding even as the Cuban Missile Crisis brings the world to the brink of disaster; in 2001, while planes fly into the Twin Towers, a maid working for US Embassy staff in London wonders if her birth on the day of the Kennedy assassination shaped her life; and at the height of a pandemic lockdown, Dr. Cole, a retired specialist in respiratory disease, returns to work and recalls a formative childhood encounter with illness and much more. These are just a few of the challenged characters we meet in Graham Swift’s Twelve Post-war Tales.

 

Tender, humane, funny and moving, Swift’s latest work of fiction displays his quietly commanding ability to set the personal and the ordinary against the harsh sweep of history. It is an outstanding achievement, confirming his status as one of the great and subtlest voices of our age.

  Praise for Swift's most recent novel, Here We Are   

'A magical piece of writing: the work of a novelist on scintillating form.' Guardian 

 

‘Here We Are smuggles within the pages of a seemingly commonplace tale depths of emotion and narrative complexity that take the breath away.’ Observer 

 

‘The book’s power comes precisely from the fact that it performs its magic in front of your eyes, leaving nowhere to hide . . . you wonder how he does it.’ Financial Times 

 

‘With a wizardry of his own, Swift conjures up an about-to-disappear little world and turns it into something of wider resonance.’ Sunday Times 

 

'Swift has no equal in evoking the atmosphere of an era while probing human psychology with irony and tenderness.' L’Express, France 

 

‘Swift doesn’t write, he whispers’, Corriere della Sera, Italy

 

 “In a dozen pages Swift can embrace a whole life”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany

BOOK OF THE DAY

Named A Most Anticipated Book by: LitHub * Vulture * Time * A PW 2022 Holiday Gift Pick 

One of: Time's "100 Must-Read Books of 2022" * NPR's 2022 "Books We Love" Vulture's "10 Best Books of 2022"

A Goodreads Readers Choice Award Semifinalist

From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.

Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples.

With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time--from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. As she wrestles with the daily griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope in the aftermaths, and visions for our collective survival

BOOK OF THE DAY

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A damning, step-by-step account of how the people closest to a stubborn, aging president enabled his quixotic resolve to run for a second term.” — The New York Times

“Original Sin is not really a 'campaign book'—its account of the 2024 election largely ends after Biden drops out—but its simple assessment of the race is more compelling than anything else I’ve read about it . . . Original Sin is rarely better than when Tapper and Thompson are writing—with extensive reporting and clear-eyed prose—about the disaster that Biden caused . . . Over the next year, dozens of books will appear that attempt to explain this election. It’s hard to imagine any doing better than that.” —The Washington Post

“A reconstruction of what Democrats should have known and when they should have known it.” —Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show

“Explosive . . . Tapper and Thompson have done the [Democratic] party a favor. Some sort of reckoning is due for the disastrous missteps that that paved the way for Trump’s return.” — Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times

"The big political book of the moment . . . The power of Original Sin is its relentless marshaling of such insider scenes — the admissions, regrets and recriminations within the White House and the campaign — as the president continued to falter." — Carlos Lozada, The New York Times

“[The] most significant book to date about Biden’s cognitive decline, which was written by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson and draws on hundreds of interviews . . . To their credit, they do little editorializing. The book is written not unlike an autopsy report, describing a gruesome political car crash in dispassionate, clinical detail.” —The Atlantic

“A devastating account of Biden’s decline and the extent of the White House cover-up . . . I’m convinced that deep institutional soul-searching is due in many quarters, and that this conversation is too important to delay.” —Megan McArdle, The Washington Post

"A monumental piece of reporting." —Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring newsletter

"A deeply-reported and damning portrait of an active cover-up by the advisers closest to Joe Biden." —Chris Cillizza, So What newsletter

"A necessary and deeply disturbing account of the Biden White House. For anyone interested in politics and Shakespearean tragedy, there's something on every page." —Rolling Stone

“Their portrait of a decrepit American president is devastating . . . Original Sin succeeds because it has a strong thesis and an arresting narrative, delivered in made-for-TV episodes. The prose is punchy and so are the quotes.” —Lionel Barber, The Financial Times

“Original Sin is a comprehensively sourced autopsy of the agonised end to Biden’s 50-year career. It’s accusatory, indignant, righteous – and convincing.” —The New Statesman

“Original Sin both asks and answers troubling questions about health and the world‘s most powerful political office. And it creates a highly detailed historical record along the way.” —The Globe and Mail

“Drawing on extensive interviews with Biden administration insiders, Tapper and Thompson paint an intricate, appalling panorama of hubris and delusion . . . The result is a colorful and telling indictment of the blinkered self-interest that rules American politics.” —Publishers Weekly

“An authoritative indictment of a denial-plagued presidential run . . . This tough yet fair account of an aging president’s inauspicious reelection campaign makes a strong case that voters deserve to know more about their commander-in-chief’s health.” —Kirkus

BOOK OF THE DAY

With captivating storytelling and cutting-edge science, neuroscientist Daniel Yon explores the power and the perils of the brain's internal models, offering a provocative look at the hidden forces shaping our thoughts, beliefs, and even our sanity. Prepare to question everything you thought you knew' Daniel Z. Lieberman, author of The Molecule of More

'This book will profoundly change the way you consider your own mind' Lewis Dartnell, bestselling author of The Knowledge, Origins and Being Human

'You will not a find a more up-to-date or more compelling account of how a mind emerges from the brain' Chris Frith, Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at University College London

'An engaging, informative, and genuinely entertaining guide to the many weird ways in which our brains create the world we live in' Dean Burnett, author of The Idiot Brain

How does your brain decide what it’s seeing, from the physical world to other people? For decades, scientists have tried to understand how our brains work, not realising that the answer lies much closer to home than it seems.

The latest research in neuroscience and psychology suggests that the brain is doing the same thing that the scientists are: using past experiences to build theories of how the world works, and using these models to predict and make sense of it. Through this process, your brain constructs the reality that you live in.

In this book Daniel Yon takes the research one step further, uncovering how your brain colours your perception of the world, the judgements you make about other people and the beliefs you form about yourself. With transformative applications for how we engage with other communities and approach mental illness, A Trick of The Mind will revolutionise the way you think.

BOOK OF THE DAY

One of the most significant global events in the last forty years has been the rise of China— economically, technologically, politically, and militarily. The question on people's minds for decades has been whether China will replace the United States as a superpower in the near future. But for China, this power must be comprehensive — having strong economic and militant forces are only two pieces of the puzzle. China must also possess soft power, such as attractive ideologies, values, and culture.

China as Number One? explores China's soft powers through the eyes of Chinese citizens. Utilizing data from the World Values Survey, the contributors to this collection analyze the potential soft power of a rising China by examining its residents' social values. A comprehensive study of changes and continuities in the political and social values of Chinese citizens, the book examines findings in the context of evolutionary modernization theory and cross-national comparison.