A report from behind the front lines of the war over the world’s most important technology.

A new Cold War is being fought for control over the world’s most powerful technology — semiconductors, the tiny chips that power everything from iPhones to AI supercomputers to military drones. At the heart of this war is ASML, a long-obscure Dutch firm that has become Europe’s most valuable technology company by building the only machines on Earth capable of manufacturing the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips.

The US is fighting relentlessly to keep these machines out of Chinese hands. US-led export controls have cut China off from the technology, and despite investing billions of dollars and espionage, it has yet to build a viable alternative. Which raises an unsettling question: if China cannot buy them or build them, could it one day decide to take them?

Taiwan, an island of 23 million people that Beijing claims as its own, is the beating heart of the global semiconductor industry and home to many of these irreplaceable machines. As tensions in the Taiwan Strait continue to rise, the US, Taiwan, ASML, TSMC, and their allies are preparing for a confrontation that could trigger a major war, upend the world economy, and mark a tectonic shift in the global balance of power.

The Machine and the Microchip takes readers behind the scenes of this extraordinary struggle, from the White House and prime ministers’ offices to sealed cleanrooms, private dinners, and tense negotiations across three continents. Whoever wins may well control the future.

Award-winning Elisabeth Åsbrink writes the biography of Gloria Ray Karlmark, one of the Little Rock Nine.

Gloria Ray was 14 years old when she was stopped by armed white soldiers from entering Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. The year was 1957 and the governor of Arkansas refused to allow her and eight other Black teenagers to enter the all-white school. ‘That day my childhood ended’, Gloria says today.

Gloria Ray and the others in the Little Rock Nine were the first to act on the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ruled the segregation of Black and white children in American schools unconstitutional. Arkansas’ resistance to the decision was so strong and violent that President Dwight Eisenhower was forced to deploy elite armed troops to escort the nine Black children to school every day.

The incident became world news and a pawn in the Cold War, as well as a shocking exposure of racism in America. The Little Rock Nine are now icons in the history of the American civil rights movement.

But the price was high. They endured harassment, death threats, and violence, and their parents and siblings suffered greatly, as did those who supported their fight for justice. In the end, the governor of Arkansas closed all public schools instead of allowing African-American children to mix with whites, and thousands of young people were affected by the decision.

Gloria is the story of that year that would change her life, but also of American racism and the slavery it grew out of, inextricably linked in the story of the United States. Written by Elisabeth Åsbrink with her eloquent narration, distinct voice, and unique ability to crack open key moments of conflict, oppression, and inequality by weaving together strands of personal and national history.

In the summer of 1992, patients at a veterans’ hospital in mid-Missouri began dying under suspicious circumstances — but the institution meant to protect them was busy protecting itself. Three decades on, Jake Adelstein comes home to his native Missouri to take up the case his father never stopped investigating.

Strange things were happening at the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans’ Hospital. Patients who should have gone home were never making it out. And in Ward 4 East, the loudspeakers kept crackling with an announcement that told the staff someone was about to die: Code Blue.

When staff raised concerns, administrators found a suspect — a nurse. They acted quickly. But they didn’t call the police. Instead, they went after the people trying to tell the truth. The nurse moved on to new jobs. Death followed.

This is the story of serial killings in a college town, the cover-up, and the devastating ripple effects of a crime that went unpunished. It is a story of grieving families, courtroom battles. law enforcement agencies that fumbled the case, and whistleblowers who should have been heroes but were treated like criminals. At the centre of it all: the hospital pathologist who started the investigation and asked his son to finish it.

For the first time in thirty years, Jake Adelstein — the author of Tokyo Vice — has returned to his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. Together with his daughter, Beni, and Amy Yoshida-Plambeck, they turn up the heat on a very cold case in a quest for real justice.

The story of how a vast fortune acquired in the Gilded Age has moved into the darkest spaces of the American political system, now bankrolling Donald Trump, the administration’s anti-immigration machine, and conservative judges and right-wing think tanks.

Andrew Mellon built one of the largest fortunes in American history, served as Treasury secretary for three US presidents, and amassed the greatest private art collection in the world. He bent the nation’s tax code and financial institutions to his will, clearing the way for his family and other wealthy industrialists to acquire unprecedented sums and become immensely influential.

There were Mellons on the Gatsby-esque Long Island estates and polo fields of the Roaring Twenties, and in the viewing box with Hitler at the Nuremberg rallies. They helped build the nascent CIA in the World War II intelligence services during the London Blitz. Modern-day Mellons can be found in the secretive world of Washington power brokers.

Now, as Kevin Carey reports, some of Mellon’s descendants have been using their wealth to help move presidential elections and to reshape American institutions to favour ultra-right-wing interests. Between them, Timothy Mellon, Andrew Mellon’s last living grandson; Andrew Mellon’s grand-niece, Cordelia May; and Cordelia’s brother, Richard Mellon Scaife, have spent vast sums funding the campaigns of Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump, and key elements of Trumpism and the MAGA movement.

Shadow Dynasty tells a riveting tale of what colossal amounts of money have done to people as individuals and what they are doing to American society as a whole.

A gripping exploration of a mother-daughter relationship against the backdrop of a rapidly changing China.

When 52-year-old Chunxiang leaves her rural Shaanxi province for the first time for the mega-city of Shenzhen, she moves into her adult daughter Xiaoman’s cramped apartment and takes a gruelling job cleaning a luxury mega-mall. Suddenly thrust back together, mother and daughter begin to clash.

But as Xiaoman watches her mother endure rigid corporate micromanagement and arduous, endless labour, she begins to document her mother’s backbreaking daily reality, pulling back the curtain on China’s ageing, invisible migrant workforce. Together, mother and daughter learn to navigate a new reality, mending the deep roots of their relationship and complex history.

Deeply moving, this bestselling literary phenomenon is both a powerful critique of the human cost behind an economic miracle and a poignant tribute to the unsung, essential hands that keep our modern world spinning.

i had been a male model since i moved to london and initially i was making lots of money and then suddenly i wasn’t making any.

Xander is ageing out. A former high school jock turned model, he’s spent a decade in London riding a carousel of validation and success. Now the ride is slowing down.

When his much-more-successful actor girlfriend, Tessa K, buys him a plane ticket home to New Zealand for the first time in ten years, Xander returns as a stranger. The family farm is for sale. His mother is overbearing. His high school ex wants to reconnect. And his life is unravelling. 

Then he meets someone younger, someone vibrant and unburdened, who makes him fall back in love with the small town he fled. But is she the cure for his problems or just another symptom of how empty his life has become?

In the long cloud, newcomer Hector Mackenzie captures the anxious rhythm of life in the 20s — a tender, often funny meditation on masculinity, beauty, and mortality that proves you might be able to go home, but you can never truly go back.

A young man is gripped by one fear: that he’ll lose his mind.

With depression, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia spread across his family tree, the odds are not in his favour. So, he does what any analytically minded man might do: he tries to calculate the statistical probability of his own madness. What follows is a restless, darkly comic journey — from New York to Paris to Vienna — as he tries to outrun a fate that seems written into his DNA, only to end up working as a psychologist inside the very institution he’s spent his life fearing.

There, surrounded by stories that echo his own family’s, he begins to see with a new, hard-earned clarity. In this bestselling German debut, a potent blend of memoir and fiction, Engler unravels a compassionate tale of reconciliation in which the protagonist is forced to confront a question he has avoided all his life: What is normal?

From the award-winning author of Pink Slime comes a hypnotic novel of rage, solitude, and metamorphosis, set on a mountain where the living and the dead refuse to stay silent.

A woman lives alone on the slope of a mist-covered mountain, hired by a man she has never seen to patrol the boundary between the cloud forest and the quarry that is slowly devouring it. In her notebooks, she records her solitary days, her fierce desires, the language of her landscape, and the violence that shaped her childhood.

One day, a body appears in her yard. And then another, and another. As the dead repeat their silent message, the woman finds in the act of tending to their remains an answer that escaped her among the living, and she begins to form an intimate bond with the mountain that shelters her, mirrors her, and demands to be heard.

At once earthy and visionary, tender and ferocious, The Mountain Woman is a novel about the violences women inherit and the forms of life that persist in the ruins. In prose of rare intensity, Fernanda Trías gives voice to a world beyond the human, where care can be an act of rebellion and language must be broken open to tell the story of the harm we do to ourselves, others, and the world we love.

The public execution of Ringo Starr is the first demonstration of power by the aliens whose spacecraft hangs over Britain and seals off the country from the outside world.

It’s the 1960s and, while the aliens linger overhead, London’s streets have become a feral playground for warring factions of fascists and communists. The odious teenage Rat runs a rooming house that is also a brothel and a crash pad for a volatile gang of neo-fascist thugs known as The Lot. But the house’s fragile equilibrium implodes with the arrival of his cousin, Frijja. Delicate, but radiating icy detachment, she systematically dismantles the gang’s primitive power dynamics. Her presence ignites a dangerous, obsessive fixation in Connor, The Lot’s most ruthless enforcer.

When rising violence forces them to flee their home in a stolen helicopter, the three embark on a desperate trek across a decaying England and the strange new communities that have sprung up amongst the wreckage. As the trio fight to survive and for dominance between themselves, their uneasy alliance unravels toward a shocking, haunting conclusion.

Bitingly, darkly funny, satirical A Sweet, Sweet Summer is one of the great lost classics of postwar British fiction, now available to readers again for the first time in many decades.

A new dawn of animal linguistics, by a modern-day Doctor Dolittle.

For centuries we believed that language was humanity’s defining gift, and that bird calls were no more than an expression of emotion. Then one young Japanese scientist stepped into a forest and began to listen.

Through patience, curiosity, and a series of inventive, handmade experiments, Suzuki Toshitaka eventually revealed that Japanese tits combine over twenty ‘words’ and are able to use grammar and syntax, displaying the cognitive building blocks of language and upending everything we thought we knew about animal intelligence.

Part scientific detective story, part memoir of a life spent in forests, I Can Understand the Language of Birds follows Suzuki Toshitaka’s journey from teenage birdwatcher to the researcher who set up the world’s first laboratory specifically devoted to animal linguistics.

Illustrated by the author, and filled with delight, humour, and infectious enthusiasm, this is a book about opening our ears to wonder all around us.

The definitive, all-access biography of one of the world’s most beloved literary voices, showcasing a life as triumphant and inspiring as the stories she crafted.

To know the name Judy Blume is to know and love literature. Her influential novels turned classics — including Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing; Deenie; and Summer Sisters — touched the lives of tens of millions of readers. For more than fifty-five years her work has done something revolutionary: it rewired the world’s expectations of what literature for young people can be — frank, candid, earthy, and unafraid to show the messier sides of humanity. But little has been written about the real woman behind the iconic persona and the unlikely journey of her literary ascension, until now.

In Judy Blume, journalist, historian, and longtime Blume aficionado Mark Oppenheimer pens a beautiful, multidimensional portrait of the acclaimed author through extensive interviews with Blume herself, invaluable access to her papers and correspondence, and thoughtful analysis of Blume’s beloved novels, including early, unpublished works that shed light on the pathbreaking writer she would become. Oppenheimer goes deep, exploring Blume’s middle-class 1940s upbringing, complicated childhood, varied relationships and marriages, unabashed sexual experiences, bouts of heartache and loss, and enduring legacy as a champion of free speech and contemporary literature. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the woman behind the literary empire in all her complex, multifaceted glory — a true gift for anyone who grew up reading and loving these extraordinary books.

A clear-eyed manual for building a life of meaning in the chaos of the modern world.

So you’ve realised life is meaningless. Religion is fake, your job is pointless, society is a charade, and everyone else is just pretending things are fine when, in reality, existential despair is the only logical reaction to any of this. You’re staring into the abyss, but author and spiritual director Britt Hartley is here to pull you back from the edge.

Hartley has travelled deep into the void of nihilism herself after deconstructing her faith and every other belief system she could think of, and she knows firsthand how to rebuild a meaningful life from scratch without sugar-coating or toxic positivity. In this book, she shares the tools of philosophy, spirituality, psychology, and creativity that have helped her and countless of her clients rediscover how to live. You’ll learn how to:

• lovingly confront the fear of death, meaninglessness, and loneliness;
• shift to a perspective based on experience, play, and quiet joy;
• unearth the core values already guiding your inner compass;
• connect deeply with other humans on their own unique journey;
• and much more, all without being asked to put on a smile or believe anything unbelievable.

Yes, maybe it’s true that everything is stupid, the world is on fire, and nothing matters. But as Hartley demonstrates, that only means we have the opportunity to define our own lives in the ways that matter most and move forward with hope and purpose.

The brilliant debut collection from the author of the internationally bestselling Colony

This I knew: that the whole thing would end in disaster, but I couldn’t tear myself away from standing in that light. It was so warm there, in the light.

This critically acclaimed Swedish bestseller, published in English for the first time, introduces a cast of strange, loveable characters, moving through life in ways that defy expectation.

Norlin’s stories explore longing and recognition, cult films and road trips, hopeless punk bands and nights that stretch towards dawn. Funny, surprising, and quietly profound, they reveal the strange, surreal, and tender moments hidden within ordinary lives.

Minor is the desiring body that runs, rises, gravitates towards larger, brighter, more dazzling bodies, that bestows on other bodies the status of suns and planets, fires to be orbited, the reason for everything. There is no centre of the universe except the one we invent for ourselves.

Jonathan is twenty years old, gay, and full of life. He’s set out to escape the insignificance of his suburban home, to give himself instead and forever to the real city, Milan, where he hopes also to find love.

But when Jonathan finds love in all its messy, complicated, sexy reality, it is not enough. He has escaped the place and people of his childhood, but can he escape the man raised by those people and in that place, the man he has grown up to be?

The defining book of the dawning age of climate revolt — armed with the latest science and buttressed by ecological models, theories of political change, philosophies of degrowth, and narratives of unforgettable characters.

Rebellion or Oblivion tells the story of people around the world who believe that techno-industrial capitalism is not sustainable in the long run, and that radical change is required to right the course of humanity so that we learn to live at last within the limits of our finite Earth. The rebels he profiles include: 

• climate disobedients in the UK such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, who blockade streets, highways, and airports, and pay the price with draconian prison sentences;
• direct actionists putting their bodies on the line to protect farmland in France, where the state serves big-money agricultural interests against the rights and well-being of citizens;
• eco-saboteurs who go underground to attack the property of nature-ravaging corporations; and
• Indigenous tribespeople in Peru, India, and the western US who refuse to bow before capital and profit, occupying their threatened sacred land in immoveable masses. 

As he takes readers through the riveting drama of the rebels’ surprising victories and manifold defeats, the ultimate question that Christopher Ketcham seeks to answer is the one that should be on all our minds: will climate chaos and ecological breakdown lead to authoritarianism and full-blown climate fascism? Or will we have radical democracy that maximises justice and equity, despite the collapse of the biophysical underpinnings of modern society?

From the battle for equal pay, to LGBTQIA+ rights and the fight against sexual violence, women footballers have become some of the most effective gender equality campaigners in the world — not by choice, but out of necessity, because they are trying to play the game they love on an unequal playing field.

After years of toiling in obscurity, women footballers around the world have broken through to the mainstream, pulling in billions of spectators, scooping up record quantities of prize money, and landing major sponsorship deals. Once derided as playing a lesser form of the beautiful game, players like Aitana Bonmatí, Lauren James, Trinity Rodman, and Khadija 'Bunny' Shaw are today some of the most respected athletes on the planet.

That doesn’t mean that the playing field is level — far from it. Men still out-earn women by a factor of four to one in international competitions and, as the whole world saw when former Spanish football federation president Luis Rubiales forcibly kissed Jenni Hermoso during the medal ceremony of the 2023 World Cup final, players are as vulnerable to sexual violence as women and gender minorities everywhere. This is where the paradox lies. Women footballers are more successful than ever, but the game they play remains largely hostile to them. Yet such conditions have led footballers to become some of the most prominent and effective gender equality campaigners in the world. By striving to be the best at what they do, these athletes have shed light on some of the world’s most pernicious gender gaps — and showed how to close them.

The Feminism Factory tells the story of how, despite the best efforts of the men who run it, football has become a global laboratory for feminist activism.

In the beginning, these islands seeped with magic. It floated on the rivers and trickled with the sap from the trees.

Beloved writer and historian Nicholas Jubber guides us around the stories of Britain and Ireland and an alternative journey through their history. From the building of neolithic cairns and the age of the druids, through the so-called Dark Ages, the rise of Christianity, the Viking and Norman invasions and other key moments of medieval history, we travel through the centuries to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and beyond.

Featuring a ‘devil’s dozen’ of thirteen core figures and events, each of them rooted in history but rich in magical influence, we explore how wielders of magic influenced events and shaped these islands’ emerging nations. Amongst these figures, we encounter the druids who stood against the might of the Roman Empire, the historical origins behind the story of Merlin, the heartbreaking stories of the most beloved and most notorious of Britain’s witches, and scientist-occultists such as Queen Elizabeth I’s favoured confidante, Dr John Dee. We see how magical and scientific thinking coiled together over the centuries, and the significance of magical ideas such as second sight and alchemy to key figures of the Scientific Revolution such as Robert Boyle and, most importantly of all, Sir Isaac Newton.

Exploring the enduring legacy of sorcery through encounters with practitioners of the present, and showing how magical thinking can re-connect us with the natural world, These Sorcerers’ Isles uncovers a magical past that lies under the present like a secret vault under a mighty monument, waiting to be excavated.