Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

The best books on health anxiety, as recommended by Caroline Crampton, author of A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 5h

"It’s generally understood to mean the intense anxiety some people experience about their health, sometimes associated with symptoms that medicine can’t detect or diagnose."
fivebooks.com/best-books/h...

Hypochondria

The best books on sex and marriage, as recommended by journalist and author Kate Figes.

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 9h

"It’s a very explicit book about how to arouse a woman and about a woman’s orgasm and how different it is from a man’s. She said 70 to 80 per cent of married women were deprived of a full orgasm by their husband’s speed."
fivebooks.com/best-books/s...

Sex and Marriage

Best-selling author Stella Tillyard says the 19th century Regency era (1810-1820) was a time of war and economic uncertainty.

1 1 1

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 12h

"Some think of the Regency as the whole of that time, before the Victorian era. But technically the Regency only lasted nine years."
fivebooks.com/best-books/r...

The Best Regency Novels

The best books about the Olympics, recommended by Olympic historian, Philip Barker. Read about the Olympics' history, its myths, culture and traditions

4

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 15h

"The flame ceremony is always held in ancient Olympia and the flame is always lit from the rays of the sun."
fivebooks.com/best-books/o...

The Olympic Games

The Best African Contemporary Writing

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 17h

"Africa is still trying to reckon with its own history, especially the recent history"
fivebooks.com/best-books/t...

The emphasis in new African writing is away from politics towards how the individual responds to events, says South African novelist Mphuthumi Ntabeni, author of The Broken River Tent and The…

The 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction Shortlist

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 19h

"Research in the UK suggests a disparity of more than 40% between the average earnings of male and female writers."
fivebooks.com/best-books/t...

The six novels shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction, including new books by Barbara Kingsolver and Maggie O'Farrell

The best 'eco-thrillers'—as selected by Manda Scott, author of bestselling books including the Boudica: Dreaming series

3

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 1d

"Clearly we are locked into capitalism, and we are often told explicitly that there is no alternative, but what we as writers can recognise, and what we can get across is that this is fundamentally untrue."
fivebooks.com/best-books/e...

The Best Eco Thrillers

Machine learning uses data to predict outcomes, explains Eric Siegel, a former professor at Columbia who now advises companies on deploying it in their business. Unlike artificial intelligence, it's…

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 1d

"Machine learning learns from data to predict. In established company applications, that means to help target marketing, fraud detection, ads, etc."
fivebooks.com/best-books/m...

Machine Learning

The Best Science Fiction Books About Aliens

1 2

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 1d

“Science fiction is very much in conversation with science”
fivebooks.com/best-books/s...

The best and most mind-boggling aliens in science fiction, as recommended by Jaime Green, author of The Possibility of Life

The Best Historical Fiction Set in the American South

4

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 1d

"The South is a mess, a minefield, but it’s like a concertina file. There’s all this history bunched right up together, huggle-muggle, tightly folded, past and present."
fivebooks.com/best-books/b...

The best historical novels set in the American South, selected by the writer Xan Brooks—H fiction by Flanner O'Connor and Mark Twain

The Best Vasily Grossman Books

1 4

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 1d

"I would venture to say he’s now one of the five or six best known writers to have emerged from Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century."
fivebooks.com/best-books/v...

The Soviet writer bore witness to the horrors of Russia's World War Two and the Shoah — and deserves a place in literary history, says scholar Maxim D Shrayer. He recommends the best books by and…

The best books on horticulture, as recommended by Andrea Wulf.

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 1d

"If you think about planting an oak tree, for example, you know you’re never going to see it grow into maturity but that makes doing so a real assertion of your belief in the future and in future generations."
fivebooks.com/best-books/a...

Horticulture

The best books on architectural history, as recommended by art historian and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank.

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 1d

“Architecture as a profession has now reduced tremendously but architects are still credited more than other professions in the making of things.”
fivebooks.com/best-books/a...

Architectural History

Wildlife ranger Margaret Darawanda recommends books for children about wild animals, books about animals in the wild for children of all ages

4

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 1d

"When you’re working in the bush, the animals are dangerous, and also there are armed poachers that you can meet in the bush."
fivebooks.com/best-books/w...

Wild Animals for Kids

The Best Latin American Novels

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 2d

"I arrived at a very interesting, effervescent time in Argentina because the former President who had been exiled – Juan Domingo Perón – had come back and everyone was out in the streets."
fivebooks.com/best-books/l...

From magical realism to political upheaval, John King, Professor Emeritus at Warwick University, recommends the best Latin American novels

Memoirs of Dauntless Daughters

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 2d

“I don’t know how these people got any sleep. This is a court that revolved around sex, there’s no question about it.”
fivebooks.com/best-books/n...

In her book The Rival Queens, historian Nancy Goldstone explored the destructive relationship between Marguerite de Valois and her mother Catherine de' Medici. Here she chooses five different memoirs…

What does it mean to be an ethical meat-eater? Author and journalist Louise Gray chooses five books that examine the impact of our omnivorous lifestyle

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 2d

"Being an ethical carnivore means trying only to eat meat that you understand comes from a good source."
fivebooks.com/best-books/e...

Eating Meat

The Best Science Fiction of 2020

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 2d

"This year we have four female and two male authors on the shortlist, which is the first time that’s ever happened in the 30-plus years history of the award."
fivebooks.com/best-books/t...

The best science fiction of 2020: Tom Hunter, director of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, discusses their 2020 shortlist.

The best books on video games, as recommended by Katherine Isbister, professor of computational media at the University of California.

1 5

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 2d

“The developer wanted to evoke that sense of awe, and wonder, and smallness of the people who first landed on the moon.”
fivebooks.com/best-books/v...

Video Games

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 2d

Books by @willdalrymple.bsky.social, @profsophieharman.bsky.social

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 2d

NEW: "We want something that’s written in sparkling and engaging prose that will be a pleasure to read" Rebecca Earle, chair of the judges, talks us through the brilliant books that made the shortlist of the 2025 @britishacademy.bsky.social Book Prize:
fivebooks.com/best-books/2...

To be shortlisted for the annual British Academy Book Prize, books have to be both rigorously researched and highly readable. Historian Rebecca Earle, chair of the 2025 judging panel, talks us…

The best books to learn more about the 17th Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, recommended by Spinoza expert Steven Nadler.

1 1 2

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 2d

"He was important in his own time and I think he is important for our time. He was the most radical and independent thinker of the 17th century."
fivebooks.com/best-books/s...

Spinoza

The best novellas—short and intense works of fiction of 100–150 pages in length—as recommended by the acclaimed writer Claire Fuller.

1 1 3

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 2d

"For me, as a reader, I think novellas are about being able to get into a story that is intense and engrossing—more so than a short story—but one that you can hold in your head all in one go, unlike a longer novel."
fivebooks.com/best-books/n...

The Best Novellas

The History of the Present

3

Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @fivebooks.com · 2d

"He [Herodotus] is the first person who does this business of saying, ‘Well this is what the Persians say about it and this is what the Greeks say about it, so let’s try and work out what’s the truth in between.’"
fivebooks.com/best-books/t...

Historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash describes the "mongrel genre" between reportage and scholarship and says using the historian’s tools to analyse the present is a vital undertaking