Archives de catégorie : Narrative Nonfiction

NEPTUNE’S RANSOM de Julian Sancton

Julian Sancton’s follow-up to his thrilling, acclaimed debut, Madhouse at the End of the Earth, is the riveting story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of Columbia in 1708 with over a billion dollars in gold and silver—and one man’s obsessive quest to find and excavate it.

NEPTUNE’S RANSOM
by Julian Sancton
Crown, January 2026

Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San Jose—he was looking for the galleon Mercedes. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive led him to the story of a lifetime—the journey of a ship that had gathered a mountain of plundered riches from the New World for a long-awaited delivery to the King of Spain. But that ship, the San Jose, never reached Spanish shores. Somewhere miles off Cartegena, the Spanish armada was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war. When the smoke cleared, the San Jose had disappeared into the ocean, its precise location unknown and its decaying hull shrouded in darkness beyond the reach of divers.

Dooley was at once an unlikely candidate to find it, but also a singular figure. Half Cuban by birth, his life stretched from the ballfields of Brooklyn to the shores of Castro’s Havana at the dawn of revolution, where he would help birth a fledgling nation’s diving program and make films with the likes of Jacques Cousteau before finding himself placed on an international watch list and barred from the United States. With academic training cobbled together across various disciplines, Dooley was no one’s idea of a credentialed academic, and yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to the science of ocean archeology—and to finding the San Jose—led him to breakthroughs thought impossible, as he jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors and ultimately homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a three hundred year old shipwreck—or nothing at all.

Like The Orchid Thief, NEPTUNE’S RANSOM plunges into a rarified world through the eyes of an idiosyncratic protagonist, one whose work would spark the hopes of presidents and make real the dreams of a nation. In this tale of temerity and treasure, Julian Sancton blends the adventure of Indiana Jones with the international intrigue of XXX into a one-of-a-kind story of a lost fortune and a decades-long quest to shine light on the bounty of gold and silver at the bottom of the sea.

Julian Sancton is a senior features editor at Departures magazine, where he writes about culture and travel. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Yorker, Wired, and Playboy, among others. He has reported from every continent including Antarctica, which he first visited while researching this book.

THE WIREGRASS de Matt Kessler

A vital and propulsive true crime narrative of corruption, injustice, and two young women’s murder in a little-known corner of the American Deep South.

THE WIREGRASS:
A Tale of the Murder and Retribution
by Matt Kessler
Grand Central, Spring 2026
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

In 1999, in the rural Alabama town of Ozark, high schoolers Tracie Hawlett and J.B. Beasley were found shot in the trunk of their car, weeks before the start of their senior year. The night of their murder remains shrouded in mystery. They were driving between field parties. They were lost. But why were their jeans muddy, soaked to the bone? And what drove someone to kill them?

Twenty years passed, but locals could not forget the girls’ deaths. Suspicions of a police cover-up reached a fever pitch until, out of the blue, a softspoken Black man named Coley McCraney—a long-haul trucker and ordained deacon—was arrested for the crime. The dramatic trial and controversial conviction that followed would tear this small farming community in two.

THE WIREGRASS is an under-documented region of the American Deep South, known for its peanuts. Religiously conservative and historically poor, it stretches from Montgomery, Alabama to Macon, Georgia and south to the Florida Panhandle. Cut off from major highways, effectively run by local law enforcement, it’s a place where America’s fundamental prejudices present themselves without veneer; inequality, violence and racism run bone-deep.

A native Alabamian, seasoned journalist, and student of Maggie Nelson and Percival Everett (who gave the book its title), Matt Kessler has spent seven years researching the tangled case of the Beasley-Hawlett murders, attending the trial of Coley McCraney, and gaining the trust of the local community—as well as the ire of local police enforcement.

THE WIREGRASS is an atmospheric and utterly compelling true crime narrative, as interested in the rippling effects of murder on a small, tight-knit community as it is on exposing truth in places that are otherwise forgotten and neglected. Calling to mind the work of Patrick Radden Keefe (Say Nothing, Empire of Pain) and David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager), as well as Michelle McNamara’s legendary I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, this is a thrilling yet profound story of race, class, and the corruption of power.

Matt Kessler is a journalist based in Birmingham, Alabama. His reporting appears in The Guardian and The Atlantic and has been commended by the Mississippi ACLU. His cultural criticism and award-winning short stories have appeared in Pitchfork, Vice, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and is completing a PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California.

THE SEASON de Helen Garner

[Garner’s sharp eye, wit and warm humour bring the team and the season to life, as she documents this pivotal moment, both as part of the story and as silent witness. It’s a reflection on masculinity, on the nobility, grace and grit of team spirit and the game’s power to enthrall.

THE SEASON
by Helen Garner
Text Publishing, August 2024

I pull up at the kerb. I love this park they train in. I must have walked the figure-of-eight around its ovals hundreds of times, at dawn, winter and summer, to throw the ball for Dozer, our red heeler, but he’s buried now, in the backyard, under the crepe myrtle near the chook pen.

The boy jumps out with his footy and trots away, bouncing it. Boy? Look at him. He’s five foot eleven. The last of my three grandkids. This year he’s in the Under 16s.

It’s footy [Australian football] season in Melbourne, and Helen Garner is following her grandson’s suburban team. She turns up not only at every game (give or take), but at every training session, shivering on the sidelines in the dark, fascinated by the spectacle.

She’s a passionate Western Bulldogs supporter (with a rather shaky grasp of the rules) and a great admirer of the players and the epic theatre of the game. But this is something more than that. It is a chance to connect with her youngest grandchild, to be close to him in his last moments as a child and in his headlong rush into manhood. To witness his triumphs and defeats, to fear for his safety in battle, to gasp and to cheer for the team as it fights its way towards the finals.

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. And in 2023 she was awarded the ASA Medal for her outstanding contribution to Australian literature. Her works include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, The First Stone, The Spare Room, This House of Grief and three volumes of her diaries. She lives in Melbourne.

CAVE MOUNTAIN de Benjamin Hale

Benjamin Hale looks into his own family lore to tell the non-fiction stories of two young girls, the Arkansas wilderness, and the strange things that connect them.

CAVE MOUNTAIN
by Benjamin Hale
Harper, Fall 2025
(via DeFiore & Company)

Six-year-old Haley, Ben’s second cousin, was out for a hike with her grandparents when she became lost in the vast Arkansas wilderness. The child was lost for three days, and was the subject of an enormous manhunt, with regional media frenzy. She was ultimately found by two local men on mules, who ignored the common wisdom of police and the FBI which would never have led to the girl.

Days later, when calmly back in her parents’ arms, the girl told of the ‘friend’ who helped her find her way through the woods. An apparition clearly not real, but also real enough to show her the way to safety, tell stories with her, keep her calm.

Twenty years earlier, in the same remote spot in the wilderness, a local game warden was out hunting turkeys with a friend when they came across a group of people “acting kinda funny.”

He ran their plates and discovered there was a subpoena out for their arrest. The county sheriff arrived, the people were arrested, and soon the body of a young girl was found nearby, victim of a fundamentalist cult. The similarity between Haley’s description of the apparition, and the murdered girl, is unnerving and extraordinary.

Ben tells the story of both girls—the lost girl with the loving family, and the other who ends up a tragic sacrifice—and how their stories intersect. It’s a story about the arrogance of authority. It’s a story about nature and survival. It’s a story about police, and police corruption, and infighting within police and sheriff’s departments between corrupt and honest actors. Part of it is a courtroom drama. It’s a story about family. It’s a story about the South. It’s a story about religion, about skepticism and faith, getting lost and being found, sin and redemption. It’s ghost story. And it’s a detective story with several different detectives in it, including Benjamin Hale himself, researching the story, retracing the steps of the people involved and putting it all together.

Ben’s fiction has been called “an absolute pleasure,” (The New York Times) “a book to screech and howl about, [an] audacious first novel” (The Washington Post), and “a lively page-turner that asks the big questions head on… a noisy, audacious and promising debut.” His narrative non-fiction rises to the same storytelling level and will be a major dramatic and surprising book about family, faith, and redemption.

Benjamin Hale is the author of the novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve, 2011) and the collection The Fat Artist and Other Stories (Simon & Schuster, 2016). He has received the Bard Fiction Prize, a Michener-Copernicus Award, and nominations for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. His writing (both fiction and nonfiction) has appeared, among other places, in Conjunctions, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Dissent and the LA Review of Books Quarterly, and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013. He is a senior editor of Conjunctions, teaches at Bard College, and lives in a small town in New York’s Hudson Valley.

BEAUTIFUL HACKS FOR BROKEN HEADS AND CREATIVE HEARTS de Jenny Lawson

A thought-provoking, supportive, and funny creativity journal that fosters creativity.

BEAUTIFUL HACKS FOR BROKEN HEADS AND CREATIVE HEARTS
by Jenny Lawson
Penguin Life, Spring 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

BEAUTIFUL HACKS FOR BROKEN HEADS AND CREATIVE HEARTS is an inspiring self-help book for the rest of us—the ones who haven’t successfully stacked a tower of Atomic Habits or cultivated the 7 traits that would make us highly effective individuals. Now more than ever, readers crave a book that meets them where they are. And where they are just might be still in their pajamas at 2pm, unable to turn on their Zoom video, and feeling worse every time someone recommends yet another book outlining a 10-step plan they can’t muster up the enthusiasm or energy to read, much less conquer.

The question Jenny has heard most over the past decade is, “How?” How did you —struggling with depression, anxiety, ADD, chronic pain—manage to publish four bestsellers and open a successful bookstore (in April 2020, no less). Too often, people assume you must conquer your demons, cure your ills, and leave behind the brokenness completely before you can even begin to create your life’s work and succeed. Nothing could be further from the truth, and BEAUTIFUL HACKS FOR BROKEN HEADS AND CREATIVE HEARTS is the road map for this tribe.

Jenny Lawson has published four New York Times bestsellers, including Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy. She is the owner and proprietress of Nowhere Bookshop, a beloved independent bookstore and bar in San Antonio, Texas. She’s been writing her popular, award-winning blog (thebloggess.com) for over 15 years and has a very large social media following on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Threads.