Archives de catégorie : Narrative Nonfiction

THE NIGHT GARDENER de Susannah Charleson

In the spirit of Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller, Fox and I by Catherine Raven, and Wintering by Katherine May, THE NIGHT GARDENER is a beautiful inquiry into the natural world, as well as a contemplation on loss and grief and the hope of re-birth. A perfect mix of narrative, memoir and nature writing.

THE NIGHT GARDENER:
Grief, Regrowth, and the Secret Life of Nature After Dark
by Susannah Charleson
St. Martin’s Press, Fall 2027/Winter 2028

It is another sleepless night for Susannah Charleson, beset by grief over the death of her mother, and waging a years’ long battle with insomnia in the way one does when a loved one is lost and you’re left contemplating life. A shrill cry echoes in the middle of the night (Human? Animal? What?), and Susannah is drawn out onto her porch and suddenly headlong into a childhood memory of that same sound—a fox crying out in the dark—and a youthful fascination with the night that likewise kept her curious younger self up at odd hours. What goes on when humans are sleeping? Susannah remembers wondering. What lives do the plants, animals, and insects lead in the night?

And so, she lights on the idea of using her anxious, sleepless hours in another way—by gardening at night. She studies the medieval practice of two sleeps, in which an individual rests twice each night, divided by an active middle-of-the-night pursuit. She researches the history of the land and the soil on which her house is perched. She gathers tools, gear, seeds, and a research-grade microscope, hatching plans to rise night after night when the rest of the world is sleeping and work outside over the course of a year to transform her disheveled yard into a beautiful garden sanctuary and wildlife habitat. Frozen ground, stubborn roots, a fall that trips her watch alarm, a tornado blowing through, and a four-foot snake with a penchant for surprises make for a bumpy beginning, but as each night passes, dogs by her side, and progress is made, what Susannah discovers in the dark is a revelation. And a salvation.

THE NIGHT GARDENER is a beautiful look into the science of the natural world, as well as into the human soul, an inquiry of the sort that can only happen when the world quiets enough so we can listen, really listen, and see, and not just appreciate but come to understand. 

Susannah Charleson is an award-winning journalist, professor and the author of three books, including the New York Times bestselling Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search and Rescue Dog. Charleson’s work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, The Wall Street Journal, The Denver Post, AARP Magazine, People, The Bark, Life+Dog, and on ABC’s Good Morning America, Fox & Friends, and NPR’s Here & Now.

THE BURIED TEACHESTS d’Annika Blau

An extraordinary true story of family secrets, scandal, and survival.

THE BURIED TEACHESTS
by Annika Blau
on submission
(via The Pilkington Agency)

THE BURIED TEACHESTS follows journalist Annika Blau’s journey after she stumbles upon a secret family legacy. What follows is a remarkable investigation into a family who rose to prominence as purveyors of the famous 4711 cologne, only to be brought down by scandal, internment, and erasure.

A few years ago, Annika discovered that two teachests of mail collected by her great-grandfather had been found during a demolition and auctioned off for a small fortune by strangers. They were lauded as one of the most significant hauls of military mail in Commonwealth history, containing rare correspondence from Sydney’s WW1 prisoner of war camp. But for Annika,they revealed family secrets, silences and shame.

Using the mail as clues, Annika uncovers the riches to rags tale of the relatives who collected it. Charting a path through two world wars and the Great Depression, it’s a story about the family’s rise to Sydney’s high society and their fall to years behind bars as British “war trophies”. At the heart of the story is a mystery: why did Annika’s great-grandfather collect this historic haul only to hide it under some floorboards? Ultimately, she discovers he buried not just the teachests, but the truth of who the family were and where they came from.

At once memoir and investigation, The Buried Teachests sits alongside Wifedom by Anna Funder and The Hare with Amber Eyes as a powerful exploration of identity, loss, and the truths families bury to endure.

Annika Blau is an award-winning journalist, editor and podcaster. She is a reporter for ABC Radio National’s flagship investigative program, Background Briefing. In 2023, she wrote, produced and presented The Buried Teachests: a two-part podcast series for RN’s History Listen program.

HOW TO BE A GOOD GIRL de Jamie Hood

The ambitious and experimental debut by Jamie Hood, author of Trauma Plot, interrogating the “good girl” archetype and the price one pays to embody it.

HOW TO BE A GOOD GIRL
by Jamie Hood
Vintage, March 2025
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

In the thick of winter 2020, when so many books were buried beneath the catastrophe of the COVID-19 news cycle, one unlikely debut seemed to cut through the noise. Jamie Hood’s How to Be a Good Girl was an inventive and hybrid work of self-making, mingling diary entries, poetry, literary criticism, and love letters to interrogate the archetype of the “good girl,” and the ideas of femininity, passivity, desire, and trauma that come with it. Journeying from the ice age to our modern-day climate crisis, it devoured texts as expansive as Levinas and Plath to the Ronettes and after-school specials, all the while asking: what pound of flesh must a woman pay to be seen as “good.”

How to Be a Good Girl was a critical darling when it was first published by Grieveland. The Rumpus praised its “bold vulnerability,” and Vogue named it a Best Book of 2020. Now, Vintage is proud to reissue this provocative and genre-bending debut and find new readers for an exciting, new literary voice.

Jamie Hood is a critic, memoirist, and poet. Her work has appeared in Bookforum, The Baffler, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, Observer, The Drift, SSENSE, Bookforum, Vogue, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

THE ZORG de Siddharth Kara

From Pulitzer finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Cobalt Red: A notorious slave ship incident that led to the abolition of slavery in the UK and sparked the US abolitionist movement.

THE ZORG:
A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
by Siddharth Kara
St. Martin’s Press, October 2025

In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning both “care” and “worry”) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique.

After reaching Africa, The Zorg was captured by a privateer and came under British command. With a new captain and crew, the ship was crammed with 442 slaves, and departed in 1781 for Jamaica. But a series of unpredictable weather events and mistakes in navigation left the ship drastically off course and running out of food and water. So a proposition was put forth: Save the crew and the most valuable of the slaves―by throwing 140 people, mostly women and children, overboard.

What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front page news. For the first time, concepts such as human rights and morality entered the discourse on slavery, in a notorious case that boiled down to a simple but profound question: Were the Africans on board the Zorg people or cargo?

The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history. In this book, Siddharth Kara utilizes primary source research, masterful storytelling, and painstaking investigation to uncover the Zorg’s journey, the lives and fates of the slaves on board, and the mystery of who finally revealed the truth of what happened on the ship.

Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, and activist on modern slavery. He is a British Academy Global Professor and an Associate Professor of Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Nottingham University. Kara has authored several books and reports on slavery and child labor, and he won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. He has also taught courses on modern slavery at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, and Cornell University. He divides his time between the U.K. and the U.S.

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.