There are plenty of new and exciting nonfiction titles coming out in 2022! If you’re looking to add some interesting books to your collection, this list will not disappoint. Whether you like memoirs or true stories, these non-fiction finds are the ultimate page-turners. Here are the 8 best nonfiction books readers can look forward to this year.
Strangers to Ourselves
Rachel Aviv
In Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis.
Release Date: September 13, 2022
Fen, Bog and Swamp
Annie Proulx
A lifelong environmentalist, Annie Proulx brings her wide-ranging research and scholarship to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important yet little understood role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that greatly contribute to climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are the earth’s most desirable and dependable resources, and in four stunning parts, Proulx documents the long-misunderstood role of these wetlands in saving the planet.
Taking us on a fascinating journey through history, Proulx shows us the fens of 16th-century England to Canada’s Hudson Bay lowlands.
Release Date: September 27, 2022
The Sporty One
Melanie Chisholm
25 years ago, The Spice Girls, a girl band that began after five women answered an ad in the paper, released their first single. ‘Wannabe’ became a hit and from that moment and, almost overnight, Melanie Chisholm went from small town girl to Sporty Spice, part of one of the biggest music groups in history.
Beginning in her bedroom in the north-west of England dreaming of performing on stage, THE SPORTY ONE follows the meteoric rise of the Melanie and The Spice Girls, from the incredible highs of becoming one of the world’s most recognizable popstars – playing at Wembley.
Release Date: September 27, 2022
120 Seats in a Boiler Room
Lewis Kempfer
A dilapidated boiler room filled with debris and four theater friends looking for a home for their newly created theater company. What could go wrong? Better still, what could go right? The heartwarming story of Nashville’s “scrappy little theater that could,” 120 Seats in a Boiler Room: The Creation of a Courageous Professional Theater, retells the tumultuous journey of the award-winning Boiler Room Theatre from conception to closure. This hybrid memoir journeys with readers, show by show, through the company’s first five burgeoning years as well as offering valuable “Hot Tips” for new and seasoned theater owners and managers alike to boost their expertise.
Release Date: October 11, 2022
Madly, Deeply
Alan Rickman
Alan Rickman remains the one of the most beloved actors of all time across almost every genre in the American and British markets, from his breakout role as Die Hard’s Hans Gruber to his heart-wrenching run as Professor Severus Snape, and beyond. His air of dignity, his sonorous voice, and the knowing wit he brought to each role have captivated viewers across nearly every generation alive today. But Rickman’s artistry wasn’t confined to just his performances. Fans of movies, theater, and memoirs at large will delight in the intimate experience of Rickman detailing the extraordinary and the ordinary in a way that is “anecdotal, indiscreet, witty, gossipy and utterly candid.”
Release Date: October 18, 2022
The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Stacy Schiff
Thomas Jefferson asserted that if there was any leader of the Revolution, “Samuel Adams was the man.” John Adams thought his cousin “the most sagacious politician” of all. With high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, Adams led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history.
Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Stacy Schiff returns Adams to his seat of glory, introducing us to the shrewd, eloquent, and intensely disciplined man who supplied the moral backbone of the American Revolution.
Release Date: October 25, 2022
The Song of the Cell
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Mukherjee begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s, when a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences, and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves—hearts, blood, brains—are built from these compartments. Hooke christened them “cells”.
Release Date: October 25, 2022
Inciting Joy
Ross Gay
In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we expand it. In “We Kin” he thinks about the garden (especially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come on) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in “Share Your Bucket” he explores skateboarding’s reclamation of public space; he considers the costs of masculinity in “Grief Suite”; and in “Through My Tears I Saw,” he recognizes what was healed in caring for his father as he was dying.
Release Date: October 25, 2022