Bono, Nick Cave, Greta Thunberg, John Creedon: The best upcoming non-fiction reads

As the planet continues to burn, wars continue to rage and nearer to home the blackberries get blacker and there’s a distinct chill to the very early mornings, there’s plenty for non-fiction readers on the bookshelves this new season. There’s history, geography, the natural world and the virtual one, biography and Biden and even bungalows in their bliss. Here’s just a smattering of what’s to come.

hile some of us would take to hiding under the bed rather than discover the whole truth about climate change, Greta Thunberg isn’t hiding. In The Climate Book (Penguin) she rails at us to act and act now. It’s not too late, apparently. In Assaad Razzouk’s Saving the Planet Without the Bullshit (Atlantic) the same argument is put forward, from one of Insta’s most popular “climate influencers”.

Of course, unless elected (and unelected) leaders act fast, we’re all sunk and the “Rule Britannias” are too busy defending the Brexit mess to care, as Guardian political columnist Marina Hyde argues repeatedly in What Just Happened? (Faber), a collection of some of her best columns.

Staying with elected leaders Ben Schreckinger’s The Bidens (Twelve) is an exhaustive family history of Joe Biden’s clan, going right back and promising to expose ancient secrets he would prefer to keep buried. And going further back again in American history, Becoming FDR (Random House) by Jonathan Darman is a bio of Franklin D Roosevelt founded almost exclusively on new material not previously publicised.

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Tommie Gorman looks back at his career

Tommie Gorman looks back at his career

More recently in Irish history we witnessed the arrival of the bungalow. We have oodles of them still, dotted across the landscape like square grey sheep on the hills. Adrian Duncan writes about how the arrival of the book Bungalow Bliss transformed the way we built our houses, in his Little Republics: The Story of Bungalow Bliss (Lilliput). Tommie Gorman has borne witness to more of our recent Irish historical events than most and his memoir, My Life (Allen & Unwin), is a look back at his long career.

Riverdance was another historic watershed in recent Irish history and while we think of the dancing we may not so readily think of the composer responsible for the score. Bill Whelan’s The Road to Riverdance (Lilliput) is both the story of the show and of his own journey, emerging from well known Irish composer to international superstar.

Our magnificent lighthouses (with magnificent photography) are the subject of David Hare’s The Great Lighthouses of Ireland (Gill) which surely has to grace every smart coffee table this autumn. John Creedon, known for campervanning his way across the country with increasing regularity for TV documentaries, concentrates on the myths and legends he’s encountered along the way in An Irish Folklore Treasury (Gill).

There’s more to history than our own, of course, and an ambitious world history of the 20th century is J Bradford DeLong’s magnificently titled Slouching Towards Utopia (John Murray), a journey from the early days of industrial revolution through to the destruction of climate change.

Another, possibly even more ambitious, history book is Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The World (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), a journey through the cultures, peoples and families that shaped our world, including the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Bonapartes, Hapsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Kennedys, the Saudis and Assads.

Probably the biggest 20th century innovation was the internet, although Chris Gray’s The Moderator (Gill) will leave you wondering if it’s really so wonderful, especially with regard to the most popular internet software of all: Facebook. Here Gray lifts the lid on what life was like as a Facebook moderator.

Biographies and memoirs are in bountiful harvest this year

What life was like as a doctor in the NHS is something Adam Kay has already written about, hilariously, in This is Going to Hurt. His new book Undoctored (Trapeze) is about leaving his medical career behind but finding it still following him about. There’s more fun in this second memoir, along with more frustration, of course.

And if your health is interfering with your drinking, why not try moderation? Adrian Chiles’s The Good Drinker (Profile) chronicles his days as a bit of a lush through to his present position, not teetotal but well within healthy alcohol unit limits. He insists it can be done.

Biographies and memoirs are in bountiful harvest this year. Roald Dahl is the subject of Teller of the Unexpected (Head of Zeus) and biographer Matthew Dennison promises the inside story on this strange man and beloved children’s author.

Lucy Worsley’s Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman (Hodder & Stoughton) emerges with lots of material never before documented. An actor who has played many Christie characters is the inimitable Richard E Grant and his memoir, A Pocketful of Happiness (Simon & Schuster) is a love song to his wife who died almost a year ago.

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Nick Cave on stage. Picture by Megan Cullen

Nick Cave on stage. Picture by Megan Cullen

Another actor who’s played Christie roles many times, although he’s better known for Downton Abbey, is Hugh Bonneville. His memoir titled Playing Under the Piano (Little, Brown) is a look behind the scenes, richly entertaining and extremely funny. The Rickman Diaries (Canongate) range from 1993 to 2015 and cover Alan Rickman’s vocation from Hans Gruber to Harry Potter’s Severus Snape and beyond. Friends star Matthew Perry has written Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing (Headline), travelling from Perry’s childhood right through to stardom, his very public addiction issues and beyond.

Editor-in-chief of British Vogue, Edward Enninful, the first black editor on the magazine, writes in his memoir A Visible Man (Bloomsbury) about a childhood looking out his window at firing squads in Ghana, tracing his meteoric rise to the pinnacle of his career. Jonathan Wilson’s Two Brothers (Little, Brown) traces a similar rise to fame from humble beginnings, although here it’s in the world of soccer as he tells the story of Bobby and Jack, the two Charlton brothers.

Nick Cave’s Faith, Hope and Carnage (Canongate), written by Sean O’Hagan, is the culmination of 40 hours of conversation between singer and author on life, love and music.

Author Haruki Murakami reflects on his life as a writer in Novelist as a Vocation (Harvill Secker), where he muses on the novel’s place in society and the duty, if any, of the novelist as contributor to that society.

And finally, Quentin Tarantino’s self-explanatory Cinema Speculation (HarperCollins) is due to hit the shops in November all going well for the cinephiles while Bono’s book Surrender: 40 Songs One Story (Penguin) is due to be published the same month and these words from the author himself, describes it as well as anyone can: “ In the band, in my marriage, in my faith, in my life as an activist, Surrender is the story of one pilgrim’s lack of progress… With a fair amount of fun along the way.”