Five Books

Five Books

We invite specialists to share their top five book picks in their field and discuss their choices in an interview format. Our website features a collection of over 1,700 interviews, showcasing around 8,000 book recommendations. We add at least two new interviews every week. Five Books is a part of the Amazon Associate program, allowing us to earn a commission on eligible purchases.

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English
Online/Digital

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59
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Global

#68218

United States

#36208

Science and Education/Philosophy

#5

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Articles

  • 3 days ago | fivebooks.com | Howard Amos |Lucy Ash |Benjamin Nathans |Alexei Navalny

    Russia is a lot in the news at the moment, but the Pushkin House Book Prize has been around for a while. For those who don’t know it, could you say a bit about the prize and what kind of books you, as judges, were looking for? The Pushkin House Book Prize has been awarded annually since 2013 to celebrate the best nonfiction book written in relation to Russia. Indeed, the judges’ attention extends beyond Russia. Russia’s imperial legacies, for example, are very much on the agenda now.

  • 1 week ago | fivebooks.com | Edward Wong |Anne Applebaum |Mishal Husain |Victoria Amelina

    At the Edge of Empire: A Family's Reckoning with China Growing up, Edward Wong didn’t hear his father talk much about the older man’s life in China. Perhaps that’s why Wong found himself retracing the elder Wong’s footsteps through the borderlands of the Chinese empire, in his work as the New York Times’s Beijing correspondent.

  • 2 weeks ago | fivebooks.com | Jack Kerouac |Richard Ford |Anne Tyler |John Updike

    What is it about a road trip that makes it a good basis or structure for a novel? Good question. I think partly it is just an adventure story. The idea of a lot of adventure stories is that you walk out of the house, then something happens to you that changes you. The road trip is a version of that story, but it also has some difficulties as a structure for a plot.

  • 3 weeks ago | fivebooks.com | Neneh Cherry |Rachel Clarke |Chloe Dalton |Clare Mulley

    The Women’s Prize for Nonfiction is still a relatively new prize. Perhaps you might talk us through its aims and the type of book you are seeking to reward. This is the second year of the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction. We are the younger sister of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

  • 1 month ago | fivebooks.com | J.K. Rowling |Sophie Roell

    Given the development of the characters and the plot over the course of the series, it’s important to read them in order. We’ve listed them individually to give a sense of what each of them is about, but it’s also quite nice to buy them all together as a Harry Potter: The Complete Series box set, particularly if you’re buying them as a gift for a child. We also have recommendations of illustrated Harry Potter books, put together by our children’s editor.