15 Non-Fiction Books to look forward to in 2023

15 Most Anticipated Non-Fiction Books from 2023: For some, non-fiction is a way to understand the world around them, while others think non-fiction is a method of looking at the mundane world around them through an analytical and critical lens. Non-fiction books, at their best, are informative and illuminative; at the same time, they manage to prove the axiom that reality is stranger than fiction. The touchstones of reality in non-fiction are explored through the genres of self-help, memoirs, scientific breakthrough, and cultural commentary, all of which make non-fiction a compelling read. If you are a non-fiction lover and are willing to explore the new non-fiction releases of 2023, we have curated a list of 15 non-fiction books from 2023 for you to look forward to below.

1. The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise by Pico Iyer

Pages – 240
Publisher – Riverhead Press
Publication Date – January 10, 2023

Pico Iyer’s travelogue covers the author’s search for utopia and the conflicting depictions of utopia through popular culture. He travels from Iran to North Korea and from the home of the Dalai Lama to the ghostly temples of Japan; Iyer’s journey and exploration spanning over 50 years culminates in this observational piece about the mutability of “paradise” as a location. The question of whether the monopoly of this paradise only extends to the underworld or it can be found within humanity if one tries lies at the heart of the book.

Pico Iyer has been based in Western Japan since 1987. He traveled almost everywhere around the world, from Bhutan to Easter Island, North Korea to the City of Angels, and has published two novels, ten works of non-fiction, and introductions to fifty other books as well as screenplays and librettos. Between 2013 to 2016, he also delivered TED talks ranging from topics like ‘The Art of Stillness’ to ‘Where is Home.’

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2. The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging by Samira Mehta

Pages – 200
Publisher – Beacon Press
Publication Date – January 10, 2023

An exploration of the challenges and misunderstandings faced by mixed-race people within the confines of the family and intimate relationships, Samira K. Mehta tackles the preconceived notion of mixed-race people being comfortable in multiple spaces. Mehta chooses to tackle topics of ‘the authenticity test’, mentorship, assimilation, and others in seven pointed essays within this book which weaves in memoir, cultural criticism, and theory. The book thus becomes a scholarly but personal look at being multiracial, the inherent racial assumptions made by people (even family), and how these assumptions about the world by her family become an ingrained attribute about herself.

Samira K. Mehta is the Director of Jewish Studies and an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections of religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, “Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States”, was a National Jewish book award finalist.

3. The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg

Pages – 464
Publisher – Allen Lane
Publication Date – 14th February 2023 (US)

As the blurb for the book states, this is the essential handbook for changing the world. Yes, we still have time to do that. Thunberg, one of the leading climate activists of our time, gathers the perspectives of over one hundred experts across different fields – engineers, economists, mathematicians, historians, philosophers, and leaders of indigenous communities – to equip the citizens of the world with the knowledge to combat an inevitable climate disaster. She also regales us with our experiences in demonstrations, the prevalent practice of greenwashing, and how much information needs to be brought to light so that humanity, as a collective force, can work together to combat this climate crisis.

Greta Thunberg is one of the leading faces of climate activism in the world. Born on January 3rd, 2003, Thunberg attracted attention to her activist ways when she was 15 years old and was spending her Fridays outside the Swedish Parliament to criticize the Government and call for stronger action on climate change. According to the Intelligencer section of the NYMag, Greta Thunberg’s sudden rise to fame in 2019 led her to be gifted the moniker of “Joan of Arc” of climate change, able to command a global army of teenage activists and “waging a rhetorical war against her elders through the weaponry of generational shame”. Her lucidity and clear-eyed approach towards the environmental crisis and humanity, in general, is commendable in bringing about a fresh perspective in understanding the global climate crisis.

4. Microjoys by Cyndie Speigel

Pages – 288
Publisher – Penguin Life
Publication Date – 28th February 2023

After suffering from devastating and unprecedented back-to-back losses in her life, author Cyndie Spiegel began noting down every small moment of joy in her life, be they hidden wisdom or the presence of a friend at the exact right moment, or a cherished recipe of a beverage. Coining these as microjoys, Speigel’s essays and narrative prompts elucidate the microjoys that helped her get through the tough times. These essays will also help the reader learn how to identify the microjoys in their lives. It not only seeks to eradicate grief or help you forget about it but also acts as a glimmer of hope and happiness, helping you move forward.

Cyndie Spiegel is a beloved inspirational speaker, author, and the founder of Dear Grown Ass Women®, an inclusive and highly relatable social community for women above the age of 35. She is also the writer of the best-selling book, “A Year of Positive Thinking: Daily Inspiration, Wisdom & Courage.”

5. Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell

Pages – 400
Publisher – Random House
Publication Date – 7th March 2023

Jenny Odell delved into our relationship with time in her book ‘How to Do Nothing’, in which she discussed how to disconnect ourselves from the frantic world and grant ourselves a moment of quiet contemplation. In ‘Saving Time’, her latest book, she goes on to describe how the clock we are running against is a clock built on the altar of capitalism (a commodified entity), where life becomes a series of moments to be bought and sold with precise efficiency. She describes how this relationship is inextricably connected with the fatalism inherent within the world during modern times and contributes to existential dread. She instead suggests living by a different clock, inspired by the pre-industrialization culture and ecological cues, and identifying and trying to reconnect with the natural rhythm of the world. The book would work very well as an antidote to regaining a sense of time that had gone sideways during the pandemic.

Jenny Odell is an Oakland-based artist, writer, and educator. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, and Sierra Magazine. Her visual work has been exhibited internationally, including as a mural on the side of a Google data center in rural Oklahoma. She is a lecturer in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University.

6. The Real Work – On the Mystery of Mastery by Adam Gopnik

Pages – 256
Publisher – Riverrun
Publication Date – 2nd March 2023

Adam Gopnik, through this book, tries to tackle the fundamental question – What does mastery over a skill entail? To answer that, Gopnik apprentices himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and a driving instructor (from the DMV), among others, trying his hand at stuff thought to be ‘beyond his scope or skill’. Through this exuberant and hilarious book, Gopnik serves to understand humanity’s inherent desire to better themselves.

Adam Gopnik is an American writer and essayist. He is best known as a staff writer for The New Yorker, to which he has contributed non-fiction, fiction, memoir, and criticism since 1986. He is also the author of nine books, including “Paris to the Moon,” “Through the Children’s Gate,” “The King in the Window,” and “A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.” In 2020, his essay – The Driver’s Seat – was cited as the most-assigned piece of contemporary nonfiction in the English-language syllabus.

7. Humanly Possible – Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope by Sarah Bakewell

Pages – 453
Publisher – Vintage Digital
Publication Date – 30th March 2023

Bakewell introduces the readers to humanism – the rational outlook favoring the moral dimensions of human thought over supernatural belief or any sort of human conditioning – through the perspectives of many unique individuals throughout history who had followed the humanist train of thought. It’s Blakewell’s choice of individuals which makes this book unique. From Charles Darwin, Erasmus, and Esperanto to Bertrand Russell and Zora Neale Huston, the diverse voices from different fields of thought fields are brought together in a single book to celebrate humanism while also highlighting its importance and urgency in today’s times.

Sarah Bakewell was born in Bournemouth but spent most of her childhood in Sydney, Australia, traveling throughout Asia with her parents through the hippie trail. She studied philosophy at the University of Essex. She also worked as a curator of early printed books at London’s Wellcome Library for ten years before devoting herself to full-time writing in 2002. She now lives mostly in London and teaches Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford. 

8. On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory by Thomas Hertog

Pages – 330
Publisher – Transworld Digital
Publication Date – 6th April 2023

One of the biggest questions intellectual superstar Stephen Hawking tried to answer was how the universe created conditions conducive to life. While studying The Big Bang of the universe, Hawking stumbled upon the concept of a multiverse produced by multiple Big Bangs. Most of those universes would be too bizarre to harbor life. In the final years, Hawking and his close friend and collaborator, Thomas Hertog, developed a new theory for the cosmos that would explain the emergence of life through a deeper level of evolution within the concept of physics itself. The book calls itself The Final Theory, but it also holds promises for many such theories to come.

Thomas Hertog was born on 27 May 1975. He graduated Summa cum laude from KU Leuven in 1997 with an MSc in Physics. He obtained his Master’s degree at the University of Cambridge in Part III of the Mathematical Tripos and obtained a Ph.D. from Cambridge with a thesis on the origins of cosmic expansion under the supervision of Stephen Hawking. Hertog worked in the field of quantum cosmology and string theory with James Hartle and Stephen Hawking. In 2011, after years of research, they came to a new insight by combining the mathematics of quantum cosmology and that of string theory.

9. The Wager – A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

Pages – 352
Publisher – Doubleday Books
Publication Date – April 18, 2023

In 1741, the HMS Wager wrecked off the coast of Patagonia. Two sets of the crew give two conflicting opinions on what happened during the time they were marooned. According to one part of the crew, they landed in Brazil and were welcomed as heroes, survivors of a fantastical and yet dangerous adventure, while the other set believes that they landed in Chile and accuses the first crew of sailors of not being heroes but mutineers. As charges and counter-charges flew, the Admiralty convened a court-martial to uncover the truth. This story, paced like a thriller, seeks to document the truth of these events.

David Grann is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. He is the author of ‘The Lost City of Z’ and a National Book Award finalist for ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ both of which were chosen as one of the best books of their respective years by renowned publications. Several of his stories, including ‘The Lost City of Z’ and ‘Old Man and the Gun’, have been adapted into major motion pictures.

Also, Read – 10 New Books to Look Forward to in April 2023

10. Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman

Pages – 200 (Kindle Edition)
Publisher – Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publication Date – April 19, 2023

Movie Critic Ian Pen Penman’s love letter to the late West German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945 – 1982) is almost written in the style of Fassbinder himself. Part melodrama, part cold war thriller, and part fragmented essay, Penman’s long-awaited original work are almost ironically written within a self-imposed deadline. As a result, it is a fragmented kaleidoscopic study of Fassbinder in the late 1970s as a pivotal figure in the world of cinema during the transitory period from modernism to post-modernism and the digital revolution slowly butting its inevitable head through.

Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. He began his career as a writer for the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications, including Uncut, Sight & Sound, The Wire, The Face, and The Guardian. He is also the author of ‘Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias’. Penman has been singled out as a source of influence by writers and theorists alike. He is famous for introducing a form of criticism of music knee-deep in allusions to critical theory and art form and is very experimental in structure.

11. Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

Pages – 352
Publisher – Penguin Press
Publication Date – 2nd May 2023

Ben Smith’s Traffic is the story of the two rivals of the tech and information sectors from back when New York was supposed to become the tech mecca of America instead of Silicon Valley. Within a couple of blocks, Nick Denton’s band of misfits and the growing Gawker Empire were on the one side. On the other side were their much sunnier counterparts – Jonah Peretti and his crew at Huffpost and Huffington Media. This was a period of transition when traditional media had already been discredited by their coverage of the Iraqi War, and the digital sphere was looked at as fertile land and a beacon of hope for the truth. Ben Smith chooses to deliver a far more nuanced approach to the material, considering his reputation as Buzzfeed’s Editor-in-Chief. While he spares no one, not even himself, he tells a larger story on how the age of disinformation came into being due to the obsession with click-based journalism.

Ben Smith is an American journalist who is also the co-founder of Semafor, a global news organization he formed with Justin Smith in early 2022. He was previously a media columnist at The New York Times from 2020 to 2022. From 2011 to 2020, he was the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News.

12. Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby

Pages – 304
Publisher – Faber & Faber
Publication Date – May 16, 2023,

Samantha Irby strives to reconcile the glamorous life she finds herself in after the success of her breakout book, ‘Wow No Thank You,’ answering calls from Hollywood, hanging out at the Red Carpet, and having the opportunity to work with the actresses from The Sex and the City. However, she is working to maintain her composure behind all the fame. From agonizing over her rotting teeth to adopting her first dog to her very specific porn searches, Irby paints a hilarious yet truthful and relatable portrait of her life, warts and all. 

Samantha Irby is the creator of the blog “Bitches Gotta Eat,” where she writes humorous anecdotes about her own life ranging from her sex life to her battles with Crohn’s Disease, while also managing to highlight minute observations about modern society. She is the author of New York Times Bestsellers “We Are Never Meeting in Real Life” and “Wow, No Thank You.” She had also been involved as a writer and in a co-producer capacity for “Tuca and Bertie” and HBO’s reboot of “Sex and The City.”

13. The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives by Naoise Mac Sweeney

Pages – 448
Publisher – Dutton
Date of Publication – May 23, 2023,

The concept of Western civilization as a singular entity extending from ancient Greece to modern times, according to historian Naosie Mac Sweeney, is a collective figment of the imagination. Through this text, Mac Sweeney tries to debunk the history and myths of the West. She does that through the perspectives of fourteen important historical figures responsible for shaping humanity’s concept of the West, from Herodotus (a mixed-race migrant) to Phylis Wheatley (an enslaved African-American who had been one of the best poets of pre-19th century America) to Arab scholar Al-Kindi. Her subjects comprise unsung heroes of history to known faces belonging to different religions, possessing different degrees of wealth, education, etc., and how each life gives an idea about the period they lived in and how it contributed to the collective idea of the West, recontextualized through a different lens. According to the blurb, “At this moment of civilizational redefinition, if we are to chart a future for the West, we must properly understand its past.”

Naoíse Mac Sweeney is a classical archaeologist and ancient historian. Since 2020 she has been a Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on aspects of cultural interaction and identity, with a focus on the ancient Greek world and Anatolia from the Iron Age to the Classical period. Her 2018 book Troy: Myth, City, Icon explores the mythic, archaeological, and cultural significance of Troy. It was short-listed for the 2019 PROSE awards in the category of Archaeology & Ancient History.

14. 1000 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife by Ken Jennings

Pages – 304
Publisher – Scribner
Publication Date – June 13, 2023,

Ken Jennings is a Salt Lake City software engineer turned famous author. In 2004, he became a household name overnight thanks to his record-breaking six-month streak on the TV quiz show Jeopardy! During his 75 appearances on the show, Ken won 74 games and $2.52 million, both American game show records. He has since gone on to write several popular non-fiction books, including “Brainiac,” which explores America’s obsession with general trivia, and “Ken Jennings’ Trivia Almanac,” touted as one of the most significant American trivia books ever assembled. He has also penned “Maphead,” a book about his love of geography.

His latest non-fiction book, set to be released in 2023, is a unique travel guide that recommends journeys through different sections of the afterlife. This book is a conglomeration of different visualizations of the afterlife that has been conjured up over 5000 years of human history by historians, poets, prophets, artists, filmmakers, and recent TV showrunners (including those behind “The Good Place”). The index of over 100 different destinations of the afterlife was meticulously researched using sources such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, pop songs, TV series, and motion pictures (including “Field of Dreams” and others). Written in a fascinating, hilarious, and irreverent tone, this book keeps a consistent vibe throughout, making it an entertaining and informative read for anyone interested in exploring the afterlife.

15. Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

Pages – 400
Publication – Hachette
Publication Date – July 18, 2023,

The question of what happens to the waste we throw away is the one that journalist Oliver Frankiln-Wallis tries to answer. He takes his readers on a journey to traverse the multi-billion dollar waste industry whose sole source of profit is the waste left behind by humanity. From the waste-pickers in India to journeying down sewers in the UK and facing nuclear waste and from a ghost-town in Oklahoma to goodwill donations becoming an integral part of landfills in Africa, Franklin-Wallis brings out a thought-provoking first-hand account of how companies handle the waste. Along the way, he meets innovators and theorists planning ideas to build a cleaner, sustainable world before the future of “Wall-E” comes to pass.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis is an award-winning magazine journalist whose writing has appeared in WIRED (where he is a contributing editor), British GQ, The Guardian, The New York Times many other publications. He has written about art fraudsters and deep-sea explorers, reported from Liberia on the ebola virus, and profiled countless startup founders, scientists, film directors, and celebrities.