9 narrative non-fiction books people are reading in 2026

Patrick Radden Keefe, known for Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, turns his attention to London in this account of the 2019 death of nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler, who fell from a riverside apartment tower into the Thames. Brettler had spent months posing as the son of a Russian oligarch, a fiction that drew him into the orbit of a London businessman named Akbar Shamji and a figure known only as Indian Dave. Scotland Yard treated the death as a suicide, a conclusion Brettler’s parents refused to accept. Keefe follows the family’s own investigation as it uncovers a version of London built on private members’ clubs, unregulated wealth and money whose origins nobody asks about too closely. The book moves between the specifics of one death and the broader machinery of the city that allowed the circumstances around it to happen. It follows the pattern Keefe is known for: a single case used to open up a wider institutional picture.

Matthew Desmond’s Evicted follows eight families in Milwaukee as they navigate the private rental market at its most precarious end, from a trailer park to a run-down rooming house on the city’s north side. Desmond, a sociologist, lived alongside his subjects for over a year to document how eviction functions not as a symptom of poverty but as one of its drivers, pushing tenants out of jobs, schools and communities in a cycle that is difficult to break. The book follows landlords as closely as tenants, including one who owns dozens of properties in the city’s poorest areas, laying out the financial logic of the low-income rental market alongside its human cost. Desmond won the Pulitzer Prize for the book, which is built almost entirely from direct observation and case files rather than statistics presented on their own. It remains one of the most cited examples of narrative non-fiction applied to social policy.

John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood documents the rise and collapse of Theranos, the Silicon Valley company founded by Elizabeth Holmes that claimed to have developed technology capable of running hundreds of tests from a single drop of blood. Carreyrou, a Wall Street Journal reporter, spent years investigating the gap between the company’s public claims and what its own employees knew about the unreliability of its testing devices. The book follows Holmes and her partner Sunny Balwani as they built a company valued at nine billion dollars on the strength of demonstrations that, according to Carreyrou’s reporting, were often staged or falsified, while patients received inaccurate results from machines still in development. It also follows the whistleblowers inside Theranos who risked their careers to speak to Carreyrou despite pressure from the company’s lawyers. The book is frequently used as a case study in corporate fraud and remains one of the most read business narratives of the past decade.

Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken follows Louis Zamperini from his childhood in California and his career as a competitive runner who qualified for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, through his service as a bombardier in the Second World War. After his aircraft crashed into the Pacific, Zamperini survived forty-seven days adrift on a life raft with two crewmates, fending off sharks and starvation, before being captured by the Japanese navy. The bulk of the book covers his time in prisoner of war camps, where he was repeatedly targeted by a particular guard, and his difficult return to civilian life afterwards. Hillenbrand, who also wrote Seabiscuit, built the book from Zamperini’s own accounts along with military records and interviews, producing a work that has stayed in print and popular since its 2010 publication and was later adapted into a film.

Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air is a first-person account of the May 1996 disaster on Mount Everest, during which eight climbers died after a storm hit the mountain while several commercial expeditions were attempting the summit on the same day. Krakauer, a journalist and climber, was on the mountain on assignment for Outside magazine and was part of one of the expeditions caught in the storm. The book reconstructs the decisions, delays and equipment problems that contributed to the deaths, including the actions of guides Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, both of whom died on the mountain. Krakauer also examines the commercialisation of Everest, where paying clients with limited high-altitude experience were, by the mid-1990s, routinely being guided towards the summit. The account has been disputed by some of the other climbers involved, particularly over Krakauer’s portrayal of Russian guide Anatoli Boukreev, but it remains one of the defining books on the mountain and on the risks of commercial mountaineering generally.

Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method examines the mass killings that took place in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966, when the military, with support from the United States, targeted members and suspected members of the Communist Party, resulting in the deaths of an estimated half a million to a million people. Bevins, a journalist who spent years reporting from Indonesia and Brazil, argues that the tactics used there, coordinated violence against the political left backed by American intelligence, became a template referenced and in some cases directly applied in other countries during the Cold War, including Brazil, Chile and Guatemala. The book combines archival research with interviews of survivors who lived through the killings and their aftermath, many of whom had never spoken publicly about what happened. It positions the events in Indonesia not as an isolated episode but as a hinge point in twentieth-century Cold War history, one that has received comparatively little attention in Western accounts of the period.

Jeannette Walls’ memoir The Glass Castle recounts her childhood moving between towns across the American Southwest and later West Virginia with parents who rejected conventional stability. Her father, Rex, was intelligent and charismatic but struggled with alcoholism, while her mother, Rose Mary, prioritised her own art over providing for her four children, at points leaving them to find food and shelter on their own. The book follows the family through poverty, frequent moves made to avoid bill collectors, and the children’s growing recognition that they would need to build lives separate from their parents to escape the instability at home. Walls eventually left for New York and became a journalist, and the book closes with an account of her parents’ later years, by which point they were living without a permanent address by choice. It has become one of the most widely read American memoirs since its 2005 publication and is often taught as an example of the form applied to personal history rather than reportage.

Julian Sancton’s Neptune’s Fortune tells the story of the San José, a Spanish galleon that sank off the coast of Cartagena in 1708 during a battle with British warships, taking an estimated billion dollars in gold and silver to the seabed along with it. The book follows Roger Dooley, an American diver with little formal training who spent four decades searching for the wreck, working through Spanish colonial archives, competing with rival treasure hunters and eventually falling out with the government of the country where he had built his search. Sancton, who also wrote Madhouse at the End of the Earth, splits the book across three periods: the eighteenth-century naval battle that sank the ship, Dooley’s long personal pursuit of it and the legal and ethical questions that followed once its likely location was identified, including disputes between Colombia, Spain and Indigenous groups over who has a claim to what lies on the ocean floor. It treats a historical event and a present-day search as two halves of the same story.

Frequently asked questions

What is narrative non-fiction? It is factual writing that uses the techniques of storytelling, such as scene setting, character and pacing, to present real events, people or subjects rather than presenting them as a straightforward report or academic study.

Which of these books is a memoir rather than reportage? The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir, drawn from Walls’ own life. The other eight books are works of reported non-fiction, built from interviews, archives and documented research rather than the author’s personal experience, with the partial exception of Into Thin Air, where Jon Krakauer was also a direct participant in the events he describes.

Are any of these books connected to each other? Several deal with overlapping themes rather than shared events. The CIA Book Club and The Jakarta Method both examine covert American action during the Cold War, from opposite ends of the spectrum between soft power and violence. London Falling and Bad Blood both concern deception involving large sums of money, one in London’s private wealth world and the other in Silicon Valley.

Do any of these books have film or television adaptations? Unbroken was adapted into a 2014 film directed by Angelina Jolie. Bad Blood has been the basis for television and documentary treatments of the Theranos story. The Glass Castle was adapted into a 2017 film starring Brie Larson.

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