November global nonfiction: Start a new month with these recent books, including Orhan Pamuk’s

Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022, Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap

Every day for over a decade, Orhan Pamuk has written and drawn in his notebooks. Translated into English for the first time, these stunning snapshots of his life and creative process are a wonderful accompaniment to his bestselling works of fiction.

They include daily events and reflections, dialogues with his imagined characters, notes on his works-in-progress, his experience of writer’s block and the unfolding of his difficulties with the current Turkish government. Each entry is illustrated in the author’s uniquely idiosyncratic and charming style.

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham, Lucky Hughes-Hallett

As King James I’s favourite, Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, advisor and lover. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was similarly enthralled and made Buckingham his best friend and mentor. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skilful player of the political game, Buckingham rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. He became one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Englishmen at the heart of seventeenth-century royal and political life.

The book transports the reader into a courtly world of masques and dancing, exquisite clothes, the art of Rubens and Van Dyck, gender fluidity, same-sex desire, and appallingly rudimentary medicine. Witch hunts coexisted with Descartian rationality and public opinion was becoming a political force. Falling from grace spectacularly, Buckingham came to represent everything that was wrong with the country.

Warhol After Warhol: Power and Money in the Modern Art World, Richard Dorment

Late one afternoon in the winter of 2003 art critic Richard Dorment answered a telephone call from a stranger. The caller was Joe Simon, an American film producer and art collector. He was ringing at the suggestion of David Hockney, his neighbour in Malibu. A committee of experts called the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board had declared the two Warhols in his collection to be fake. He wanted to know why and thought Dorment could help.

This call would mark the beginning of an extraordinary story that would play out over the next ten years and would involve a cast of characters straight out of fiction. From rock icons and film stars; art dealers and art forgers; to a murdered Russian oligarch and a lawyer for the mob; from courtrooms to auction houses: all took part in a bitter struggle to prove the authenticity of a series of paintings by the most famous American artist of the 20th century.

Human Peoples: On the Genetic Traces of Human Evolution, Migration and Adaptation, Lluís Quintana-Murci

We are living through a revolution in knowledge. Over the past twenty years, genetics has shed light on the history of humanity in unprecedented ways. It enables us to study an individual’s genome, compare it with populations worldwide, and understand its place in human history.

Lluís Quintana-Murci, one of the scientists at the forefront of this research reveals how population genetics is transforming our understanding of who we are. Thanks to numerous discoveries, we now know how Homo sapiens spread around the world: from their exit from Africa approximately 60,000 years ago to the recent settlement of the remote lands of Polynesia within the last millennia. Population genetics has also shown that humans mixed with now-extinct species, including Neanderthals, enabling them to adapt to new environments and survive diseases. These cutting-edge genetic findings will shape our future too, offering the key to medicine tailored to individuals.

But the greatest revelation of population genetics is that we are all mixed and the product of our ancestors’ long odyssey of migrations and adaptations across the globe. As Quintana-Murci explains, without diversity, without difference, there is no evolution.

Lost Wonders: 10 Tales of Extinction from the 21st Century, Tom Lathan

Many scientists believe that we are currently living through the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, with species disappearing at a rate not seen for tens of millions of years – a trend that will only accelerate as climate change and other pressures intensify. What does it mean to live in such a time? And what exactly do we lose when a species goes extinct?

In a series of fascinating encounters with subjects that are now nowhere to be found on Earth – from giant tortoises to minuscule snails the size of sesame seeds, from ocean-hopping trees to fish that wag their tails like puppies – Tom Lathan brings these lost wonders briefly back to life and gives us a tantalising glimpse of what we have lost within our own lifetime.

Lost Wonders is an intimate portrait of the species that have only recently vanished from our world and an urgent warning to hold on all the more tightly to those now slipping from our grasp.

This Fiction Called Nigeria: The Struggle for Democracy, Adéwálé Májà-Pearce

Essayist and critic Adewale Maja-Pearce delivers a mordant verdict on Nigeria’s crisis of democracy. A mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, the most populous country in Africa was fabricated by British colonisers at the turn of the 20th century. In the years since its independence in 1960, Nigeria spent an unbroken quarter century as a military dictatorship. Yet the blessings of today’s democracy are unclear to many, especially among the more than half of the population living in extreme poverty. Buffeted by unemployment, saddled with debt, menaced by bandits and Islamic fundamentalists, Nigeria faces the threat of disintegration.

Májà-Pearce shows that recent mobilisations against police brutality, sexism, and homophobia reveal a powerful undercurrent of discontent, especially among the country’s youth. If Nigeria has a future, he shows here, it is in the hands of young people unwilling to go on as before.

Information sourced from publishers.