December global nonfiction: Six fascinating new books about humanity’s iconic stories

All information sourced from publishers.

Muslim Europe: A Journey in Search of a Fourteen Hundred Year History, Tharik Hussain

In a revelatory journey across the continent, we tread in the footsteps of the first Muslims who arrived on European soil in 647 AD. We travel through Cyprus, Sicily, Malta, Portugal and Spain, learning about the continent’s great Caliphate culture and Muslim commonwealth, encountering red-haired European Sultans and Arabic-speaking Christian Kings, the Sufi lodges of Cyprus and the palaces of Sicily.

Forgotten Muslim pioneers like Abbas Ibn Firnas gave us flight, Ibn Rushd gifted us modern philosophy and the cross-fertilisation of faiths and cultures birthed Europe’s Christian Renaissance. For twelve centuries, Muslim Europe was a sanctuary for the continent’s Jews. Recalling the poignant voices of Hasdai Ibn Shaprut and Abraham Ibn Daoud, Jews flourished under Muslim protection, triggering the Jewish Golden Age.

For the first time, Muslim Europe lays bare the cause of our collective Islamic amnesia by mapping Europe’s “anti-Muslim DNA” through medieval Crusade narratives and nation-building myths. But Islam was never a sideshow to Western culture; it was integral to its development for over 1,400 years.

A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature, Adam Morgan

Already under fire for publishing the literary avant-garde into a world not ready for it, Margaret C Anderson’s cutting-edge magazine The Little Review was a bastion of progressive politics and boundary-pushing writing from then-unknowns like TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Djuna Barnes. And as its publisher, Anderson was a target. From Chicago to New York and Paris, this fearless agitator helmed a woman-led publication that pushed American culture forward and challenged the sensibilities of early 20th-century Americans dismayed by its salacious writing and advocacy for supposed extremism like women’s suffrage, access to birth control, and LGBTQ rights.

But then it went too far. In 1921, Anderson found herself on trial and labelled “a danger to the minds of young girls” by a government seeking to shut her down. Guilty of having serialised James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses in her magazine, Anderson was now not just a publisher but also a scapegoat for regressives seeking to impose their will on a world on the brink of modernisation.

Journalist and literary critic Adam Morgan brings Anderson and her journal to life anew in A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, capturing a moment of cultural acceleration and backlash all too familiar today while shining light on an unsung heroine of American arts and letters. Bringing a fresh eye to a woman and a movement misunderstood in their time, this biography highlights a feminist counterculture that audaciously pushed for more during a time of extreme social conservatism and changed the face of American literature and culture forever.

Battle of the Arctic: The Maritime Epic of World War Two, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore

A deep dive into the Second World War’s maritime epic in the Arctic. In a reconfiguration of recent events in Ukraine, it is 1941, and Russia has been invaded. The terms of the new alliance were that Western nations would ship urgently needed war materials to Russia via the shortest but most dangerous route: sailing north of the Arctic Circle while being hunted by U-boats, the Luftwaffe, and a surface fleet spearheaded by Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. This endeavour was called the Arctic convoys.

Battle of the Arctic is about the conflict and naval battles that unfolded while Allied naval and merchant seamen, airmen, submariners, soldiers and intelligence officers delivered on this wartime commitment to Russia from 1941-45, passing through terrific storms, snow, ice and Arctic mirages. When ships went down in seas so cold that a man could die after just five minutes of immersion, it triggered events reminiscent of the do-or-die moments during the sinking of the Titanic.

Men perished one by one in lifeboats, and as castaways on deserted Arctic islands where they were stalked by polar bears. Frostbitten and wounded survivors ended up in Russian hospitals so primitive that amputations were carried out without anaesthetics. Other survivors, while stranded for months in the communist state they were aiding, experienced the murky worlds of the NKVD and the gulags as well as famine and prostitution.

Although during World War Two, the relationship with Russia was far from smooth sailing, this wartime sacrifice for Stalin’s Soviet Union is today used by both parties as the historical precedent for future cooperation between Russia and the West.

The Curious Case of Mike Lynch: The Improbable Life and Death of a Tech Billionaire, Katie Prescott

On the morning of August 19, 2024, the Bayesian yacht tragically sank off the coast of Sicily, taking with it the lives of Mike Lynch, his daughter and five others. Hours earlier, Lynch’s associate and co-defendant in one of the biggest fraud cases in Silicon Valley history, Stephen Chamberlain, was hit by a car in Cambridge and killed.

The odds of these two deaths occurring together were estimated at four in one billion.

Drawing on extensive research and exclusive access to key sources, journalist Katie Prescott forensically explores the life and death of this elusive maverick. Prescott guides us from Lynch’s humble beginnings, through his meteoric rise to CEO of Autonomy, and beyond to a vicious legal battle lasting more than a decade following the 2011 sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for more than £11 bn. A truly brilliant feat of investigative reporting, this is a tale where nothing is quite as it appears.

Hate: The Uses of a Powerful Emotion, Şyeda Kurt, translated from the German by Jackie de Pont

Who is allowed to hate? Hatred, this grating, corrosive feeling, is omnipresent, roaring from the streets or whispered in bourgeois homes. It thrives in parliamentary speeches, conspiracy theorists’ fantasies and children’s bedrooms – and certainly not in secret, even if many would like to see it restricted there.

Kurt frees hatred from its banishment and sets out on the trail of its potential for resistance. She is particularly interested in people as subjects of hatred in a capitalist, racist and patriarchal world. Who are these haters and what power relations do they base themselves on? Who is allowed to hate? Which feelings paralyse, and which ones guide us to a fairer, more caring society?

Quantum 2.0: The Past, Present, and Future of Quantum Physics, Paul Davies

Scientist Paul Davies tells the gripping story of how, beginning with an iconic mathematical equation in the 1920s, a radical new theory of nature – quantum mechanics – burst upon the modern world, and how today we are on the cusp of the second great quantum technology revolution.

Quantum 2.0 reveals how exotic states of matter that have no counterpart in the everyday world are being harnessed to enable forms of teleportation and “spooky” telepathic links between remote places. Powerful new tools such as quantum computers, quantum cryptography and the quantum internet have attracted billions of dollars of investments, triggering a frantic quantum arms race. And appearing on the horizon is the most awesome and game-changing prospect of all – quantum AI.

Yet underpinning this dazzling promise lies a paradox. Although quantum mechanics is the most successful scientific theory ever, quantum systems possess properties that defy intuition and shred everyday notions of reality. Albert Einstein could never quite believe it. And decades after Erwin Schrödinger introduced his famous cat paradox, scientists are still divided over how to make sense of the weird quantum realm, one where ghostly quantum particles produce tiny forces in nanotechnology, cause black holes to evaporate – and may even be making the universe expand faster and faster. Indeed, cosmologists believe, the imprint of a quantum process remains etched into the afterglow of the Big Bang.

Quantum 2.0 takes the reader gently from the basic concepts to the cutting edge, inviting us all to peek into the new wonderland of quantum physics and glimpse its stunning implications.