Adding nonfiction to your stacks is always a must for growing in your knowledge of real-world events and the endeavor certainly feeds the curious mind. I am always on the lookout for upcoming nonfiction reads and it is always a pleasure to share what I’m interested in learning.
I am currently reading through the nonfiction books I have already acquired and I’m enjoying them greatly and have learned a great deal more. Meanwhile, I’m collecting nonfiction (that sounds interesting) to read in the near future. They are not listed in any order and one of them is being published in November of this year and the others next year.
What nonfiction books are you on the lookout for? Do any of these books sound intriguing to you?
Stephanie
In Search of Ancient Trees: A Wayward Quest for America’s Oldest Living Things by Greg Melville
Expected Publish Date Mar 16, 2027 by @AbramsPress
Description
For readers of Bill Bryson and Ed Yong, a cross-country road trip to America’s ancient trees, reveling in natural wonder and exploring what old trees reveal about our environment, our history, and our future
We often think of ourselves as the stewards of the forests. But since before the spark of civilization, trees have been silent engineers of ecosystems and even shaped human evolution. Trees made us, have sustained us, and we couldn’t survive without them. The problem is we don’t know how to stop killing them.
Journalist Greg Melville set out in his family camper van—nicknamed the Mystery Machine—to see the extraordinary arboreal survivors across the United States while he still could. By car, foot, subway, and kayak, he visits the oldest of the old trees, Methuselah, a 4,857-year-old bristlecone pine, the tallest tree in the world, Hyperion, a 380-foot coast redwood that is between 600 and 800 years old, and the biggest tree, General Sherman, a giant sequoia with a 36-foot diameter. He stops in Austin, Texas, for a famous crime scene, in Utah for the world’s largest living organism in Pando, a quaking aspen clone that covers over 100 acres, and in Manhattan for an unassuming elm tree that predates the United States.
Blending adventurous travel, history, and natural history, Melville explores what happened to America’s trees, wonders at the survivors, and uncovers the lessons they can teach all of us. In Search of Ancient Trees is insightful and entertaining, a walk in the woods like no other.
Dead in the Water: The Lost Passengers of the Titanic by Caitlin Doughty
Expected Publish April 6, 2027 by W. W. Norton & Company
New York Times best-selling author Caitlin Doughty presents Titanic like never before: through the stories of those who died—and what happened to the bodies.
Millions of people trust Caitlin Doughty to explore dark subjects with empathy and humor. Now, in her most ambitious work to date, Doughty explains what actually happened to the 1,500 people who died the night of history’s most famous shipwreck. Alongside white-knuckle tales of survival and mass death during the disaster, Doughty foregrounds the haunting stories of lesser-known victims, profiles the telegraph-cable-repairmen–turned–seafaring-undertakers who pulled the floating bodies from the wreck site in the North Atlantic and explores how a salvage company came to control the human artifacts—shoes, hairbrushes—carried and worn by the dead passengers and crew. Along the way she shares the surprising science of death at sea, and how the Titanic tragedy led to mass casualty protocols still used today. The first book of its kind on one of the most famous events in human history, Dead in the Water explores how we face the void and accept (or refuse to accept) death in extreme conditions.
By Definition: The Surprising History of the English Dictionary by Peter Sokolowski
Expected Publish February 23, 2027 by @StMartinsPress
A veteran Merriam-Webster editor celebrates the world’s biggest language through the dictionary
In this engaging narrative lexicographer Peter Sokolowski uncovers the history of our language in the dictionary definitions written from Shakespeare’s time to ours. English is always changing. And so our dictionaries present a paradox; they represent stability and standards, but they also constantly add new usage and new words (and discard some old ones). The dictionary is, by definition, the story of the way we express culture, authority, and identity with our words.
We haven’t always had dictionaries. In Renaissance England, explaining the meanings of words meant translating the Latin of the Church and the French of the Norman bureaucracy. A linguistic class system separated these “hard words” of privilege, prestige, and power from the native English words of hearth and home. Thus, the most common words in English–from go and green to mother and father–were not given definitions in dictionaries until the mid-18th century.
Dictionaries developed as the language grew, and definitions by British Samuel Johnson and American Noah Webster are compared through Sokolowski’s close readings, which take us through the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary and into current online references. Many questions are answered along the way, Is irregardless a word? Does literally have only one meaning? And what exactly are users looking up today? Full of fun examples, and peeks into the mysterious world of dictionary creation, this book will delight word lovers of every kind.
Harboring the Enemy (The Civil War Heroine History Forgot) by R.C. Duffy
Expected Pub Date Nov 7, 2026 by @AmericanLegacyMedia
Charleston, 1861. Anna Itgen is a twenty-year-old German immigrant, newly married and expecting her first child, when cannon fire erupts from Fort Sumter and upends her world. Within months, her husband is killed at the Battle of Port Royal.
As a single mother, Anna works alongside her neighbors to survive the Union blockade, all while a Confederate prison sits within view of her window, packed with starving captives. She begins slipping bread to guards and prisoners alike. Then she hides an escaped Union officer in her cellar and is summoned before the Confederate provost marshal on charges that could hang her.
Choosing her integrity over self-preservation, Anna Itgen risked everything for a stranger who wore the wrong uniform.
Beneath Waves and Shadows (The Sinking of the Steamship Valencia) by Tyler Hooper
Expected Pub Date Jan 19, 2027 by @StMartins Press
With the suspense of a thriller and the emotional depth of human drama, Beneath Waves and Shadows is the untold, meticulously researched story of survival after a 1906 shipwreck in the Pacific Northwest.
On a mild January day in 1906, the Valencia steamed out of San Francisco and began the four-day voyage to Seattle. Though it was a routine journey, the crew was well aware of the dangers of sailing along the west coast of Vancouver Island, an area known as the “Graveyard of the Pacific”, a place of violent storms, dense fog, rocky shoals, and fearsome currents.
The Valencia’s captain, Oscar Marcus Johnson, was an experienced mariner, but on the third day at sea, he lost his bearing in the increasingly thick winter weather. The vessel’s hull was ripped apart on Vancouver Island’s rocky shore, setting in motion a multiday struggle for survival that revealed both the sea’s terrible power and the remarkable bravery of passengers, crew, and rescuers alike.
Of the approximately 165 souls who left San Francisco, fewer than 40 would survive.
Hooper spent more than a decade immersed in the story of the Valencia. He hiked the same wild stretches of Vancouver Island coastline where the tragedy unfolded in 1906 and combed through thousands of pages of letters, newspapers, and official reports. Drawing from survivor testimonies, and a powerful interview with one of the survivors’ descendants, Hooper brings to life a deeply human story of courage, chaos and survival at sea.
