I have been through all of the 2021 publishers catalogues that could lay my hands on (21 so far and still a few missing too). I have extracted all the books that I really like the look of. Most are non-fiction, as you have probably come to expect by now, but there are a smattering of fiction, sci-fi and the odd poetry in there.
Allen Lane
Mission Economy – Mariana Mazzucato
Math Without Numbers – Milo Beckman
Finding the Mother Tree – Suzanne Simard
Worn – Sofi Thanhauser
Ice Rivers – Jemma Wadham
Shape – Jordan Ellenberg
Bloomsbury
Male Tears – Benjamin Myers
A Still Life – Josie George
The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing – Mark Kurlansky
The Glitter in the Green – Jon Dunn
When America Stopped Being Great – Nick Bryant
I Belong Here – Anita Sethi
About Britain – Tim Cole
Kintsugi – Bonnie Kemske
Shedding the Shackles – Lynne Stein
Cuba – Mike Gonzalez
Going Dark – Julia Ebner
The Trick – William Leith
Sardinia – Edward Burman
Tangier – Richard Hamilton
Handmade – Anna Ploszajski
The Brilliant Abyss – Helen Scales
Much Ado About Mothing – James Lowen
Forecast – Joe Shute
Heathland – Clive Chatters
Treasured Islands – Peter Naldrett
Bodley Head
Under A White Sky – Elizabeth Kolbert
A Most Remarkable Creature – Jonathan Meiburg
The Day The World Stops Shopping – J. B. MacKinnon
British Library
The Book Lover’s Bucket List – Caroline Taggart
Spaceworlds – Edited by Mike Ashley
Future Crimes – Edited by Mike Ashley
Canongate
Thin Places – Kerri ní Dochartaigh
The Secret History of Here – Alistair Moffat
Chatto & Windus
Heavy Light – Horatio Clare
Snakes And Ladders – Selina Todd
Letters To Camondo – Edmund de Waal
Eland
Borderlines – Charles Nicholl
Somebody Else – Charles Nicholl
Letters from Egypt – Lucie Duff Gordon
The Turkish Embassy Letters – Mary Wortley Montagu
Three Cities of Morocco – Jerome and Louis Tharaud
Elliott & Thompson
The Future of You – Tracey Follows
Earthed A Memoir – Rebecca Schiller
The Pay Off – Gottfried Leibbrandt and Natasha De Terán
Lobby Life – Carole Walker
Beside the Seaside – Ian Walker
Faber & Faber
Britain Alone – Philip Stephens
Gollancz
What Abigail Did That Summer – Ben Aaronovitch
Harvill Secker
Seed to Dust – Marc Hamer
99 Green Maps To Change The World –
Head of Zeus
Languages Are Good For Us – Sophie Hardach
Voyagers – Nicholas Thomas
The Gardens of Mars Madagascar – John Gimlette
How Britain Ends English Nationalism and the Rebirth of Four Nations – Gavin Esler
The Physics of Climate Change – Lawrence Krauss
The Wild Isles – Patrick Barkham (ed.)
Headline
The Circling Sky – Neil Ansell
Icon Books
Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars – Kate Greene
Shearwater – Roger Morgan-Grenville
Sealand – Dylan Taylor-Lehman
Imperial Mud – James Boyce
Half Lives – Lucy Jane Santos
John Murray
Hot Stew – Fiona Mozley
Extraterrestrial – Avi Loeb
Futureproof – Kevin Roose
Super Senses – Emma Young
The Hunt For Mount Everest – Craig Storti
Outlandish – Nick Hunt
Checkmate In Berlin – Giles Milton
A Length Of Road – Robert Hamberger
Jonathan Ball
Hitler’S Spies – Evert Kleynhans
Jonathan Cape
Ransom – Michael Symmons Roberts
Waypoints – Robert Martineau
Little Toller
They are planning on releasing ten books in 2021, I have only been told about these so far:
Swifts – Charles Foster
Long Field – Pamela Petro
Millstone Grit
Michael Joseph
A Walk from the Wild Edge – Jake Tyler
A History of What Comes Next – Sylvain Neuvel
Peter 2.0 – Peter Scott-Morgan
A New History of Britain – Philip Parker
Latitude – Nick Crane
12 Birds to Save Your Life – Charlie Corbett
Oneworld
Weirdest Maths At the Frontiers of Reason – David Darling and Agnijo Banerjee
Why You Won’t Get Rich – Robert Verkaik
Some Assembly Required – Neil Shubin
The Art of Patience – Sylvain Tesson, Tr. Frank Wynne
Social Warming – Charles Arthur
The Last Stargazers – Emily Levesque
Pan Macmillan
Hunter Killer Spy – James E Mack
Particular Books
Slow Rise – Robert Penn
Birdsong in a Time of Silence – Steven Lovatt
Lev’s Violin – Helena Attlee
Picador
The Quiet Americans – Scott Anderson
The System – Robert B. Reich
The Book Collectors of Daraya – Delphine Minoui
A World on the Wing – Scott Weidensaul
The Stone Age – Jen Hadfield
The Book of Difficult Fruit – Kate Lebo
Revolt – Nadav Eyal
Everybody – Olivia Laing
A Place For Everything – Judith Flanders
Wayfinding – Michael Bond
Profile Books
Notes From Deep Time – Helen Gordon
Field Work – Bella Bathurst
The Greywacke – Nick Davidson
Mountain Tales – Saumya Roy
How to Spend a Trillion Dollars – Rowan Hooper
Quercus
Sad Songs – Laura Barton
A history of the universe in 100 stars – Florian Freistetter
The Plant Hunter’s Atlas – Ambra Edwards
Reaktion Books
An Inky Business – Matthew J. Shaw
Nature Fast and Nature Slow – Nicholas P. Money
Ash – Edward Parker
Cherry – Constance L. Kirker and Mary Newman
Sandstone Press
The Actuality – Paul Braddon
The Weekend Fix – Craig Weldon
Saraband
Westering – Laurence Mitchell
The Mahogany Pod – Jill Hopper
Scribe Books
The Ghost in the Garden – Jude Piesse
The Rare Metals War – Guillaume Pitron
Waters of the World – Sarah Dry
September Publishing
Two Lights – James Roberts
Serpent’s Tail
The Disconnect – Roisin Kiberd
Square Peg
Gardening For Bumblebees – Dave Goulson
Transworld
The Wild Track – Margaret Reynolds
Red Line – Joby Warrick
Elegy For a River – Tom Moorhouse
Woodston – John Lewis-Stempel
The Age of Unpeace – Mark Leonard
Taking on Gravity – Richard Browning
The Spy who was left out in the Cold – Tim Tate
Two Roads
Back To nature – Chris Packham & Megan McCubbin
The Lip – Charlie Carroll
Windswept – Annabel Abbs
W&N
Kim and Jim – Michael Holzman
The Life Scientific – Anna Buckley
How to Read Numbers – Tom Chivers and David Chivers
White Rabbit
The Foghorn’s Lament – Jennifer Lucy Allan
NEW ADDITIONS:
Salt Publishing
White Spines – Nicholas Royle
Duckworth
Deeper Into The Wood Ruth Pavey
Chelsea Green
From What Is to What If – Rob Hopkins
Barn Club – Robert Somerville
Wild Nights Out – Chris Salisbury
William Collins
The Black Ridge – Simon Ingram
Islands of Abandonment – Cal Flyn
Land – Simon Winchester
River Kings – Cat Jarman
The Wood Age – Roland Ennos
A Curious Boy – Richard Fortey
The Fragile Earth – Ed. David Remnick & Henry Finder
Restoring the Wild – Roy Dennis
Einstein’s Fridge – Paul Sen
Truth is Beautiful – David McCandless
Beak, Tooth and Claw – Mary Colwell
Swifts and Us – Sarah Gibson
Bat, Ball and Field – Jon Hotten
Noise – Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass R. Sunstein
Phosphorescence – Julia Baird
Mother of Invention – Katrine Marçal
4th Estate
What If We Stopped Pretending? – Jonathan Franzen
Sea State – Tabitha Lasley
Albert and the Whale – Philip Hoare
How to be Sad – Helen Russell
Hummingbird Salamander – Jeff VanderMeer
Thinking Better – Marcus du Sautoy
Granta
The Language of Thieves – Martin Puchner
Wars of the Interior – Joseph Zárate Tr Annie McDermott
Karachi Vice – Samira Shackle
Comic Timing – Holly Pester
Undreamed Shores – Frances Larson
Had I Known – Barbara Ehrenreich
The End of Bias – Jessica Nordell
Comrade Aeon’s Field – Emma Larkin
Any that take you fancy? And are there any that you know about that you think that I should know too?
Wow, so much work must have gone into making this list! I never look at catalogues, just relying on word of mouth and seeing new books via Twitter, Instagram, publisher newsletters, etc. You’ve alerted me to a few I’m interested in and didn’t know about — Bathurst, Dunn, Hardach. I’m also keen on the Laing and Mozley, and I have proof copies of Kerri ní Dochartaigh and Josie George’s books.
It is not so much work. I have a pre-prepared list of publishers that I work through and pick the ones that I fancy.
I’m trying not to look too closely! I’ll be interested to see what you review as usual, though!
There are some good looking books on the list, Liz.
It’s a great list and there are some on there that appeal to me too. At the risk of opening a can of worms, I’m wondering if you ever consider independently published books as well/instead?
Thanks, Jessica. When you say independently published books, do you mean those published by independent publishers, or self published books?
Self published – but would you also make a distinction between small independent publishers and the big guns?
I do read the odd self-published book but tend to avoid now after a run-in with an author and the aggressive pushing of their book a number of years ago. I read a lot from independent publishers in fact eight of the top ten publishers were from independent publishers this year. My stats are on this link
I understand – didn’t mean to get at you personally (and have had the same problem after giving certain sp books “only” 3 star reviews). But some of us self publish high quality books and are at best diffident and at worst useless about pushing them. the result is that we do get depressed sometimes by how invisible our work remains. So every now and then I take the opportunity to remind bloggers we exist, and are sometimes quite good writers…
I didn’t take it personally at all, Jessica. I have one self-published book lined up that is by a non-fiction writer for February / March. It can’t be easy as writing is a solitary profession and most authors are not necessarily disposed to self-promotion, so I can understand why you get down about it. I did have a look at your books on good reads, but I really only read a little fiction nowadays.
Thank you- that’s a great list! I have found a few books I didn’t know about!!
I have a couple that look interesting from William Collins that may be of interest- A Curious Boy: The Making of a Scientist by Richard Fortey and The Black Ridge: A Journey Amongst Skye’s Cuillin Ridge by Simon Ingram
Thanks, James. Glad it was useful. Trying to find anything about the new books that William Collins are bringing out is almost impossible, so thanks for those.