Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, security services and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda and disinformation. Centralised autocracies don’t operate like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies: Autocracy, Inc.

Anne Applebaum weaves a set of compelling case studies to show how this works and argues that we can stop this from happening, suggesting radical changes are needed in order to achieve this.

In Embers Of The Hands, Eleanor Barraclough blows back to life the vast, rich and complex world of the real Vikings. These are not just stories of kings, raiders and saga heroes; here are the lives of ordinary people: the merchants, children, artisans, enslaved people, seers, travellers and storytellers who shaped the medieval Nordic world.

The Eagle And The Hart chronicles the lives and reigns of Richard II and Henry IV. First cousins, born just three months apart, their two lives were from the beginning entwined. Richard II had birthright on his side, and a profound belief in his own God-given majesty; beyond that, he lacked all qualities of leadership. Henry had everything Richard lacked – all the qualities of a sovereign, bar one: birthright.

This is the story of one of the strangest and most fateful relationships in English history.

A Thousand Threads tells Neneh’s story, including her childhood in rural Sweden, her start in music with groundbreaking punk bands, becoming a mother, inspiring collaborations, life-long friendships and finding her voice as she rose to global fame after her iconic Top Of The Pops debut. But navigating fame and family wasn’t always simple.

In this memoir, Cherry remembers the highs and lows, the friendships and loves, and the addictions and traumas that have shaped her as a woman and artist. At the heart of it, always, is family: the extraordinary three generations of artists and musicians that are her inheritance and her legacy.

One summer day, nine-year-old Keira suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident. Though her brain and the rest of her body began to shut down, her heart continued to beat. In an act of extraordinary generosity, Keira’s family agreed that she would have wanted to be an organ donor. Meanwhile, nine-year-old Max had been hospitalised for nearly a year with a virus that was causing his heart to fail.

This is the unforgettable story of how one family’s grief transformed into a lifesaving gift. Dr Rachel Clarke relates the urgent journey of Keira’s heart and explores the history of the remarkable medical innovations that made it possible.

When lockdown led busy professional Chloe to leave the city and return to the countryside of her childhood, she never expected to find herself custodian of a leveret. Yet when she finds the creature, endangered, alone and no bigger than her palm, she is compelled to give it a chance at survival.

Raising Hare chronicles their journey together and the challenges of caring for the leveret and preparing for its return to the wild. We witness an extraordinary relationship between human and animal, rekindling our sense of awe towards nature and wildlife.

Jenni Fagan was property of the state before birth. She drew her first breath in care and, by the age of seven, she had lived in 14 different homes and had her name changed multiple times. Twenty years after her first attempt to write a memoir, Jenni has finally shared her story in Ootlin.

Ootlin is about dislocation, ceaselessly moving through all kinds of placements in a broken UK system. It’s a story of the very human act of making meaning from adversity.

As a child, Lulu Miller’s scientist father taught her that chaos will come for us all. At a time when Lulu’s life starts to unravel, enter David Staff Jordan, 19th century taxonomist and believer in order. Reading about Jordan’s perseverance after an earthquake shattered his collection, Lulu stumbles on an unexpected antidote to life’s unpredictability.

But lurking behind the lore of this mighty taxonomist lies a darker tale waiting to be told: one about the human cost of attempting to define the form of things unknown. Why Fish Don’t Exist is a beguiling and surprising blend of personal memoir and scientific discovery.

Agent Zo tells the incredible story of Elżbieta Zawacka, a second world war resistance fighter. She was one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history, but after the war, the Communist regime imprisoned her and ensured her story remained hidden for over 40 years. Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to life and transforms how we see the history of women’s agency in the second world war.

In the 1830s, Muscogee people were rounded up by the US military and forced into exile halfway across the continent. They were promised this new land would be theirs, but when Oklahoma was created on top of Muscogee land, the new state claimed their reservation no longer existed.

By The Fire We Carry braids together the story of the forced removal of Native Americans in the nation’s earliest days with a small town murder in the 1990s. The defence in the murder case argued that as a Muscogee had murdered another Muscogee on their tribal lands, the state death penalty couldn’t be enforced as Oklahoma didn’t have the jurisdiction to execute him. Rebecca Nagle recounts the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty eastern Oklahoma.

In Wild Thing, Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of Paul Gauguin, whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his vision, including his formative encounters with Vincent van Gogh and August Strindberg.

The first biography of Gauguin to be published in the UK in 30 years, it draws from a wealth of new material and access to the artist’s family. This myth-busting work invites us to see Gauguin anew.

What The Wild Sea Can Be is a bracing yet hopeful exploration of the future of the ocean. Beginning with its fascinating deep history, Helen Scales links past to present to show how prehistoric ocean ecology holds lessons for the ocean of today.

Offering innovative ideas for protecting coastlines and cleaning the toxic seas, Scales insists we need more ethical and sustainable fisheries and must prevent the other existential threat of deep-sea mining. Inspiring us all to maintain a sense of awe and wonder at the majesty beneath the waves, she urges us to fight for the better future that still exists for the ocean.

In 1953, police discover the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terrace house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they find another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. But they have already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place, three years ago, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?

A nationwide manhunt is launched for the tenant of the ground-floor flat, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. As star reporter Harry Procter and celebrated crime writer Fryn Tennyson start to learn the horror of what went on at Rillington Place, the case becomes an instant sensation alongside the relentless rise of the tabloid press. Procter and Tennyson realise that Christie might have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice in plain sight.

Harriet Wistrich has been at the forefront of some historic and groundbreaking legal victories, including Sally Challen’s over her coercive controlling husband, the victims of the taxi-driver serial rapist John Worboys and the women caught up with the ‘spy cops’ scandal. Her work has led her to challenge the police, CPS, government departments and the prison and immigration detention system.

In Sister In Law, she tells the shocking stories of some of those who have come to her for assistance and shines a feminist light on the landscape of arcane laws and byzantine systems, skewed towards male behaviour and responses.

A larger than life champion of Aboriginal self-determination, Tracker Tilmouth was a visionary, a strategist and projector of ideas, renowned for his humour and his determination to tell things the way he saw them. One day he asked his old friend, Alexis Wright, for help writing his memoirs. Wright interviewed Tracker, along with family, friends, colleagues and the politicians he influenced.

Thousands of interview hours later, the result was Tracker, a groundbreaking piece of oral history and a testament to the power of storytelling in contemporary Aboriginal life.

A sweeping yet intimate portrait of modern China told through the lives of four ordinary women, each striving for a better future in an unequal society.

June, who dreams of going to university rather than raising pigs; Sam, forced into hiding as her activist peers are lifted from the streets; Leiya, who wants to escape the fate of the women in her village, and despite being underage, bluffs her way on to the factory floor; and Siyue, ranked second-to-bottom of her English class, who decides to prove her teachers wrong. This is a singularly immersive portrait of a rapidly changing nation – and of the courage of those caught in the swell.