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Eden McCallum’s Top Reads for Summer 2025

As many of us look forward to some time off over the next few weeks, we have been discussing our holiday reading.

Here are some of the summer reads on our lists, focused on non-fiction titles across business, economics, history and leadership. And with an additional novel that has captivated so many of us recently that we just had to mention it!

Wishing you a splendid summer, and happy reading.

 

Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages by Johan Norberg

Historian Norberg examines the rise and fall of seven of history’s greatest civilizations and what they can teach us: how do we ensure that our current golden age doesn’t end?

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race that will Change the World by Parmy Olson

Award-winning journalist Olson’s dramatic and revealing story of Microsoft and Google’s race to control generative AI, the struggle to use tech for good, and the perils that lie ahead.

Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son by Lionel Barber

The extraordinary story of tech investor Son’s breathtaking rise, making and losing several fortunes along the way from a Korean slum to becoming one of the most consequential investors of our time.

House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company by Eva Dou

Washington Post journalist Dou traces the rise of Huawei from startup to telecommunications giant, in an intricately-reported and even-handed look inside this mysterious company.

Wildly Different: How Five Women Reclaimed Nature in a Man’s World by Sarah Lonsdale

The inspiring stories of five bold female explorers, scientists and conservationists who fought to explore and protect the sort of wild spaces that had hitherto been the preserve of male adventurers.

Your Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall

Minshall, Professor of Innovation at Cambridge, reveals the surprising and complex journeys products take to reach us, illuminating manufacturing’s transformational impact and a potential path to a more sustainable future.

The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power our Lives by Ernest Scheyder

Sheyder, a senior Reuters correspondent, chronicles the explosive battles, complexities and dilemmas the world faces in extracting the essential deposits to fuel the energy transition.

Growth: A Reckoning by Daniel Susskind

Susskind’s thought-provoking study of the past, present and future of economic growth makes the case for its continued pursuit, redirected to reflect what we really value.

Exile Economics: What Happens if Globalization Fails? by Ben Chu

BBC correspondent Chu examines the rise of isolationist thinking and the dangers of “Securonomics” to the global economy, looking at global supply chains from food to high-tech.

The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder by Robert Sutton & Huggy Rao

From endless emails to convoluted processes, destructive friction plagues organisations, but not all friction is bad. Stanford Professors Sutton and Rao draw on seven years of research to teach us to be “friction fixers”, averting bad friction and injecting the good.

Fair or Foul: The Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition by Stefan Stern

Journalist Stefan Stern meditates on aspects of ambition and its place in our lives, drawing on the major themes of Macbeth and the lives of public figures, from Kamala Harris to Boris Johnson, to explore both sides of this powerful driver.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

A beautiful, Booker-prize winning short novel that follows the lives of six astronauts on one day aboard the International Space Station. Through sixteen rotations around the earth the profound story illuminates life in our fragile and precious world, from the epic to the intimate.