Non-Fiction Book Club

Tuesday 28 April | 6:30 pm

A new, deluxe edition of Kitchen Confidential to celebrate the life of Anthony Bourdain. The book will feature a brand new introduction, a Q&A with Ecco publisher and Bourdain’s long-time editor Daniel Halpern. Interior pages are hand-annotated by Anthony Bourdain himself.

Almost two decades ago, the New Yorker published a now infamous article, “Don’t Eat before You Read This,” by then little-known chef Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain spared no one’s appetite as he revealed what happens behind the kitchen door. 

Frankly confessional, addictively acerbic, and utterly unsparing, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business, this time with never-before-published material.

Tuesday 23 June | 6:30 pm

From New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides comes an epic account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration - the fateful final journey of Captain James Cook.

On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook began his third voyage in HMS Resolution. Two-and-a-half years later, in Hawaii, Cook was killed - stabbed by the indigenous population. What brought Cook to this end, so far from his reputation? Cook was renowned for humane leadership, dedication to science and respect for indigenous societies.

Tuesday 25 August | 6:30 pm

Enshittification: it's not just you -- the internet sucks now. Here's why, and here's how we can disenshittify it. We're living through the Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It's frustrating.

Demoralising. Even terrifying. Enshittification identifies the problem and proposes a solution. When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, he was not just finding a funnier way to say "things are getting worse." He was making a specific diagnosis about the state of the digital world and how it is affecting all of our lives (and not for the better). 

Tuesday 27 October | 6:30 pm

From the acclaimed author of The Lost Pianos of Siberia, comes a new journey tracing a colonial-era African expedition. In 1879, King Leopold II of Belgium launched an ambitious plan to plunder Africa's resources. The key to cracking open the continent, or so he thought, was its elephants -- if only he could train them. And so he commissioned the charismatic Irish adventurer Frederick Carter to ship four tamed Asian elephants from India to the East African coast, where they were marched inland towards Congo. The ultimate aim was to establish a training school for African elephants.

The author digs deep into historic records to reckon with our broken relationship with animals, revealing an extraordinary -- and enduring -- story of colonial greed, ineptitude, hypocrisy and folly.