Must Read Non-Fiction for January 2025

In Vegan Italian Food: Over 100 Recipes for a Plant-based Feast, Australia’s number one vegan chef Shannon Martinez celebrates the joys of Italian food in signature riotous style.

Following on from Shannon’s bestselling cookbooks Smith & Daughters: A Cookbook (That Happens to be Vegan) and Vegan With Bite, this glamorous guide features more than 80 delicious recipes for comforting classics and modern entertaining that will bring Italy into your kitchen at home.

Discover meat-free versions of delicious antipasti, elegant pastas such as tortellini in brodo, red sauce meatballs (vegan, of course), plus vibrant vegetables, sides, salads and an extensive range of desserts inspired by the world’s favourite cuisine.

A magnificent meat-free celebration of the joy of Italian food – taking style cues from Scarface to La Dolce Vita – Vegan Italian Food is a party for the ages and one you won’t want to miss.

In Time for Dinner, Australia’s favourite cook, Adam Liaw, is back with a new cookbook featuring smarter recipes for faster cooking.

From shopping to chopping to washing, there are plenty of opportunities to save time while cooking without compromising on taste. Each chapter in Time for Dinner focuses on how you can shrink the time you spend getting dinner on the table, from clever pasta dishes made in the amount of time it takes you to boil the pasta, to traybakes and one-pot wonders that will save you time washing up, to meals that cut your chopping and shopping times to the minimum.

Full of simple, satisfying meal ideas, Time for Dinner is a cookbook for everyone, from busy singles to on-the-go families. It’s packed with more than 80 time-saving recipes, such as Kimchi and Garlic Butter Fried Rice, Turkish Tandoori Drumsticks and Spanish Garlic Prawns.

This delicious and original collection takes the grind out of midweek cooking with speedy, nutritious and affordable meals that mean you’ll always have time for dinner.

Lonely Planet’s South Africa, Lesotho & Eswatini is your passport to the most up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you. Lounge on a Cape Town beach, spot wildlife in Kruger National Park; all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of South Africa, Lesotho & Eswatini and begin your journey now!

Inside Lonely Planet’s South Africa, Lesotho & Eswatini Travel Guide:

Up-to-date information – all businesses were rechecked before publication to ensure they are still open after 2020’s COVID-19 outbreak

NEW top experiences feature – a visually inspiring collection of South Africa’s best experiences and where to have them

What’s NEW feature taps into cultural trends and helps you find fresh ideas and cool new areas

NEW pull-out, passport-size ‘Just Landed’ card with wi-fi, ATM and transport info – all you need for a smooth journey from airport to hotel

Improved planning tools for family travellers – where to go, how to save money, plus fun stuff just for kids

Colour maps and images throughout

Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests

Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots

Essential info at your fingertips – hours of operation, websites, transit tips, prices

Honest reviews for all budgets – eating, sleeping, sightseeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss

Cultural insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience – history, people, music, landscapes, wildlife, cuisine, politics

Over 102 maps

Covers Cape Town, Western Cape, Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Free State, Johannesburg & Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Kruger National Park, Limpopo, North West Province, Northern Cape, Lesotho, Eswatini

The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet’s South Africa, Lesotho & Eswatini, our most comprehensive guide to South Africa, Lesotho & Eswatini, is perfect for both exploring top sights and taking roads less travelled.

Looking for more extensive coverage? Check out Lonely Planet’s Cape Town & the Garden Route for a comprehensive look at all the region has to offer.

Lonely Planet’s Cape Town and the Garden Route is our most comprehensive guide that extensively covers all the region has to offer, with recommendations for both popular and lesser-known experiences. Climb the impressive Table Mountain, visit historic Robben Island and walk the colourful streets of Bo-Kaap; all with your trusted travel companion.

Inside Lonely Planet’s Cape Town and the Garden Route Travel Guide:

Lonely Planet’s Top Picks – a visually inspiring collection of the destination’s best experiences and where to have them

Itineraries help you build the ultimate trip based on your personal needs and interests
Local insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience – whether it’s history, people, music, landscapes, wildlife, politics

Eating and drinking – get the most out of your gastronomic experience as we reveal the regional dishes and drinks you have to try

Toolkit – all of the planning tools for solo travellers, LGBTQIA+ travellers, family travellers and accessible travel

Colour maps and images throughout
Language – essential phrases and language tips

Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots

Covers City Bowl, Foreshore, Bo-Kaap and De Waterkant, East City, District Six, Woodstock and Observatory Gardens and Surrounds, Green Point and Waterfront, Sea Point to Hout Bay, Southern Suburbs, Simon’s Town and Southern Peninsula, Cape Flats and Northern Suburbs, Stellenbosch, Franschhoek, Paarl, Robertson, Hermanus, Stanford, Darling, Langebaan, The Garden Route

Lonely Planet Africa is your passport to the most relevant, up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you.

Wander the cobbled streets and graceful pracasrimmed by once grand churches and stately colonial-era buildings, against a backdrop of turquoise seas, on the Unesco-listed Mozambique Island; drink your way around whitewashed Cape Dutch architecture and the endlessly photogenic hills and vines of South Africa’s Winelands; or discover the wildlife of the acacia-studded savannah of the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya -all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Africa and begin your journey now!

Inside Lonely Planet’s Africa Travel Guide:

• Colour maps and images throughout
• Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests
• Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots
• Essential info at your fingertips – hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices
• Honest reviews for all budgets – eating, sleeping, sight-seeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss
• Cultural insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience – history, culture, wildlife, safaris, cuisine, music, environment
• Covers Egypt, Tanzania, Morocco, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Cabo Verde and more

The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet Africa, our most comprehensive guide to Africa, is perfect for both exploring top sights and taking roads less travelled.

Looking for just a few of the destinations included in this guide? Check out the relevant Lonely Planet destination guides, our most comprehensive guides that cover destinations’ top sights and offbeat experiences.

Build new chess skills and practice key tactics with these 500 entertaining, intermediate chess exercises for skilled chess players to improve their game.

For practiced chess enthusiasts who are eager to grow their skills even further, Intermediate Chess Puzzles has hundreds of puzzles to up your game!

Through 500 puzzles, you’ll learn motifs that will take intermediate players’ games to the next level—including advanced tactics, combinations, and defending against an opponent’s attacks. Basic instructions for how to solve chess puzzles are covered, then chapters take players through increasingly complex motifs with puzzles to practice each. Workout sections throughout include puzzles that practice any of the skills learned up to that point; without additional information, players must detect which motifs will need to be deployed—much like in an actual chess game.

Clear chess board diagrams allow you to picture every puzzle, and the detailed answer key carefully explains how to get to the best solution. Allowing practiced players to further improve their skills on their own, offline, and in a take-anywhere format, Intermediate Chess Puzzles is the perfect gift for chess fanatics of any age!

Explore the galaxy far, far away as never before with the official Star Wars crossword puzzle collection.
Test your galactic knowledge with over 50 colorfully illustrated, fun, and challenging puzzles, acrostics, and other word games. Puzzle master and lifelong Star Wars fan James Floyd draws clues and answers from quotes, trivia, memorable character moments, lightsaber showdowns, and much more.

Featuring Mandalorians and Wookiees, Yoda’s wisdom, the Jedi code, and creatures large and small from the Skywalker saga and beyond, these puzzles are a playful, interactive way to celebrate Star Wars for fans of any age.

Problem-solve under pressure and spot the imposter in time. An immersive puzzle book experience.

Step inside the book and get ready to start a compelling, solve-as-you-go adventure. Put your investigative skills to the test and use your intuition to eliminate the suspects, piece together the clues and hunt down the imposter, from puzzle to puzzle.

Bestselling author Dr Gareth Moore and Laura Jayne Ayres will put your logic and reasoning to the test and keep you looking over your shoulder as you solve the puzzles. The decisions you make will determine what happens next – but have you made the right choices? Be prepared to revisit any evidence you may have missed the first time…

The game is afoot: do you dare to step inside the book?

Published to mark the centenary of Surrealism, this publication offers a new perspective on one of the most famous art movements with pioneering new research on its links with ecology and with politics.

The development of Surrealism in the 1920s and 30s coincided with that of important new research and knowledge in the sciences, notably in biology. Forbidden Territories explores the unexamined interplay between Surrealism and life science, including the mutual influence of Sigmund Freud, illuminating how Surrealist strategies draw the eye to the astonishing aspects of scientific data and knowledge of the landscape, in ways that are prescient, even revelatory, in the present.

The book further looks at the role of international conflict within Surreal landscapes and how these terrains became a vehicle for political statements and dissent. Finally, it expands on the Surrealist mythologization of the unconscious as a great ocean ‘where the sharks of madness cruise’, analysing the ‘ecology of the mind’, examining links between bodies of water and psycho-surreal worlds in poetry, paintings and photographs from the unique perspective of female Surrealist artists.

Spanning the movement, this survey includes works by Eileen Agar, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Lee Miller and Yves Tanguy as well as interventions by contemporary artists working within the lasting legacy of Surrealism, such as Maria Berrio and Michael Dean.

A comprehensive monograph chronicling the phenomenal rise of CryptoPunks – one of the world’s first and most sought-after crypto collectibles and trailblazer for digital art and web3 culture.

CryptoPunks: Free to Claim   explores the meteoric rise of a pre-eminent NFT collectible: what began as an experiment in digital ownership has become the catalyst for a digital art movement and a dynamic subculture synonymous with a new age of the internet.

Minted on the Ethereum blockchain in 2017, the CryptoPunks – 10,000 uniquely generated pixel characters – have produced more than $2.3 billion in cumulative sales and entered the permanent collections of major institutions including LACMA and Centre Pompidou, meanwhile fostering a passionate and decentralized online community.

All 10,000 CryptoPunks are presented in a special 400+ page catalogue raisonné within this book, with a comprehensive listing including Punk, number, type, colors, attributes and image hash. A timeline provides a zine-like assemblage of community member posts and tweets as they happened; while an extensive glossary defines more than 100 anonymously authored terms and ideas with guest contributions from Beeple, Emily Segal, Venkatesh Rao, and more.

With an in-depth interview between Hans Ulrich Obrist (Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries) and CryptoPunks founders Matt Hall and John Watkinson, this cult and category-defining book features a kaleidoscopic collection of texts, interviews, and visual essays exploring this emerging world of web3 and digital culture at large – inspiring a first wave of visual books on this groundbreaking subject.

The book is for all levels of knowledge and features unique contributions from fascinating figures in tech, design, fashion, finance, and contemporary art including: Anika Meier, Alexis Ohanian, Mat Dryhurst, Noam Segal (Guggenheim), Philippe Bettinelli and Marcella Lista (Centre Pompidou), Michael Connor (Rhizome), Mindy Seu, Chris Lyons (a16z), Salome Asega (NEW INC), Simon Denny, Shumon Basar, Martina Tiefenthaler, Jack Butcher, Sean Bonner, 6529, among others.

The first book to showcase selections from the groundbreaking Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, accompanying a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum

Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys  celebrates selections from the world-class collection of musical and cultural icons Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys.

Giants  illustrates 100 works by nearly 40 multigenerational Black American, African, and African diasporic artists in the Dean Collection, hand-picked and curated by the Brooklyn Museum for a major exhibition of the same name.

The book also features an exclusive conversation between curator Kimberli Gant and Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, as well as interviews with ten legendary artists: Derrick Adams; Kwame Brathwaite’s son, Kwame Samori Brathwaite; Jordan Casteel; Nick Cave; Titus Kaphar; Ebony G. Patterson; Jamel Shabazz; Amy Sherald; Mickalene Thomas; and Kehinde Wiley.

Both book and exhibition bring together these ‘giants’ of the art world to embody and highlight the Deans’ collecting philosophy: ‘by the artist, for the artist, with the people.’

A stunning and comprehensive exploration of the work of visual artist-activist Zanele Muholi.

Born in South Africa in 1972, Zanele Muholi came to prominence in the early 2000s with photographs that sought to envision black lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersex lives beyond deviance or victimhood.

Muholi’s work challenges hetero-patriarchal ideologies and representations, presenting the participants in their photographs as confident and beautiful individuals bravely existing in the face of prejudice, intolerance, and, frequently, violence. While Muholi’s intimate photographs of others launched their international career, their intense self-portraits solidified it.

This groundbreaking publication include images from the key series Muholi has produced over the past twenty years, as well as never-before-published and recent works, presenting the full breadth of Muholi’s photographic and activist practice like never before.

Coming soon – January 2025

A bestselling author’s definitive guide to writing and publishing research-based nonfiction for a wide audience 
 
Writing fact-based nonfiction for large general audiences requires two different skills: the ability to conduct rigorous research and to craft engaging prose. Tilar J. Mazzeo is one of the few people with extensive experience in both arenas, as a tenured academic and a New York Times bestselling author whose books have been made into a major motion picture and translated into more than fifteen languages. She is also a sought-after writing coach with a passion for helping others communicate their expertise more broadly.
 
In this practical how-to book, Mazzeo draws on her experiences writing and publishing bestsellers to offer an indispensable guide for anyone looking to write narrative nonfiction for a large public audience. In a series of frank and illuminating chapters, she leads readers through the entire process, from conception to publication and beyond. She covers choosing a topic, finding an agent, negotiating a contract, crafting an effective proposal, creating a compelling narrative, marketing one’s work, and developing an author platform. Most importantly, she provides step-by-step advice on how to write prose that will resonate broadly.
 
The ultimate insider’s account, this book will help researchers convey their knowledge effectively so it has impact in the public sphere.

Explore the failures, mistakes and missed opportunities that shaped history in this new entry in the bestselling series.

From the botched attempt to create a life-extending elixir that produced gunpowder, to the unsuccessful stint in medical school which led to a career in naturalism for Charles Darwin, to the missile detection system malfunction that almost sparked a nuclear war, the course of human history has so often been shaped by failures of all magnitudes.

In fifty bite-sized chapters spanning thousands of years, A Short History of the World in 50 Failures details how the world as we know it has been defined by plans gone awry, opportunities not seized upon and schemes that were always fated to end in catastrophe.

Whether it’s the pharaoh Akhenaten’s misplaced attempt to found a new religion or Napoleon’s doomed invasion of Russia, discover a fascinating collection of outsized tales and historical snafus that created the world as we know it today.

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea. – Karen Blixen

The ocean is an icon of our summer holidays and a place of happy memories – and there’s no wonder why. Swimming in and being near salt water has been shown to lower cholesterol and blood pressure, boost immunity and even slow the signs of ageing. But that’s just the physical side.

Saltwater Cure draws on compelling, life-affirming stories about the healing power of the ocean – whether it be a balm for mental health, a comfort for an autistic child, the start of a lifelong environmental passion or a path to building community and escaping loneliness. Journalist Ali Gripper shares the experiences of people who have been transformed by the ocean, including author Tim Winton, surfer and blue-health advocate Layne Beachley, conservationist and underwater cinematographer Valerie Taylor, solo sailor Jessica Watson, First Nations scientist and dolphin-singer Chels Marshall, blind swimmer James Pittar, Swim Sisters founder Yusra Metwally and many others.

All speak honestly about the ocean’s ability to not only provide solace and comfort, but to help them find strength in themselves and make the most of living connected to nature. The ocean, they all say, is one of our great treasures and worthy of our protection – and it’s where they feel most at home. Saltwater Cure reminds us of nature’s restorative power and will inspire us all to preserve the beauty of our oceans for future generations to enjoy.