Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. One of the best-written biographies I have read in years. I would not say it is close to my core interests, but if you think you might like it you will.
Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Never Known Men. I enjoyed this novel: “Deep Underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.”
J.P. Mallory, The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story. The best book I know of on the origins and unities of Indo-European languages. I had not known Edward Sapir was born in Pomerania. And “…the Keres people who occupy seven pueblos (villages) in New Mexico speak a language totally unrelated to any of their neighbours and their origins have been frequently disputed.”
Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn. One of the best Trollope novels it seems, even though it is not (yet?) clear what the plot actually consists of. Currency decimalization is also one of the side plots, who can argue with that?
Manu S. Pillai, Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity. It may be fruitless to argue about this topic on-line, but almost all Westerners under-read when the topic is Hinduism.
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