The best new popular-science books of November 2026

As seasonal storms take many of us by surprise, it’s time to head for the certainty of indoors, and a decent book (or two). We have some really intriguing titles this month, including a profoundly odd-sounding book by a forest that shares author rights with humans, and some terrifying night terrors that may teach us a lot about our brains. Oh, and if you want to stop trying to control everything around you, try surrendering to a higher power – of your choice, naturally.

Radical Surrender by Anna Lembke

In a complex world, the pressure to control your life is immense: from removing annoying noises around you to slavishly avoiding missing out on living your best life, to keeping your relationship, children and health on track in every way imaginable. It’s overwhelming. Surely we can’t keep it up? According to Anna Lembke’s new book, Radical Surrender: Letting go in a world addicted to change, there is a way out. The word ”addicted” in the subtitle offers a clue here: this is the author of the bestselling book Dopamine Nation, in which she looked at pleasure and pain – and the critical task of finding a delicate balance between them, especially in an age of unprecedented high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli, mostly delivered digitally.

In this new book, we are promised tools to help us let go of our desire for control, but we have to follow Lembke’s advice and acknowledge a “power greater than ourselves, however we define it, and give our will over to that power: less mastery and more a return to mystery”. As an addiction medicine psychiatrist and head of Stanford University’s Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic in California, this “radical surrender” should be scientifically argued. Watch out for our review on 5 November.

Big Math by Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend

Let’s face it: our every move, from our next Google search to our latest Netflix selection, is utterly dependent on numbers, and AI is now an everyday reality. We have no choice but to face up to the overwhelming presence of mathematics, small, medium – or big. In Big Math: The hidden codes that run our world, Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend (both leading mathematicians at Cornell University, New York) set out to show how relatively familiar concepts such as matrices, vectors, Markov chains, linear algebra and the like lie at the heart of computer science and quantum computing – essential for us all to know, say its publishers, if we’re to “comprehend the changes sweeping the world”.

Undesirable by Amy Crawford

For some while now, we’ve known that the story of invasive species is complex, but just how complex is the stuff of Amy Crawford’s Undesirable: Invasive species, humans, and where we all belong. Blundering all over the world, we have accidentally (as well as deliberately) carried species with us on our adventures – and often created great incidental damage to the recipient environments, ranging from destroyed habitats to changes in the climate. Then there is the accidental introduction of blow-in species over relatively short stretches of water, or those dropped by migrating birds. After hundreds of years, it’s still not entirely clear where the gains or losses to local biodiversity really land.

“Whether it’s garlic mustard spreading through American forests or brushtail possums allegedly decimating the flightless birds of New Zealand,” Undesirable is a “multi-faceted story”, say its publishers. On top of that, exactly how to hold ourselves to account remains an open question. And apparently, the young field of “invasion biology” has been “wracked by controversy and haunted by ethical quandaries as it has sought to destroy some species for the benefit of others”. Crawford, a freelance writer and long-time contributor to Smithsonian magazine, looks set to give us plenty to chew on here.

Song of the Cedars by Robert Macfarlane, Cosmo Sheldrake, Giuliana Furci, César Rodríguez-Garavito, Los Cedros Cloud Forest. Illustrated by Paula Terán Ospina

Look closely at the list of creators on the cover of this book, aimed at a 5+ age group, about a cloud forest within the Intac valley in northwestern Ecuador, and along with nature writer Robert Macfarlane and other experts, you’ll spot a more unusual contributor: Los Cedros Cloud Forest itself. As the publishers (probably correctly) point out, this is the first time a forest has been included in the creation of a book. To celebrate that fact – and the anniversary of a court decision recognising Los Cedros’s right to exist and flourish in the future – this is apparently “more than a book”, in that by making it, “we are recognising the forest’s moral rights as the co-creator of a literary work”. When you open Song of the Cedars, the flora, fauna and fungi of Los Cedros Cloud Forest jump off the page in a panoramic scene, which can be read or displayed as you wish. All the royalties from sales of the book, the publishers say, will be used to support the protection of Los Cedros. Fighting talk!

Gurus, Hucksters, Entertainers by Angèle Christin

What’s it like to make your money as a content creator? Angèle Christin, a digital studies scholar at Stanford University, California, takes us inside that world in her new book. The things these influencers post on social media range “from dance routines to political commentary, makeup tutorials to carpentry DIY”. She looks far and wide to explore what she calls their “golden dreams of passion, autonomy, and monetary returns”. No spoiler alert needed: the outcome for these creators and their followers shows how this digital work tends to fuel precarity, inequality – and much more. Christin’s bottom line: it’s more than time to rethink the economic structure of social media.

Saltwater by Ashley Ward

Ocean water is nearly four times saltier than human blood, yet it has been central to our evolution – the  “amniotic fluid of life itself”, as the publishers of Saltwater: A natural history of the sea describe it. In this book, author Ashley Ward, a marine biologist, will bring readers face to face with the deep secrets of marine life. There will be jousting rival humpback whales, and claustrophobic journeys in a submersible to 600 metres deep to see an aurora of bioluminescence. We will also apparently encounter the complex seabird cities that develop along coasts, where auk fathers train their chicks to become skilful divers. And there’s mention of the ethereal song of a pod of belugas carrying across a fjord in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Ward could hardly be better placed to deliver all this and more, given his background as a biologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, and as head of its Animal Behaviour Lab.

The Phantom Mind by Baland Jalal

A sneak peek at the introduction of Baland Jalal’s The Phantom Mind: Insights from the borderlands of sleep shows what we can expect from a researcher often billed as the leading expert in sleep paralysis. “One morning in my teenage years, I awoke gripped by terror… In horror, I realized a demon was on my bed. It grabbed my legs and began tossing them up and down in the air, while crushing my chest and squeezing my neck. While being strangled to death, I could somehow telepathically read the mind of the monster. It had one – and only one agenda: to destroy me.”

This terrifying no man’s land between REM sleep and wakefulness became the territory of his research for the next decade or so. There are plenty more great stories in this highly accessible book, including one featuring Jalal’s mentor, the eminent neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, who appears as a sleep-paralysis ghost to Jalal – and leads him off on a new train of thought about exactly how the ghostly figures people see in sleep paralysis are formed. The borderlands of sleep turn out to be a rich seam to mine for those hoping to discover more about the waking mind. And watch out for our interview with Jalal, in our 14 November issue.

Insect Day by Erica McAlister, illustrated by Natalie McIntyre

This is the latest in the Chicago University Press’s Day series. Earlier in the year, we enjoyed marine biologist Helen Scales’s Shell Day and behavioural ecologist Marty Crump’s Snake Day. Insect Day: A story of 24 hours and 24 hexapod lives follows the same pattern, acting as an hourly guide, this time following insects as they hunt for food, mates or just plain safety from predators. Author Erica McAlister is a curator at London’s Natural History Museum who studies flies. She starts at midnight in Africa with a female mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, which is out for the blood of any unwitting sleeper and may unintentionally transfer malaria. Who knew, by the way, that the males have no taste for blood?

By 7am, we’ve moved on to the Arctic circle, where a queen of Bombus polaris, the Arctic bumblebee, is basking within the flowers of the Arctic poppy. She can also keep warm simply by vibrating. Throughout the day, we meet the yellow-legged saddle casemaker (Agapetus ochripes), the blue-winged helicopter (Megaloprepus caerulatus), the Peruvian shield mantis (Choeradodis rhombicollis), the ferocious water bug (Abedus herberti) and Grote’s bertholdia (Bertholdia trigona). In its closing pages, Insect Day delivers a final punch: we’ve just toured insects, but there may be as many as 30 million more yet to describe.

42 Tales from Life by Richard Dawkins

A new Richard Dawkins book is always a bit of a treat, and 42 Tales from Life: A modern bestiary looks set to be no exception. This is a collection of animal tales, explaining how they evolved into the extraordinary, intriguing and often beautiful forms they have, with a colourful backdrop of illustrations by 19^th-century naturalist, morphologist and artist Ernst Haeckel. According to the publisher, Dawkins reveals “the fundamental truths behind even the most unfathomable animal behaviours”, such as the galloping of fish, the shape of the rhinoceros’ horn, the surprising similarities between horses and lizards, and why hummingbirds glow so brilliantly. The book starts with “The Cephalopod’s Tale” and “The Hummingbird’s Tale”, ending with “The Bat’s Tale” and “The Frog’s Tale”. They are accompanied by Haeckel’s art, whose depictions of plants, sea creatures and other animals turn out to have fascinated Dawkins all his life.

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