The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in Non-Fiction written by women.

The 2025 longlist varies in subject matter, style and genre, and the 16 books make for an incisive and original reading list. The following titles from the list are available to borrow with your Livingston Library card.

Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War ii Resistance Fighter by Clare Mulley

The incredible and inspiring story of Elzbieta Zawacka, the World War II female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo. During World War II, Zawacka was the only woman to reach London as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command. In Britain, she became the only woman to join the Polish elite Special Forces, known as the “Silent Unseen.” She was secretly trained in the British countryside, and then she was the only female member of these forces to be parachuted back behind enemy lines to Nazi-occupied Poland. There, while being hunted by the Gestapo (who arrested her entire family), she took a leading role in the Warsaw Uprising and the liberation of Poland. After the war, she was discharged as one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Yet the Soviet-backed post-war Communist regime not only imprisoned (and tortured) her, but also ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden for over forty years. Through new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside Agent Zo, Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to brilliant life—while transforming how we value the history of women resistance fighters during World War II.

Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum

An alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them.  Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America. International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don’t stand a chance.  Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.

By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land by Rebecca Nagle

A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the ’90s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land over a century later.

The Eagle and the Hart : The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV by Helen Castor

The dual biography of Richard II and Henry IV, two cousins whose lives played out in extraordinary parallel, until Henry deposed the tyrant Richard and declared himself King of England.

Embers of the Hands : Hidden Histories of the Viking Age by Elanor Rosamund Barraclough

An absorbing history of the Viking Age, from mighty leaders to rebellious teenagers, told through their runes and ruins, games and combs, trash and treasure.

Private Revolutions : Four Women Face China’s New Social Order by Yuan Yang

The nation of China has experienced unprecedented economic reform over the past five decades, offering seemingly limitless possibilities—but also unimaginable competition. Hundreds of thousands of students vie for admission into top universities each year, and there can be tens of thousands of applicants for a single professional job posting. This engaging offering follows four women from childhood to the current day as they navigate city life and establish careers, documenting their struggles with school admissions and quotas, educational scams, unsafe working conditions, forays into social activism, and family and corporate intrigues. Alternating chapters allow each subject’s story to emerge, and while personal details vary (one spent her early years in a remote village with her great-grandparents, another discovered her true vocation while teaching soldiers basic English greetings in preparation for the 2008 Olympics), similarities emerge: intense pressure exerted by the one-child policy, needed support from other women, and shared dedication to hard work (evidenced by an inability to function during time off from factory shifts). There are no happy endings; these women’s experiences continue to morph along with new, twenty-first century realities. 

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare. In February 2021, Dalton stumbles upon a newborn hare-a leveret-that had been chased by a dog. Fearing for its life, she brings it home, only to discover how impossible it is to rear a wild hare, most of whom perish in captivity from either shock or starvation. Through trial and error, she learns to feed and care for the leveret with every intention of returning it to the wilderness. Instead, it becomes her constant companion, wandering the fields and woods at night and returning to Dalton’s house by day. Though Dalton feared that the hare would be preyed upon by foxes, stoats, feral cats, raptors, and even people, she never tried to restrict it to the house. Each time the hare leaves, Chloe knows she may never see it again. Yet she also understands that to confine it would be its own kind of death. Here she chronicles their journey together, while also taking a deep dive into the lives and nature of hares, and the way they have been viewed historically in art, literature, and folklore.

The Story of a Heart : Two Families United by Loss, Love, and Lifesaving Medicine by Rachel Clarke

One summer day, nine-year-old Keira Ball was in a terrible car accident and suffered catastrophic brain injuries. As the rest of her body began to shut down, her heart continued to beat. In an act of extraordinary generosity, Keira’s parents and siblings immediately agreed that she would have wanted to be an organ donor. Meanwhile nine-year-old Max Johnson had been in a hospital for nearly a year, valiantly fighting the virus that was causing his young heart to fail. When Max’s parents received the call they had been hoping for, they knew it came at a terrible cost to another family-in what Clarke calls “the brutal arithmetic of transplant surgery.” The act of Keira’s heart resuming its rhythm inside Max’s body was a medical miracle. But this was only part of the story. While waiting on the transplant list, Max had become the hopeful face of a campaign to change the UK’s laws around organ donation. Following his successful surgery, Keira’s mother saw the little boy beaming on the front page of the newspaper and knew it was the same boy whose parents had recently sent her an anonymous letter overflowing with gratitude for her daughter’s heart. The two mothers began to exchange messages and eventually decided to meet.

A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry

Neneh takes readers from the charming old schoolhouse in the woods of Sweden where she grew up, to the village in Sierra Leone that was birthplace of her biological father, to the early punk scene in London and New York, to finding her identity with her stepfather’s family in Watts, California. Neneh has lived an extraordinary life of connectivity and creativity and she recounts in intimate detail how she burst onto the scene as a teenager in the punk band The Slits, and went on to release her first album in 1989 with a worldwide hit single “Buffalo Stance.”

What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean by Helen Scales

Beginning with its fascinating deep history, Scales links past to present to show how the prehistoric ocean ecology was already working in ways similar to the ocean of today. In elegant, evocative prose, she takes readers into the realms of animals that epitomize today’s increasingly challenging conditions.  Offering innovative ideas for protecting coastlines and cleaning the toxic seas, Scales insists we need more ethical and sustainable fisheries and must prevent the other existential threat of deep-sea mining, which could significantly alter life on earth. 

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller

Scientist David Starr Jordan was obsessed with the natural world from childhood; Radiolab contributor Miller was fascinated by Jordan for nearly as long. Jordan studied under some of his era’s greatest naturalists before becoming the first president of Stanford University and a dedicated collector of new species. A 1906 earthquake sent hundreds of jars of Jordan’s fish specimens crashing to the ground. Rather than allowing nature to alter the course of scientific history, Jordan scrambled to gather and retag the fish from the floor of his lab. Jordan’s lifelong unwillingness to succumb to chaos drew Miller in. The book that emerges from her research reads like a podcast episode, blending investigative journalism, biography, and a dash of memoir. The questions posed by Miller’s dive into Jordan’s life are profound and open-ended: do any species truly exist on a planet where species evolve so rapidly? Do species exist without humans who name them? Does anything exist without a human to name it?

—Archana, Adult Services & Acquisitions Librarian