Nautilus English Books

30/05/2026

Discover the Dragons, Unicorns, Fairies, and Trolls from British Library Publishing’s latest Little Book Of collection.

📌 https://cutt.ly/lt1mOOkk

From protective fairy godmothers to the graceful white horse with a single long horn, and from primordial chaos-monsters breathing fire from above, spitting poison on the land to creatures who kidnap, overrun farms, and lurk in the dark corners of landscapes, Carolyne Larrington unravels a plethora of fascinating stories, from the medieval to the modern, in these shimmering guides to the all things fae, unicorn, dragons and trolls. Each volume features beautiful illustrations from the British Library collections.

30/05/2026

Winner of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, RUBBERNECKER is a gripping thriller about a medical student who uncovers a crime that the experts were too close to see . . .

📌 https://nautilus.ro/rubbernecker

“The dead can’t speak to us,” Professor Madoc had said. But that was a lie. The body Patrick Fort is examining in anatomy class is trying to tell him all kinds of things. But no one hears what he does, and no one understand when he tries to tell them.

Life is already strange enough for Patrick—being a medical student with Asperger’s Syndrome doesn’t come without its challenges. And that’s before he is faced with solving a possible murder, especially when no one believes a crime has even taken place. Now he must stay out of danger long enough to unravel the mystery. But as Patrick learns one truth from a dead man, he discovers there have been many other lies closer to home.

🔐 “Contains one of the most startling plots in contemporary crime fiction.” (Sunday Times)

🔐 “Obvious echoes of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time . . . darker and with more twists and coils than a hangman’s noose, it deserves to do equally well.” (Daily Express)

29/05/2026

ARCADE ADVENTURES tells the story of video game arcades, from the pioneering technology of the 1970s and the golden age of the 1980s, to the modern experiences of today.

📌 https://nautilus.ro/arcade-adventures

Arcades were a true pioneer of gaming, existing long before consoles were played in homes around the world. Arcade Adventures celebrates the history of these beloved spaces, from the enduring playability of early experiences such as Pong and Space Invaders, to the skill-based play of Donkey Kong and platformers that shaped the journey of gaming.

The world of arcades existed long before consoles were played in homes around the world. ARCADE ADVENTURES celebrates the history of these beloved spaces, from the enduring playability of early experiences such as Pong and Space Invaders, to the skill-based button pressing of Donkey Kong and other platformers that shaped the journey of gaming.

🎮 Celebrate the history of arcades, from the enduring playability of Pong and Space Invaders to the skill of Donkey Kong and other platformers.
🎮 Featuring cultural analysis of each decade’s trends and innovations, and the architects behind them.
🎮 Discover the arcade icons, which celebrates the games that shaped the gaming lives of the masses (Dragon’s Lair, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Time Crisis, House of the Dead, Virtua Striker 2)
🎮 Go on a retrospective journey of the cabinets that pushed boundaries and introduced immersive new trends, such as rhythm pads, racing wheels and light gun gaming.
🎮 Accompanied by exclusive photography that showcases the most memorable and revered arcade cabinets of the past 55 years.
🎮 Explore the ongoing popularity of arcades and look to the future to see where the medium could go from here.

🔹 “This book lays out a timeline of handheld gaming since the beginning, with vibrant displays showcasing each device and their impact. The release serves not only as a collection of history, but also a study of aesthetics over the years.” (Screenrant)

29/05/2026

An intense and dramatic reimagining of real events from one of Russia’s most accomplished and far-reaching contemporary writers, JUST THE PLAGUE is powerful in its literary construction and moral clarity, not to mention its present-day parallels

📌 https://nautilus.ro/ludmila-ulitskaya

📖 Rudolf Maier, a young microbiologist working on a plague vaccine, is summoned to Moscow to deliver a progress report to his superiors.

Inadvertently, he carries the virus with him from the lab. When his illness is discovered, the state machinery turns with terrifying efficiency, rounding up dozens of people. But for many, the distinction between this enforced, life-sparing isolation and the constant churn of political surveillance and arrests is barely detectable, and personal tragedy is not completely averted. Based on real events in the Stalinist Russia of the 1930s, this gripping novel, written in the late 1980s and rediscovered by the author during lockdown - and never before translated into English - surfaces uncomfortable truths about the current Russian regime and the pandemic crisis.
Translated by Polly Gannon and with a new afterword by the author.

📖 In THE BODY OF THE SOUL: STORIES, rendered into English by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Ulitskaya maps the edges of our lives, tracing a delicate geography of the soul.

While we can feel, know, and study the body, the soul refuses definition. Where does it begin and end? What does the soul have to do with love? Does it exist at all, and if so, does it outlast the body? Or are the soul and body really one and the same?
These are questions posed by the characters who inhabit this book of stories by the award-winning Russian writer. A woman believes that the best way to control her life is to control her death. A landscape photographer wonders if the beauty he has witnessed can triumph over decay. A coroner dedicated to science is confronted by a startling physical anomaly, a lonely divorcée experiences an extraordinary transformation, a librarian whose life is devoted to language finds words slipping away from her.

28/05/2026

Now in paperback, Joe Abercrombie’s “incredibly fun, incredibly action-packed and, by the end, incredibly affecting book” (Tamsyn Muir) features a notorious band of anti-heroes on a delightfully bloody and raucous journey

📌 https://nautilus.ro/joe-abercrombie

Holy work sometimes requires unholy deeds.

Brother Diaz has been summoned to the Holy City, where he is certain a commendation and grand holy assignment awaits him. But his new flock is made up of unrepentant murderers, practitioners of ghastly magic, and outright monsters. The mission he is tasked with will require bloody measures from them all in order to achieve its righteous ends.

Elves lurk at our borders and hunger for our flesh, while greedy princes care for nothing but their own ambitions and comfort. With a hellish journey before him, it’s a good thing Brother Diaz has the devils on his side.

🔹 “THE DEVILS by Joe Abercrombie, the first in a new series, is ferociously imagined, and rumbles along with the unstoppable force of a city-burying avalanche. It’s also frequently shout-out-loud-with-laughter funny. When it comes to big, shamelessly entertaining fantasy, Abercrombie is in a class of his own.” (Joe Hill)

🔹 “Mixing the central conceit of Su***de Squad with Hammer horror vibes, as viewed via the lens of alternate history, THE DEVILS is a gore splattered roller coaster ride from start to finish. Probably the most fun you can have reading a fantasy novel.” (Anthony Ryan)

🔹 “Joe Abercrombie is, to me, the undisputed master of creating deep, distinct characters that leap off the page, and never more so than in THE DEVILS. This book is hilarious, profound, tragic, and so thrillingly paced one scarcely has time to breathe between one calamitous adventure and the next. I loved every page, and can’t wait to see where the story goes from here. Straight to hell, I hopefully suspect!” (Nicholas Eames)

28/05/2026

A stunning debut novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, reminiscent of Garth Greenwell and Douglas Stuart in the intensity of its evocation of desire, yearning, and the terror of first love.

📌 https://nautilus.ro/open-heaven

James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered s*xuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his autonomy, tenderness, s*x. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle at their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him, like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre, drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke’s bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.

With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Seán Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.

🔸 “Seán Hewitt’s OPEN, HEAVEN blisses with the bright verdure of youth—blackbirds and blossoming hedges, wet hands held tight under buttery starlight. Hewitt’s is a searching novel orbiting pleasure, loss, and the ecstatic release of both; which is to say it’s a novel about time. Which is to say it’s a novel about us.” (Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!)

27/05/2026

An original collection of rare texts from the British Library vaults, BIRD OF ILL OMEN is an annotated volume featuring the best Gothic tales of Catherine Crowe

📌 https://nautilus.ro/bird-of-ill-omen

A village is driven to a murderous frenzy by the wolf walking among them. In the moonlit chill of a monastery, a knife-wielding sleepwalker re-enacts a past tragedy. In Paris, officers edge towards a monstrous truth while investigating a spate of grisly grave-robbings.

During the Victorian era, Catherine Crowe became a household name on par with Dickens for her innovative retellings of “true” ghost stories, in which she treated readers to glimpses of the “night side of nature”—until her reputation was tarnished following a public breakdown.

Seeking to restore Crowe’s place in the canon of strange and ghostly fiction, Ruth Heholt presents some of her best tales of “real” phenomena, alongside her darker Gothic stories. Together, they demonstrate Crowe’s singular gifts as a master storyteller.

27/05/2026

As AI takes hold across the planet and wealthy nations seek to position themselves as global leaders of this new technology, the gap is widening between those who benefit from it and those who are subjugated by it.

🔖 The New Empire of AI: The Future of Global Inequality
https://nautilus.ro/new-empire-of-ai

🔖 Empire of AI: Inside the reckless race for total domination
https://nautilus.ro/empire-of-ai

📖 As Rachel Adams shows in this hard-hitting book, growing inequality is the single biggest threat to the transformative potential of AI. Not only is AI built on an unequal global system of power, it stands poised to entrench existing inequities, further consolidating a new age of empire.

AI’s impact on inequality will not be experienced in poorer countries only: it will be felt everywhere. The effects will be seen in an intensification of international migration, as opportunities increasingly concentrate in the hands of wealthier nations; in heightened political instability and populist politics; and in climate-related disasters caused by an industry that is blind to its environmental impact across supply chains.

We need to act now to address these issues. Only if the current inequitable trajectory of AI is halted, the incentives changed, and the production and use of AI decentralized and decoupled from wealthier nations will AI be able to deliver on its promise to build a better world for all.

📖 When longtime AI expert and journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, it was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely market forces.
But the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that it requires an unprecedented amount of proprietary resources: the ‘compute’ power of scarce high-end chips, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans on the ground ‘cleaning it up’ for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the need for energy and water underlying everything. We have entered a new, ominous age of empire with OpenAI setting a breakneck pace, as a small group of the most valuable companies in human history try to chase it down.
In exhilarating prose and with unparalleled access to those closest to Sam Altman, Hao recounts the meteoric rise of OpenAI and shows us the sinister impact that this industry is having on society.

27/05/2026

One of England’s funniest writers is in danger of fading out of public consciousness, writes Helen Lewis

One of England’s funniest writers is in danger of being lost to history.

26/05/2026

Ocean Vuong’s bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive is out in paperback!

📌 https://nautilus.ro/emperor-of-gladness

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once…

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing—formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness—are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.

🔸 “Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time.” (The Guardian)

🔸 “Vuong defies easy categorization. His books, whether they deploy line breaks or paragraphs, tend to root around among life’s mundane intimacies for the profound truths of human connection. It’s true here too in Vuong’s second novel.” (NPR.org)