One of the best books of the year

No one will tell us more about the struggle for the Afrikaner's soul; for this book, like the events it reports, is an act of redemption

Krog's account of the hearings, which recorded 20,000 statements from victims and nearly 8,000 applications for amnesty, is vivid and impassioned

Whatever it is that makes a major lasting work of non-fiction, it is here

Her accounts are so powerful, her resilience, humour and compassion so engaging...to have written this book is heroic

Jungle sweeps the reader into the primordial heart of the earth, as if the crucible of life welcomed you to its sanctuary. Its revelations and stories will stir, rearrange and populate your mind for years to come. As a book, it is a joy, pure intellectual chocolate

Finally, a book on rainforests that does justice to their majesty and importance. Patrick Roberts skilfully and lucidly shows why tropical forests matter. He builds the case that people and tropical forests are intimately linked, whether you live in the rainforest or seemingly a world away. Those intricate links are more important than ever today, with ending deforestation playing a key role in solving the twin climate and biodiversity crises we face this century

Enormously ambitious, deeply researched, moves with great skill from ecology and evolution to history and politics

Many European and American books and films imply that tropical forests are incapable of sustainably supporting large human societies. Jungle provides a superbly argued refutation of this long-held view . . . a thrilling reappraisal of our origins and our dependence on tropical forests

The Dawn of Everything is also the radical revision of everything, liberating us from the familiar stories about humanity's past that are too often deployed to impose limitations on how we imagine humanity's future. Instead they tell us that what human beings are most of all is creative, from the beginning, so that there is no one way we were or should or could be. Another of the powerful currents running through this book is a reclaiming of Indigenous perspectives as a colossal influence on European thought, a valuable contribution to decolonizing global histories.

Synthesizing much recent scholarship, The Dawn of Everything briskly overthrows old and obsolete assumptions about the past, renews our intellectual and spiritual resources, and reveals, miraculously, the future as open-ended. It is the most bracing book I have read in recent years.

This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast. There is not a single chapter that does not (playfully) disrupt well seated intellectual beliefs. It is deep, effortlessly iconoclastic, factually rigorous, and pleasurable to read.

A fascinating inquiry, which leads us to rethink the nature of human capacities, as well as the proudest moments of our own history, and our interactions with and indebtedness to the cultures and forgotten intellectuals of indigenous societies. Challenging and illuminating.

The book has captured the public imagination ... and is being cited as the reason why students apply to do archaeology courses. It's probably the biggest boost to the field since Indiana Jones escaped from the snake pit.

Graeber and Wengrow have effectively overturned everything I ever thought about the history of the world ... The authors don't just debunk the myths, they give a thrilling intellectual history of how they came about, why they persist, and what it all means for the just future we hope to create. The most profound and exciting book I've read in thirty years.

Scholarly, irreverent, radical and genuinely ground-breaking - my kind of non-fiction.

A massive, bracing book that turns ideas like progress and civilization inside out. It looks at the past with excitement and the future with optimism and invites you to do the same.

A fascinating, intellectually challenging big book about big ideas.

An act of intellectual effrontery that recalls Karl Marx ... The book's a gem. Its dense scholarly detail, compiling archaeological findings from some 30,000 years of global civilizations, is leavened by both freewheeling jokes and philosophic passages of startling originality ... The Dawn takes to the open sea to argue that things are, above all, subject to change.

Are you looking for some hope in a dark season? The Dawn of Everything is a line of light at the edge of the world - an exploration of the radically different ways societies have been organised throughout time ... exciting, fresh and, yes, hopeful.

A work of dizzying ambition, one that seeks to rescue stateless societies from the condescension with which they're usually treated ... Our forebears crafted their societies intentionally and intelligently: This is the fundamental, electrifying insight of The Dawn of Everything. It's a book that refuses to dismiss long-ago peoples as corks floating on the waves of prehistory. Instead, it treats them as reflective political thinkers from whom we might learn something.

Not content with different answers to the great questions of human history, Graeber and Wengrow insist on revolutionizing the very questions we ask. The result: a dazzling, original, and convincing account of the rich, playful, reflective, and experimental symposia that 'pre-modern' indigenous life represents; and a challenging re-writing of the intellectual history of anthropology and archaeology. The Dawn of Everything deserves to become the port of embarkation for virtually all subsequent work on these massive themes. Those who do embark will have, in the two Davids, incomparable navigators.

Graeber and Wengrow debug cliches about humanity's deep history to open up our thinking about what's possible in the future. There is no more vital or timely project.

As dense, dizzying and ambitious as the title suggests, it offers a new take on 30,000 years of humanity, suggesting our present-centric focus does a disservice to the fascinating lives of our forebears, and providing fresh context for the modern condition.

A truly crucial book ... an engrossing and revelatory re-examination of the human past challenges us to reject outdated ideas and consider new directions for our future.

A work that is at once dense, funny, thorough, joyful, unabashedly intelligent, and infinitely readable.

A great historical fresco

Breathtaking. A new Sapiens

Ambitious and deep ... the product of genuine scholarship