Museum Nonfiction

The “spellbinding” (People) New York Times bestseller from the author of The Dovekeepers, an extraordinary novel about an electric and impassioned love affair—“an enchanting love story rich with history and a sense of place” (USA TODAY). Coralie Sardie is the daughter of the sinister...

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK From one of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists, an important and timely work of cultural history that looks at the origins and much debated future of anthropology museums “A provocative look at questions of ethnography, ownership and restitution...

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN SOMETHING PRICELESS ENTERS A WORLD WHERE EVERYTHING HAS A PRICE? A masterpiece can be recognised everywhere—and sold almost nowhere. Yet thieves have cut paintings from frames, climbed museum walls, crossed rooftops, silenced alarms, and carried away objects nations believed untouchable. The Stolen Masterpieces enters the hidden world of ten extraordinary art crimes. It follows the disappearance of the Mona Lisa, the unsolved theft of The Just Judges, the strange removal of Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, and the enduring mystery surrounding Caravaggio’s ...

The Frame of Silence: The Heist That Made the Mona Lisa Famous is a gripping, detailed, and politically neutral account of the most audacious art theft in history. The narrative transports readers to a quiet Monday morning in 1911, when a humble Italian handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia stepped out of a Louvre storage closet to lift Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece off the wall. This art heist history book meticulously recreates the 28 hours of silence that passed before the museum realized the painting was gone, sparking a global scandal that transformed a respected artwork into a ...

*Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2026* A first-hand account of art, survival and resistance in wartime Ukraine Charlotte Higgins never imagined she would report on a war. But in the autumn of 2022, seven months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she travelled there to find...

Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories. Well-publicized restitution cases, such as that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting featured in the film Woman in Gold, illustrate the legacy of Nazi looting in the art world today. But what happened to looted art that was never returned to its rightful owners?

For forty-one years, one of the most respected scientific institutions in the world was fooled by a country solicitor and a filed-down orangutan jaw. In December 1912, Charles Dawson announced a fossil that seemed to answer one of the great questions of the age: what did humanity's earliest ancestors actually look like? A skull with a modern, human-sized brain, paired with a heavy, ape-like jaw. British newspapers celebrated a national scientific triumph. The world's leading anatomists accepted it. It sat in textbooks and museum halls for four decades. It was a fake from the very beginning ...

“This daughter of Mary Shelley delights and excites the border between story and science.”―Samantha Hunt “A novel about what we want and also what we can’t escape.”―Allegra Hyde “A haunting chord of a novel that will hang in the air long after you turn the final page...

A Handful of Home is a museum you can hold in your hands. Containing 100 objects from the Partition of India, oral historian and expert Aanchal Malhotra transforms a complex history into a gentle and accessible introduction for younger readers. Through the quiet stories of everyday treasures...