A single non-fiction book is dominating my thoughts this week. A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides by Gisèle Pelicot will likely be in my mind for many weeks to come too. Watch Mme Pelicot’s BBC Newsnight interview with Victoria Derbyshire, broadcast to mark her book’s UK publication by The Bodley Head, and you will likely be moved to tears as I was, by her courage, grace and dignity, and her message to other victims of sexual crime that they should never feel ashamed.

A Hymn to Life is just one of a pantheon of recent non-fiction books that compel us to engage with urgent contemporary issues. In a typically excellent recent piece in the Guardian, written in the context of the blanket reporting of the transgressions of Peter Mandelson in relation to Jeffrey Epstein, and entitled So the Epstein scandal is about politics? Silly me for thinking it’s about the mass abuse of women and girls, Marina Hyde wrote: “We’re talking about anything but the things that most need to be reckoned with.”

Then consider Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a devastating personal account of just such mass abuse of the young and vulnerable which brings us to just such a reckoning. Giuffre’s hope – explicitly stated before her untimely death – was that by publishing her book, she would help other victims feel empowered to speak out.

Consider also Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work in which Sarah Wynn-Williams exposes the moral vacuum at the heart of Meta (formerly Facebook), one of the most influential companies on the planet and yet one that, amid its greed for power and profit, she portrays as taking negligible social responsibility, including for the nefarious impact that social media can have on the young and vulnerable.

And with the death in detention of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny back in the headlines, we might also consider his book Patriot, which won the Overall Book of the Year at last year’s British Book Awards. With the judging process for this year’s Nibbies now underway, it is worth reminding ourselves that this same award has been won by a non-fiction book for the past three years. Not an argument against fiction, rather an assertion that the books that truly matter to the world are so often non-fiction ones. For when it comes to reckoning with "the things that most need to be reckoned with", it is non-fiction books which, above all other media, are helping us do so.

Without the non-fiction books that voice the things we would rather not know, but urgently need to, the world would be an even more deeply worrying place

The market for non-fiction remains challenging right now – as another recent article, this one from the Times, laid out – and I am under no illusions that the typical book buyer always wants to spend their hard-earned cash on books about difficult issues that can be hard to read. I myself most enjoy non-fiction that sparks joy; that brings alive places I’ve never visited; introduces me to people I would never otherwise have met; or teaches me things I didn’t know I needed to know. But without the non-fiction books that voice the things we would rather not know, but urgently need to, the world would be an even more deeply worrying place. As one reader of a Substack post of mine commented a few weeks ago: “Non-fiction books matter more than ever in today’s splintering world”.

And they matter of course, not only because of the issues they force a reckoning with, but because of the voices they enable to be heard. Victoria Roberts Giuffre’s voice. Alexei Navalny’s. Gisèle Pelicot’s. Those names are now globally known, but non-fiction books also resound with lesser-known but nevertheless significant voices, testifying to some of the most pressing issues of our times. In the next few months we will be hearing such voices via books like The Lifeboat at the End of the World by volunteer lifeboat crew member Dominic Gregory, which brings home the horror of the so-called “small boats crisis” in the English Channel; Rough Edges: Where Land Meets Water, The Untold Stories of Coastline Communities by working-class advocate Natasha Carthew; and My Body Is a Meadow: Finding Freedom in the Outdoors by Bethany Handley which is about ableism, climate justice and access to nature for all of us.

And in my Non-Fiction Book of the Month for May, This Is Also a Love Story: Searching for Good in a Divided World, Orwell Prize-winning author and journalist Sally Hayden tells human stories from behind the headlines of the world’s most turbulent places, stories which remind us of the courage and altruism that can still prevail amid a ton of pain and suffering. In her prologue she writes: “Journalism is the first draft of history, but it only offers fragments of a wider truth. What can go missing in that initial retelling is a much fuller tapestry of human behaviour, interactions and the connections that drive them.”

A stellar argument for non-fiction books right there. I wish I could engender better non-fiction sales by advocacy alone. But we can’t not have these books, can we? In courageously and meticulously reckoning with the stories that truly need to be told, they have more than proved their immense value to us all.