We are turning away from glitzy but disposable stories of fame and excess and towards more serious, thoughtful, quiet books that help us understand our place in the world. Analysts at the Bookseller parsed data from Nielsen BookScan, and saw over the past five years a dramatic rise in the sales of “long-tail” nonfiction titles, often works on politics, economics, history or medicine that attempted to synthesise or challenge received thinking on the subject.