Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye.

The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke

Why I have it: one of the ones I want to read on the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction shortlist.

Summary: A true story of two families linked by one heart – nine-year-old Keira Ball’s heart was donated to nine-year-old Max Johnson, who had been in hospital for nearly a year, fighting the virus that was causing his own heart to fail. When Max’s parents received the call they had been hoping for, they knew it came at a terrible cost to another family – Clarke calls it ‘the brutal arithmetic of transplant surgery’.

I’m thinking: Yes.

What the Wild Sea Can Be by Helen Scales

Why I have it: also on the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction shortlist.

Summary: Scales’s bracing yet hopeful exploration of the future of the ocean. Beginning with its deep history, Scales links past to present to show how the prehistoric ocean ecology was already working in ways similar to the ocean of today. And despite threats of warming, many hopeful signs remain. Increasing numbers of no-fish zones around the world are restoring once-diminishing populations and giant kelp forests are being regenerated and expanded, which may be our best defense against the storm surges caused by global warming.

I’m thinking: Maybe.

The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell

Why I have it: Enjoyed her earlier book, Cultish.

Summary: Montell explores our cognitive biases and the power, disadvantages, and highlights of magical thinking (defined as ‘the belief that one’s internal thoughts can affect unrelated events in the external’). Magical thinking works in service of restoring agency amid chaos, but in this book, Montell argues that in the modern information age, our brain’s coping mechanisms have been overloaded, and our irrationality turned up to an eleven.

I’m thinking: No.