Our Non-fiction Book of the Month for November, The Optician of Lampedusa, is a volume that has the power to provoke true change. It is the sum of desperate, human horror: an ordinary man suddenly pitched against unimaginable circumstance. Award-winning BBC journalist Emma-Jane Kirby was no stranger to the misery of the migrant plight, but something in this account – which began, as was usual, as a piece for radio – simply refused to fade away. Exclusive for Waterstones, Kirby looks back on the book’s beginnings.

£5 of every copy sold will be donated to Oxfam in support of their work with refugees.

Now at sixty, novelist, translator and passionate environmentalist Dexter Petley has turned his attention to his own past with the significant memoir Love Madness Fishing. Waterstones Online’s Peter Whitehead introduces Petley’s own reflections on the genesis of this searching new work.

Ruth Scurr, whose biography of John Aubrey was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Biography Award, introduces this fascinating 17th Century character.

Meet the barrister drawn to defend rogues and rule-breakers who famously defended Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Christine Keeler in the Profumo Affair.

Six Reasons why you should read Late Fragments - Everything I Want to Tell You About this Magnificent Life by Kate Gross

Matt Haig's new book, Reasons to Stay Alive, chronicles his own personal experiences with depression. Here he writes about how the condition once stopped him from being able to read, and how he learned to break through the barrier and pick up a book again.

Robert Crawford writes about Young Eliot, his biography of the man many people regard as the twentieth century’s greatest poet.

After a two-year battle with cancer, Kate Gross died peacefully at home on Christmas morning. Denied the chance to "bore her children and grandchildren with stories when she became fat and old", she offers her thoughts on how to live, the wonders found in the everyday and how to fill your life with hope and joy, even in the face of tragedy. Here, she introduces her moving memoir, Late Fragments.

Despite the endurance of Joan of Arc's legend, conjecture remains about even the most crucial events in her story, as Helen Castor explains.

Matt Lewis introduces an extract from his first hand account of disaster on the Antarctic seas - Last Man Off, Radio 4's Book of the Week this week.

Jung Chang explains how she came to write Empress Dowager Cixi: the Concubine who Launched Modern China - our Non-fiction Book of the Month for July.

Nat Jansz speaks to Chris Stewart on writing our Book Club book of the week, Last Days of the Bus Club.