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Whether you want to know about black holes, the brain, genes or imagination, there’s one for you in our list of books we can’t wait to read this year

In this provocatively titled book, Stuart Firestein, chair of biological sciences at Columbia University in New York City, promises to disabuse readers of the myth that the scientific quest for truth is propelled by understanding. Instead, he emphasises, it is the very fact of not knowing that spurs scientists on – groping for scraps of insight and grappling with befuddling mysteries.

Science writer Jonah Lehrer’s last book, The Decisive Moment, examined when we should let instinct run the show and when we should allow reason to take over, with exceptional results. Our hopes are high for Imagine, in which Lehrer sets out to understand human creativity, and dispenses with oversimplifications about creative “types”.

We had a sneak peek at Ian Stewart’s latest offering and found his shortlist of the most influential equations so compelling we have asked him to tell you more about them himself. Look out for his feature in our 4 February issue.

His debut book, The Disappearing Spoon, toured through the periodic table with wit and humour. So we eagerly anticipate science writer Sam Kean’s new offering, in which he aims to unravel the mysteries of our own human building blocks: DNA.

Though it may be commonplace to conceptualise the internet as a vast but invisible network channelling through the ether, Wired magazine contributing editor Andrew Blum is on a mission to unveil the real cords and cables that link us across the globe.

Professor of computational neuroscience Sebastian Seung is convinced that it’s not our genes that shape us as individuals, but our connectome – the “totality of connections between neurons in a nervous system”. By understanding what distinguishes our individual connectomes, Seung hopes to shed light on what constitutes identity.

Electricity isn’t just for charging phones. It is also the force that enables thought and movement, something that Frances Ashcroft, a professor of physiology at the University of Oxford, promises to demonstrate in her new book.

Physicist, science writer and Hollywood screenwriter Leonard Mlodinow is out to explore how important the unconscious is in shaping the way we process the world.

Director of astrobiology at Columbia University in New York City, Caleb Scharf knows a thing or two about black holes. In this book, he aims to explain how these cosmic crunchers are also hubs of explosive activity.

Sociobiologist and emeritus professor of entomology at Harvard University, Edward O. Wilson has penned more than 25 books over the course of his career. This latest work, tackling the origin of the human condition, may be his most ambitious yet.