Thomas E. Brown — the 'bright but' story, and why so many of us are only diagnosed as adults.
I think this is the book I'd hand to anyone who spent school being called bright but disorganised, capable but not applying themselves, and who's now sat wondering why it took until adulthood for anyone to say the word ADHD out loud. Brown's whole argument is that being smart is precisely what let a lot of us slip through — good enough grades, good enough talk in class, good enough charm to paper over the gaps — and I recognised so much of my own story in that.
What I found most useful is his framing of ADHD as an executive function problem rather than an attention problem, if that makes sense. It's not that the brain can't focus, it's that it can't reliably direct focus where it's needed, when it's needed, and hold everything else in working memory while doing it. That distinction did more to explain my own patterns than most of what I'd read before it.
There's a lot of case study material in here, teenagers and adults both, and I'll be honest, some of it runs a bit clinical and dense if you're after something as conversational as ADHD 2.0. But I think that's also why it landed differently for me, it felt less like a pep talk and more like someone actually explaining the mechanics of why I'd been struggling for so long without anyone noticing.
The bit that stuck with me most, appropriately enough, was the section on why bright kids get missed. Teachers and parents (and later, employers) tend to measure the outcome, not the effort behind it, so if the grade or the output looks fine, nobody asks how much harder you had to work to get there, or how much was quietly falling through the cracks alongside it. I wish I'd read this twenty years earlier, but I suspect that's true of most books on this list.
Would I recommend it? Yes, particularly if you're the kind of person who wants to understand the why behind the diagnosis rather than just the what to do about it. Pair it with something more practical if you want both sides.