What are the trends in new nonfiction? From where I’m sitting, nature writing and major biography appear to be on their way down, history and health are still rising, and every other publisher’s list is littered, somewhat dispiritingly, with what they call genre-defying but I think of as bitty, not-one-thing-or-the-other kinds of books: group biographies of people about whom tons has already been written; collections of essays with no unifying theme; texts that combine fact with a certain kind of fiction in a sometimes rather desperate bid to make the austere and the arcane seem newly “relevant”.
But never mind. Let’s find some clarity among the confusion. Bodies first. I like the sound of How We Break; Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living (Allen Lane, January) by Vincent Deary, a psychologist who specialises in fatigue; Why We Remember: The Science of Memory and How It Shapes Us (Faber, March) by Charan Ranganath, a neuroscientist at the University of California (a book the Pulitzer prize-winning biologist Siddhartha Mukherjee calls “life-changing”); and The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Allen Lane, March) by Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist who is best known as the co-author of the bestselling The Coddling of the American Mind. On more controversial ground, Johann Hari is back with Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs (Bloomsbury, May). Hari has, it seems, tried Ozempic himself (and yes, in 2024, it will be obligatory for most books, if not all, to come with long, explanatory subtitles).
Moving on to history, politics and current affairs. Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe (Viking, January), the follow-up to his bestselling Empireland, is much anticipated, as is Peter Pomerantsev’s How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (Faber, March), in which the leading expert on disinformation tells the amazing true story of Sefton Delmer, a now largely forgotten figure of the second world war. In The Picnic: An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain (Bodley Head, January), the academic Matthew Longo revisits the August day in 1989 when a group of activists did the unthinkable and entered the militarised zone between Hungary and Austria, the greatest border breach in cold war history, while in Final Verdict: A Holocaust Trial in the Twenty-first Century (W&N, March) the journalist Tobias Buck tells the story of the trial of Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former concentration camp guard who, in 2020, was found guilty of accessory to the murder of 5,232 people.
I recently saw the journalist Yuan Yang talking about her first book, Private Revolutions (Bloomsbury, May), in which she examines China’s new social order through the lives of four young women living there today, and I immediately longed to read it. In the run-up to an election in which the Conservatives look likely to suffer a rout, Bloody Panico: Or, Whatever Happened to the Tory Party (Verso, May) by the ever-sharp Geoffrey Wheatcroft looks to be required reading. Also timely is Sexed (Polity, June), an important new history of British feminism by Susanna Rustin.
Traditional biographies are thin on the ground in the first half of 2024. But I look forward to Trailblazer, Jane Robinson’s life of the Victorian feminist Barbara Leigh Bodichon (Doubleday, February), and to Paula Byrne’s Hardy Women: Mothers, Sisters, Wives, Muses (William Collins, February), in which she re-examines Thomas Hardy’s life through the eyes of those who made him. In memoir (a crowded field), I will be snaffling early copies of Me and Mr Jones: My Life With David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars (Faber, April) by the stylist Suzi Ronson, and Naked Portrait: A Memoir of Lucian Freud (Picador, May) by his daughter Rose Boyt. The Quality of Love: Twin Sisters at the Heart of the Century (Duckworth, May) by Ariane Bankes tells the story of Celia and Mamaine Paget and their friends and lovers, including George Orwell – and may prove a useful corrective to some of the claims made by Anna Funder in Wifedom, her recent book about Eileen Orwell.
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Cape, April) by Salman Rushdie will surely be one of the most talked about books of the year. To the now many literary denunciations of boarding school, Charles Spencer, the historian otherwise known as Earl Spencer, will add his own in the memoir A Very Private School (William Collins, March). The acclaimed novelist Colum McCann makes his nonfiction debut with American Mother (Bloomsbury, February), a book written with Diane Foley, whose son, the journalist James Foley, was murdered by Islamic State in 2014.
Let’s end with some books that are harder to categorise. No Judgement (Virago, March) is a collection of vaguely interconnected essays about, among other things, literature, gossip and the attention economy by the funny and pugnacious American critic Lauren Oyler (and I can hardly wait for it), while We Are Free to Change the World (Cape, January) is a biography-cum-manifesto in which the professor of human rights Lyndsey Stonebridge looks at the life and work of the philosopher Hannah Arendt and wonders what lessons she might offer for our own times. More soothing than these, though perhaps no less exhilarating, is The Garden Against Time (Picador, May), in which Olivia Laing recounts her efforts to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, a project that leads her to investigate notions of paradise.
Sophie Elmhirst’s already much talked about Maurice and Maralyn (Chatto, February) sounds like a crowd-pleaser of a book about a married couple who find themselves adrift on a tiny raft in the middle of the Pacific; and so, too, does Emma Tarlo’s Under the Hornbeams (Faber, January), the story of a couple, Nick and Pascal, who live and sleep outside in London, but who do not regard themselves as homeless. Finally, give it up for My Family and Other Rock Stars (Fleet, May) in which Tiffany Murray tells the story of a childhood spent at the legendary Rockfield Studios in Wales, where her mother worked as a cordon bleu chef for artists including David Bowie, Queen and – yes – Motörhead. It couldn’t sound more delicious if it tried.
