B elow, all the books that won nonfiction book awards in 2024. Prizes we cover include the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction, the Wolfson History Prize , the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Financial Time s Business Book of the Year Awardaward-winning biographies )
“She’s a Bloomberg columnist. In her columns, she has written about the subject of this book, which is the battle between Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, now part of Google, and Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, which is strongly allied with Microsoft. It’s about their rivalry to find a way to apply generative AI—and AI more generally—in a world-changing way. Her line is that Altman and Hassabis had a vision of a world-altering technology, and the ability to bring it into being, but that they have been corralled by corporate interests so that it’s become a commercial product.” Read more...
The Best Business Books of 2024: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award
Andrew Hill ,
Journalist
“The book is about India in the 20th century, which means taking it from the late Victorian period, when it had become an empire under Queen Victoria, through to its present form, which consists of three large nations—India, Pakistan and Bangladesh—important on a worldwide scale. That is not an easy task, because the history is crowded with agendas and assumptions. There is the assumption of Britain being a good imperial power or a very bad imperial power. There is the assumption that in 1947 a tragedy happened, Partition. As I read it, I was testing my own assumptions against these inherited ones and found the book extraordinarily fresh. It is written by a citizen of modern-day India, but she has examined her own assumptions, her own experience, and created something which I found surprising and new. There is perhaps an optimistic message behind the book, that despite all the tragedy of the history of the sub-continent in the 20th century, these are three countries which have much more in common than many of their leaders admit.” Read more...
The Best History Books of 2024: The Wolfson History Prize
Diarmaid MacCulloch ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama tells the story of a terrible school bus crash in 2012 on a highway outside Jerusalem used predominantly by Palestinians, which was badly maintained and heavily congested thanks to Israeli checkpoints. The accident killed six Palestinian children, including Milad, Abed Salama’s five-year-old son. It is a powerful, timely and original work of reportage by the Jerusalem-based American journalist Nathan Thrall.” Read more...
The Best Politics Books of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing
“There are two things that are very cool. First, it’s written by a husband-and-wife couple, one of whom is a science writer and the other is a cartoonist. They have pooled their talents to write a really engaging, fun narrative that ties together a huge array of multidisciplinary lines of evidence of what it would take to achieve different stages of living in space.” Read more...
The Best Popular Science Books of 2024
John Hutchinson ,
“Pétain had been the hero of Verdun, a great figure, but he was being tried for treason for signing the armistice with the Nazi regime and being the leader of the Vichy regime in France. He was on trial for his life, accused of collusion with Nazi Germany, and the verdict wasn’t much in doubt. It’s about more than the fate of a particular person—it’s a judgment on these four years of French history. It was newly liberated France’s first opportunity to look back on what it had done and how it had come to this. It’s a terrible account of moral ambivalence, and what you should do when faced with a conquering army. France is asking itself what it could have done, faced with total defeat by Hitler.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Duff Cooper Prize
Susan Brigden ,
Historian
“Conor was on the tennis circuit. He rubbed shoulders with the greats of the game, like Roger Federer and so on, but he never quite made it. He had his moments in the spotlight, but it’s a grinding life being on the lower rungs. If you know somebody who’s got a kid who’s thinking of making tennis their career, they should read this book first because it’s not fun…There’s humour in the book, a lot of self-deprecation and insight. He’s quite open and honest. That’s one of the key things that the judging panel liked about it. He doesn’t hide anything. He clearly loves his family a lot, but they do come over as quite pushy and he accepts that you won’t achieve anything in individual sport without a pushy parent.” Read more...
The Best Sports Books of 2024: The William Hill Award
Alyson Rudd ,
Journalist
“In the summer of 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did something unthinkable: they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain—and held a picnic. They were joined by East German holidaymakers in Ladas rolling up for goulash, beer and brass-bands. I did not know this story and I loved the way it surprised me and captured the time, the idealism, and the role of ordinary citizens in the unravelling of the Iron Curtain” Read more...
The Best Politics Books of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing
“Published on the 20th anniversary of the invasion, his book combines journalism, memoir and travel writing to tell the stories of the people caught up in the maelstrom as, to quote the author, ‘their world fragmented.’ One of the things about this book that really stood out to me was how it gives, vitally, an Iraqi-centred account. I felt that I was getting a 360º perspective of the situation, rather than stereotypes. It’s a powerful book.” Read more...
The Best Travel Writing of 2024
Shafik Meghji ,
Travel Writer
“There’s a connection with The Narrow Road to the Deep North because that book was also concerned with his father’s experience of being a slave laborer in the Second World War: he was an Australian captured by the Japanese…what holds this part memoir, part science, part history together is the personal thread. The book begins and ends with a kayaking accident the author, Richard Flanagan, has in a river in Tasmania. He is rescued, but only just. He describes this moment when he is floating above the river, looking down at himself. Is that death?” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Isabel Hilton ,
Journalist
“This book is very fluently written and very engaging. What he’s concerned about are minority or endangered languages. He says that there are around 7000 languages spoken across the world, but only 4% of the world’s population speaks 96% of those…What he focuses on is New York City because, as he says, one out of 10 of every language on the planet is being spoken at some time in the city, which is phenomenal…One of the very striking things he does is visit what he calls ‘vertical villages’ in Brooklyn. There’s one city block where practically everyone in it speaks Seke, a threatened Tibeto-Burman language from the Himalayas. It’s spoken in only two villages, which are under threat because they’re on the border.” Read more...
The 2024 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding
Charles Tripp ,
Political Scientist
Browse all our best books of 2024 interviews
Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]
Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount .
