Notable Nonfiction Books of Fall 2024

It’s been a great few months for new nonfiction, with books appearing on a number of people and topics that I was keen to know more about. As always, apologies for all the great books I’ve missed and the usual caveat applies: in this roundup I’m led by my interests and gaps in my knowledge, so it is a very personal choice.

One unmissable book is Patriot by Alexei Navalny (1976-2024), the memoir of the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner who was poisoned while campaigning in Siberia, made it to Germany for medical treatment and recovered, returned to Russia, was arrested, and was likely killed in a prison in the Arctic Circle. Navalny was a brave man, and despite the tragic end of his challenge to Putin, the memoir is very funny—in a dark, Russian humour kind of way. The tone is colloquial, as if he’s talking and joking with you. He makes fun of everything, including himself.

Navalny was an avid reader, so there are lots of references to books and authors. For example, describing falling ill on a flight back to Moscow after being poisoned with Novichok, he writes, “When I am asked what it’s like to die from a chemical weapon, two associations come to mind: the Dementors in Harry Potter and the Nazgûl in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.” Elsewhere he writes that War and Peace is his favourite book but disagrees with its overall thesis about the irrelevance of individuals to historical events—without Mikhail Gorbachev, he doesn’t believe the Soviet Union would have ended.

Navalny goes back through his whole life, so you learn a lot about life in the Soviet Union, about what drove him to politics (the Chernobyl disaster, when he was ten, was a formative experience) and what it means to be an opposition politician in a country that has the trappings of democracy and the rule of law (there are regular elections and Navalny is constantly appearing before judges) but not the real thing. The book is also a love story—of Alexei for his wife, Yulia, as well as for his country, Russia (which he distinguishes from its very poor government down the years). Patriot is the best book I’ve read all year.

Another Russia-related book I read avidly was Punishing Putin by Stephanie Baker, a Bloomberg journalist who while now based in London lived in Russia for many years. Waging war costs money and this is about the economic war against Putin and trying to hamper his ability to pursue the war in Ukraine. The book opens with the seizure of oligarchs’ superyachts and in addition to sanctions also looks at the impact of Western businesses (like McDonalds, which famously opened in Russia in 1990) leaving Russia. What’s interesting is that while it looks on paper as if the West has an enormous amount of leverage, in practice—partly because we live in countries governed by the rule of law—it’s hard to use all the possible tools effectively. This is a very readable book and I learned a lot, including about the Russian oligarchs, several of whom Baker knows.

With a surge in the success of populist politicians in recent years—and warnings how we face a possible re-run of the 1930s and the rise of Fascism—I probably wasn’t the only one who picked up Hitler’s People, a new book by historian Richard Evans, with a partial eye to the present. It can perhaps be described as a group biography, offering short portraits of major and minor players in the Third Reich, and what motivated them. It opens with a section on Adolf Hitler himself. I’ve never read any biographies of any of the men surrounding Hitler, so reading about their background and how they ended up getting involved made for interesting reading. Education and appreciation for culture were absolutely no guard against becoming a devout Nazi (some had PhDs, one or two were skilled pianists). One ray of hope for the present: most countries have not recently been through a catastrophe on the scale of World War I for Germany.

Another history book out recently I enjoyed is The Golden Road by William Dalrymple, who specialises in India and writes for a popular audience. Dalrymple previously wrote an excellent book called The Anarchy, detailing how it was not Britain but (even worse) a corporation backed by a private army—the British East India company—that colonised Mughal India in the 18th century. The Golden Road also tries to put history to rights. It makes the case for India as a major driver of cultural change from about 250 BCE to 1200 CE. It tracks two things: the spread of Buddhism and the spread of Indian mathematics across the region and around the world. I recently read the Chinese classic, The Monkey King or Journey to the West, which is based on the travels of a 7th-century Chinese monk, Xuanzang, to seek Buddhist wisdom and texts in India. In terms of Indian science, an excellent book giving a global history of maths, The Secret Lives of Numbers, was on my list of best nonfiction books of 2023. So while I was familiar with the broad outlines of the story told in The Golden Road, most of the details I was not. Once I got past the introduction, I found the book hard to put down.

Other new history books out recently focus on specific aspects of World War II. Arnhem: Black Tuesday by Al Murray focuses on one day during Operation Market Garden in September 1944—the subject of the book and movie, A Bridge Too Far—and the attempt to cross the Rhine in the German-occupied Netherlands. Murray tries to chronicle the day as the men fighting experienced it, rather than through the lens of hindsight as a doomed campaign. James Holland meanwhile takes us to the Italian campaign—the fight to break the Gustav Line at Monte Cassino in his book, Cassino ’44.

Also in military history and getting good reviews is The Vietnam War by Geoffrey Wawro. If you’re interested in the SAS, the British army’s special forces unit, Ben Macintyre, a genius at writing nonfiction books that read like thrillers has a book out, The Siege, about the terrorist attack and hostage drama at the Iranian embassy in London in 1980.

In true crime, Kate Summerscale, author of one of the best books in the genre, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, has a new book out: The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place. This is another horrifying tale, this time of a serial killer leading a seemingly ordinary life in a terraced house in West London. As in her other books, what Summerscale does so well is bring to life the era in which the events are happening, in this case the 1950s. The lives of the murdered women, of the tabloid journalist who covers the crimes, of the perpetrator and his wife, of the hapless neighbour who is executed by mistake, all feel very real.

Other notable new books in the true crime genre include The Barn, by Wright Thompson, about the torture and murder of a 14-year-old, Emmett Till, in Mississippi in 1955. There’s also the strange story told in Eden Undone by Abbott Kahler, about a search for utopia in the Galápagos islands before World War II that ends badly.

Lastly, in biography, the brilliant Sue Prideaux, who has written books about the life of Nietzsche, Strindberg and Munch, has a new book out. It’s a biography of the French painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), which has already made the shortlist of the Baillie Gifford Prize, the UK’s most prestigious nonfiction prize. If all you know about Gauguin’s life is from The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham (or other historical novels loosely based on him) this is a chance to get a more accurate picture.

In the book, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, Prideaux somewhat rescues Gauguin’s reputation. For example, analysis of Gauguin’s teeth shows that he did not bring syphilis to Tahiti, the Pacific island where he spent the last years of his life and painted many of his most striking pictures. As a fan of both Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh’s art, I was quite moved by the chapter on Gauguin’s visit to the Dutch painter in southern France, shortly before van Gogh’s mental illness got the better of him. Van Gogh painted the sunflowers specially for Gauguin’s visit, to decorate his bedroom.