Clockwise from top left: A Very Private School by Charles Spencer; Lauren Oyler; Under the Hornbeams by Emma Tarlo; Sathnam Sanghera; The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt; Rose Boyt; Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst; and Salman Rushdie.Nonfiction to look out for in 2024
From Salman Rushdie’s account of the attempt on his life to Sathnam Sanghera’s thoughts on imperialism via the story of the Tory party’s decline, here are the big hitters coming your way next year
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”.
