The five best non-fiction books of 2024 – according to our experts
With Something Good, the arts and culture newsletter from The Conversation UK, we aim to cut through the noise and recommend the very best in new releases every fortnight. In 2024, we’ve been spoiled for choice when it comes to recommending non-fiction.
At The Conversation we have experts across all disciplines. Here, a few of them recommended the best books in their field for a general audience. From a book of uncanny AI photography to a book about how to live better with less, we have some great options to fit a wide variety of interests.
Memoir: Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell
Recommended by Jay Prosser, reader in humanities at the University of Leeds.
Rachel Cockerell’s Melting Point explodes the genre of memoir. For years, I’ve been teaching my students that memoir needs the author to guide us through their story. Opposed to this, Cockerell removes herself entirely, speaking about her irritation with her “voiceover” in earlier drafts.
Her book instead consists wholly of quotes from diaries, letters, memoirs and articles of those who were there. As in a film (both Cockerell’s parents are documentary filmmakers), the reader experiences events as they happen, and from all sides.
The subject of the memoir is also extraordinary and topical. Through three generations of her family, Cockerell tells the story of Zionism before the Balfour Declaration expressed support for a national homeland for Jews in Palestine. We see how Jews were granted or sought homelands in various outposts, from Galveston, Texas in the US to Angola and Mesopotamia in Iraq. And before our eyes we witness the rising antisemitism, including pogroms, that drove their desperate search.
Politics: London, 1984 by Stephen Brooke
Recommended by Kieran Connell, senior lecturer in contemporary British history at Queen’s University Belfast.
Stephen Brooke’s London, 1984: Conflict and Change in the Radical City is a powerful study of a city – and a country – at a political crossroads. During the titular year, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party continued its momentous break with the postwar consensus in Britain, helping to usher in the profit-obsessed brand of neoliberalism that remains in place today. Brooke’s work homes in on the progressive forms of politics that were nevertheless possible at the time.
His focus is on the struggles Londoners waged against homophobia, racism and other types of discrimination around the world, as well their attempts to bring about better quality housing and childcare provision. While the book might be read as a story about the paths not taken in Britain – the radical Greater London Council was abolished by Thatcher in 1986 – London, 1984 also reminds us of the enduring influence of these struggles, what Brooke calls “the afterlives of social democracy”.
Business and economy: Less by Patrick Grant
Recommended by Olaya Moldes Andres, senior lecturer in marketing and strategy at Cardiff University.
Less, by businessman and Great British Sewing Bee judge Patrick Grant, explores the history of UK manufacturing and the evolution of consumption and production.
It threads together Grant’s experience of the clothing business with his reflections on the contemporary fashion industry. His passion for high-quality durable items inspires us to learn more about the materials, origins and stories of the objects we own and buy. And it leaves us reflecting on the human side of businesses and the joy of creating, repairing and using good-quality products.
Grant not only advocates for a different way of thinking about business, away from profit-driven models, but his own entrepreneurial experience also demonstrates that it is possible to create meaningful jobs, build communities and revitalise UK cities that lost their sense of purpose as manufacturing moved overseas.
Grant convincingly argues that “living with less but better would make us healthier, wealthier (comparatively) and happier”. So convincingly, in fact, that I am adding his book to the reading list for a module I teach.
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Art: Cursed by Charlie Engman
By Julia Johnson, senior lecturer in photography at Anglia Ruskin University.
In Cursed, photographer Charlie Engman uses generative AI’s uncanny distortions to explore the pleasure, humour and horror of the body. His uncomfortable, unattractive and surreal images of people, animals and illogically composed items look at times like banal TV stills. Subjects stare out bleakly, colours range from flesh-toned neutrals to muted fluorescents. Certain textures look edible and revolting.
The book explores the larger questions its uncanny art poses. Engman seemingly reveals the problems that have always existed in photographic representation, around its presentation, its authenticity and the ethics of subject participation and consent. It also forces readers to tackle the preconceptions of how the world should be and appear.
As is often the case when I encounter a new photography book, I was hit by the paper’s aroma. On this occasion, it reminded me of a live culture (dairy?) that had just gone off. The aroma certainly juxtaposes with the uber-contemporary, visual aesthetic. It’s a visceral and confronting experience on many levels.
Environment: The Lie of the Land by Guy Shrubsole
By Christopher Rodgers, emeritus professor of law at Newcastle University.
Britain’s natural environment is depleted and, despite nascent government schemes to manage the land differently, struggling to recover from centuries of destruction – plus new threats like climate change. What if the biggest obstacles to its recovery are the people we have trusted to look after it?
In The Lie of the Land: Who Really Cares for the Countryside? author and green campaigner Guy Shrubsole argues that antiquated property rights give landowners absolute authority over most of Britain’s land. Missing from this arrangement are properly enforced obligations to steward the country’s biodiversity and carbon sinks in the interests of everyone, including future generations.
In Shrubsole’s eyes, the greatest “lie of the land” is the idea that you have to own land to care for it. In other words, that private property is the only way that people can steward the land and care for its long-term benefit. He makes a case for modelling land reform in England and Wales on the Scottish system, where a public right to access all freehold land is enshrined in law. The advantage, according to Shrubsole, is twofold: more eyes and ears monitoring what is happening on private land and a chance to reconnect people and nature.
Christopher Rodgers has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Olaya Moldes Andrés has received funding from The British Academy and The Academy of Marketing.
Jay Prosser, Julia Johnson, and Kieran Connell do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.