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).
