Our greatest novelists shouldn’t have to go through near-death experiences to publish brilliant nonfiction, but perhaps—in a perverse way—we should be glad that both Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi did.
Rushdie’s Knife, his response to being violently assaulted in August 2022, is a wonderfully idiosyncratic book, full of horrible details, yes, but also panegyric passages about his wife and funny asides about pop culture. And much the same could be said about Kureishi’s Shattered, his account of a catastrophic fall in Rome in December 2022 that left him tetraplegic. It’s a joy to see these two artists still doing things their own way.
There is, however, another form of near-death: the final stages of a terminal illness. That, and the question of when and how death will come, is the subject of Marianne Brooker’s Intervals. Brooker’s mother, Jane, had multiple sceloris when she decided to end her life, aged 49, not through the services of an assisted dying clinic in Switzerland, but through stopping eating and drinking. “Denied a liveable life and a legal right to die, my mum made a choice within and between the lines of the law,” writes Brooker. If any book demonstrates—and humanises—the complicated issues now facing British legislators as they consider legalising assisted dying, it is this.
Can life come from death? The answer, as provided by Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart, is a resounding yes. The heart of this book’s title belonged to Keira, a nine-year-old girl who died in a car accident, yet it was given to Max, a boy of the same age whose body was failing him, so that he might live. The subject matter is overwhelmingly emotional, yet Clarke approaches it with the clear-eyed rigour of an investigative journalist—tracking every step, every person, every scientific miracle involved in a heart transplant.
By comparison, Craig Brown’s A Voyage Around the Queen is a more traditional biographical work—but only by comparison. Brown’s style, as developed in his previous books about Princess Margaret and the Beatles, is personal, tangential, hilarious. This may be his best, and perhaps the most insightful book by anybody on the late Queen Elizabeth as both a person and cultural force.
Three other biographies grapple successfully—in different ways—with cultural figures of the past. Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing is not just a compulsively readable account of one of the—yes—wildest artistic lives, Paul Gauguin’s, but a reassessment of the artist based on new discoveries. How much, it seems to ask, should we layer our 21st-century prejudices on the past? While Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist takes someone even less redeemable—the early 20th-century scientist and eugenicist David Starr Jordan—and carries us into the outer reaches of knowledge itself. Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic juggles all the parts of Frantz Fanon—the personal, the political, the poetic—to deliver the best single work on this anticolonial icon.
The subject of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s A Man of Two Faces isn’t someone else’s life—but Nguyen’s own. A refugee from war-torn Vietnam, he ended up in the US, then became the Pulitzer-winning author of the 2015 novel The Sympathizer. His autobiography is a serious reflection on what it is to be an immigrant, though—crucially—it is never self-serious. Nguyen’s story is made more powerful by his own irreverence.
Meanwhile, Cloistered begins with its author, Catherine Coldstream, fleeing from a community of Carmelite nuns; the subsequent 300 pages explain—with terrifying clarity—why. And Orlando Whitfield’s All That Glitters details its author’s friendship with the devilishly charismatic Inigo Philbrick, who—let’s just say—may have been behind one of the biggest art frauds in history.
And what of Rachel Cockerell’s Melting Point? This genre-defying book—which curates diary snippets, newspaper cuttings, letters, interviews and more to tell the astonishing story of an early-20th-century Jewish exodus to Texas—could have been placed in any of our Books of the Year categories. Here it is in “Lives”—because there is much life within it.
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Books of the year 2024: Politics & Reportage
Books of the year 2024: Ideas
Books of the year 2024: History
