Rola Khalaf, Janan Ganesh and other FT journalists pick their favourites.

Rolla Khalaf

The editor

The titles shortlisted for the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year awards are, by definition, some of the most compelling reads of 2024. For readers who missed the shortlist announcement, I recommend each of the six books. Since I chair the judging panel, I cannot reveal my personal favorites and we have yet to decide on the winner. Keep watching. I do most of my longlist reading in the summer. However, my rule is to read a novel before I start. My choice this year was Claire Massoud. This strange event is historyan epic tale of three generations of the Franco Algerian family. It has everything I love about a novel — a sensitive character study and a sweep of history.

Jeanine Gibson

FT Weekend Editor

If you’re alive in 2024, you’ll know that X (né Twitter) is either harming users or was the most important and influential spreader of disinformation during the US election campaign. Elon Musk, who bought the world’s 12th most popular social media platform for $44 billion just two years ago, is either addicted to delusional posting for RTs or the man who invented it for Donald Trump. won And as one of X’s most enduring memes says, why not both? In 2024, where major newspapers don’t bother to endorse their favorite candidates in public, a platform that doesn’t officially see itself as at least dominating the media, another election campaign and its owner wins. claimed Let it sink in, as he likes to say. Alvin and Donald’s song undoubtedly has a few more verses left, but inside Character Limits: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twittertech reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mack have produced a deeply reported, revealing, and slightly terrifying book that’s as subtle as its subtitle suggests.

Frederick Studman

Literary editor

Much has been written about the coldness of Putin’s Russia. Yet, in a crowded field, Patriots by Alexei Navalny is in a class of its own. This haunting autobiography provides a vivid, often vivid, account of the post-communist years in a Soviet Union plagued by lies, growing up through the hopes of the Soviet Union and Navalny’s emergence as an opposition leader ready to challenge state power. Contains funny incidents. , imprisonment and poisoning. Unflinching, defiant and even optimistic, the book was published earlier this year after Navalny’s death under unknown circumstances in a penal colony in the Arctic Circle. It is—to borrow the author’s own description—a startling and unusual “monument.”

On a very different note, I enjoyed it Long Island By Colm Tóibín. Sequels are often avoided. But in this follow-up to his famous novel BrooklynTóibín beautifully brings the story back to Ireland where it unfolds a poignant tale of paths not taken and opportunities missed.

Janan Ganesh

Observers of international politics

Of the great statesmen of the 20th century, Zhou Enlai is perhaps the least documented, at least in the form of English-language biography. i Chow En Lai.author Chen Jian plugs the hole, perhaps too much at times. Whether the long-serving Chinese premier was an aide to Mao, or a bridge to modern China, is teased out over 700 no-nonsense pages.

Nilanjana Roy

FT Weekend columnist

“Friend. What a word. Most use it about people they barely know. When it’s a wonderful thing.” Hisham Mutar’s deeply moving and disturbing novel my friends Worried my year. He writes about exile, friendships made of “great love and loyalty” but also “absence and doubt”, and you follow him through a London full of writers’ ghosts, memories and whispers of betrayal. Unforgettable.

Rana Fuhr

Global business columnist

I’ve long thought that most of the world’s biggest problems—from climate change to growing inequality—followed the Washington consensus. To the challenges of autocracy and oligarchy in the world – will require more systems thinking. This is an area of ​​great interest to engineers and the military in general, but in his very readable book The unaccountable machineDan Davies looks at how common sense problems, from bad business management to disastrous political decisions, are often failures of flawed systems. A great way to think about our present moment.

Camilla Cavendish

Associate Editor and Columnist

Not the end of the world. This is the most inspiring book I have read this year. Hannah Ritchie, lead data researcher at Our World, charts global progress in reducing per capita carbon emissions and tells us what to stop stressing about and what to focus on. Must be focused. A demand for action that is also an antidote to sadness.

Tim Harford

The Secret Economist

Meditation for Man by Oliver Berkman Contains 28 short essays on how to live your short life with less stress and more joy. Do you rarely see friends because the prospect of a dinner party is daunting and exhausting? Read his note on “Bad Hospitality,” cook some pasta, and enjoy your imperfect existence with some company.

Robert Sharmsley

Britain’s chief political commentator

Clever, funny and tragic, James is a wonderful retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Runaway Slave, from Jim’s point of view. Percival Everett cleverly uses a literary device to bring a secondary character from a popular novel to Jim and the true horrors of American slavery. Jim is given not only a full name but a rounded personality, revealed to be an intelligent, well-educated man creating a slave patois to appease his white masters. You don’t have to read. Hook art Enjoy it but it’s a good excuse to do it.

Alice Fishburne

Opinion Editor

while eating Garden Against Time, Olivia Lange’s beautifully told story of literature, politics and gardening, I started three lists: People give it immediately. Authors to read quickly; Plants to buy immediately. His account of the rigors of restoring a Suffolk walled garden is truly a wonderful meditation on what humanity’s obsession with Eden tells us about itself.

Robin Harding

Asia Editor

An example of a LitRPG (or Literary Role Playing Game), a strange new literary subgenre spawned by the Internet, Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman features an AI with a foot fetish and an emotional cat called Princess Donut who sends text messages in all CAPS. It is very funny and was published in print for the first time this year.

Brock Masters

American Financial Editor

If you’re a big fan of books that connect narratives across time, Elif Shafaq has written a great one. There are rivers in the sky. uses rain to weave together the stories of the last great Assyrian king, a 19th-century Dickensian wife turned looting archaeologist, a Yazidi refugee from the 2014 Iraqi purge and a modern-day London hydrologist. .

Henry Mance

Chief Feature Writer

The best royal memory of recent years is that of Prince Harry. Spare (seriously). Even so, I was fascinated. A very private schoolAn account by Charles Spencer, Harry’s uncle, of an English boarding school in the 1970s. The education was excellent, but the teachers were abusive and the separation from his parents was like “a cut”. The book made me consider the damage done to generations of posh children, many of whom live abroad today.

John Byrne Murdoch

Chief Data Reporter

With right-wing populism on the march on both sides of the Atlantic, Vincent Valentimes The Normalization of the Radical Right makes a striking argument: that what has changed in the last decade is not the rise of reactionary ideologies, but the breakdown of the norms that have suppressed these perpetually dormant ideologies. More than any other book, this book has changed how I think about the seismic political and social changes of recent years, and what they might change.

This hurts Okoro.

Life and Arts Columnist

All fourMiranda July is a funny, quirky and wonderfully mischievous and essential novel. I didn’t always sympathize with the main character, “a semi-famous artist,” but I loved the provocative questions about how women in midlife can rethink and boldly renegotiate what they want. , what they want and what they allow themselves to create.

Ann Sloane Chisani

Companies Editor

with the HorusA brutal and poignant account of the Algerian civil war, Kamel Daud has become the first writer from the former French colony to win the Prix Goncourt this year. But France’s top literary prize has come at a high personal cost: Daoud has had to flee the country, where he risks criminal charges for daring to tackle the subject.

Madhumita died

Artificial Intelligence Editor

Low and Dreamy by Samantha Harvey Orbitalwhich won this year’s Booker Prize for fiction, felt more otherworldly than when I read it in a rustic Tuscan farmhouse last summer. Could not be. This vivid novel about the lives of six astronauts as they orbit the Earth in a spaceship is a snapshot of those bonds. is a series that takes place in strange circumstances, the joys and sorrows of being human, and a love letter to our unique planet.

Gillian Tate

Columnist and Editorial Board Member

Little unites right and left today – except, perhaps, for a sense of pessimism about the quality of information. Right wing against the alleged liberal bias of the “mainstream media”. The left accuses the right of deliberately spreading massive disinformation. So, is the answer to getting more information? nexusYuval Noah Harari’s thought-provoking book suggests not. He argues that more knowledge alone will not solve our problems, because so much depends on the social and political channels through which it passes. Not everyone will like Harari’s grandiose approach, and his conclusions about AI are troubling. But it’s an important perspective at a time when information wars seem only to get worse.

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