Best summer books of 2024: Literary non-fiction

Maurice and Maralyn: A Whale, a Shipwreck, a Love Story by Sophie Elmhirst (Chatto & Windus)

If you find yourself gazing out to sea this summer, pondering what lies beyond the horizon, Elmhirst’s dramatic tale of an eccentric English couple who sold everything, set sail to New Zealand and were promptly struck by a whale and left adrift on a tiny raft will give you pause. A gripping true story of love and survival against the odds.

The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing (Picador/WW Norton)

The seed of Laing’s latest book is her own experience of creating a garden in Suffolk. From this small beginning, she cultivates and explores a thriving jungle of literary references and ideas that take her to Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, the work of poet John Clare and even filmmaker Derek Jarman. An elegantly written and thought-provoking book.

Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker (Allen Lane)

Exploring what she calls “threshold moment[s]”, Baker examines quiet periods in the lives of three great literary figures, and how those years of rural solitude in which seemingly little happened led to groundbreaking experimental leaps in their fiction. A triumph of biographical writing and literary scholarship.

No Judgement: On Being Critical by Lauren Oyler (Virago/HarperCollins)

In this interconnected series of essays on criticism in the age of social media, Oyler casts her eye over timely concerns such as the attention economy, gossip and anxiety to explore how we live now. Honest, funny and insightful.

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The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano (PublicAffairs)

Romano’s vibrant oral history of The Village Voice, the US weekly paper that captured the essence of New York’s Greenwich Village from 1955 until it ceased publication in 2017, contains multitudes. Its ragged, eclectic and gloriously energetic babble of voices tells the story of a pivotal moment in US journalism and culture.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape/Random House)

In August 2022, Rushdie was violently assaulted by a man with a knife during a literary event in upstate New York. The horrific attack, which left him close to death and cost him the sight in his right eye, provides the dramatic kernel of his book, in which he explores the traumatic aftermath of the event and his remarkable recovery.

The Book-Makers: A History of the Book on 18 Remarkable Lives by Adam Smyth (Bodley Head/Basic Books)

Rather than the usual technological breakthroughs and bestseller list of Bible, Shakespeare and Chaucer, Smyth’s history of the printed word focuses instead on some of the characters who produced the “cheap, everyday, usually ephemeral texts” that make up the bulk of print culture. The result is a fascinating book that speaks volumes.

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