The Best Nonfiction Books of the 2020s

Winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and the book that made three generations of one family legible at once. Arthur Sackler, the eldest brother, built the fortune by pioneering the advertising of medication directly to doctors through his agency, William Douglas McAdams Inc, decades before OxyContin existed. Doubleday published it in April 2021. The marketing came first; the drug was engineered to fit it.

Random House published it in August 2020 and the frame stuck: America, India and Nazi Germany read as three caste systems rather than three race problems. Eight pillars hold such a system up, the first being divine will — the claim that the hierarchy was ordained rather than built. Oprah Winfrey took it for her book club and it went to number one.

Allen Lane published it on 19 October 2021, just over a year after Graeber died on 2 September 2020. Its central move is the indigenous critique: that European arguments about equality were partly borrowed from Native American critics of Europe, above all the Wendat statesman Kandiaronk, whose talk reached Paris through Baron Lahontan. Archaeology carries the rest. Nothing else this decade argued at this scale.

Little, Brown put it out on 1 June 2021 and it took that year's National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Seven places do the work — Monticello, the Whitney Plantation, Angola Prison, Blandford Cemetery, Galveston, New York City and Gorée Island — and Blandford, where Confederate memorial windows are explained to him without a flicker of irony, is the one that stays.

Yale University Press published it in 2023 and it won that year's National Book Award for Nonfiction. Blackhawk, an enrolled member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone who teaches at Yale, moves Native nations from the edge of American history to its centre, and the familiar chronology bends structurally rather than politely. Dense, unshowy, and the most consequential US history of the decade so far.

Three handfuls of pecans, a tattered dress and a lock of Rose's hair — the cotton sack an enslaved woman in South Carolina packed for her daughter Ashley, nine years old, when the two were sold to different owners. Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered that provenance onto the cloth in 1921. Random House published it on 8 June 2021, and it took that year's National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2022 Cundill History Prize.

Winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The title is El Akkad's own tweet of 25 October 2023 — one day, when it is safe and too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this — opened out into a book-length essay on Gaza and on the distance between what the West says it believes and what it does. Knopf published it in 2025. It sits this high on prize weight alone: staying power is the one thing a book this recent cannot yet have shown.

Baillie Gifford Prize winner in November 2023, and the argument sits in the pairing: Fort McMurray, Alberta is a bitumen town, and the 2016 wildfire that emptied it behaved like nothing in the record. Even the subtitle is unsettled — Knopf and Hodder used A True Story from a Hotter World, other Knopf editions carry A True Story of Survival and Community in Our New Century of Fire.

Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2024, shared with Ilyon Woo's Master Slave Husband Wife, and the first life of Martin Luther King written with access to thousands of recently released FBI files plus thousands of personal papers from his associates. Farrar, Straus and Giroux ran the hardcover to 669 pages and the pace never sags. What emerges is a man arguing with his father, exhausted, medicated, and braver for all of it.

Royal Society Science Book Prize winner for 2021, published in 2020 and subtitled How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. Its best pages are on the wood wide web — networks of fungal tubes that enmesh roots and link separate plants — and on what it would mean for something with no brain to make a decision. Mycology as an argument about individuality.

Published by Random House in 2022, winner of the 2023 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize and an Andrew Carnegie Medal. Organising idea: umwelt, the German term for the slice of the world an animal actually senses. Scallops carry rows of eyes and no brain to assemble a picture; crickets read an approaching spider off the air with hairs on their legs.

Scribner published it in 2021 and it shared the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History with Nicole Eustace's Covered with Night. Ferrer, born in Havana, treats her subject as a country the United States kept reaching into rather than a footnote to it — the Monroe Doctrine, the Platt Amendment, the constitution of 1940, Batista, the revolution. Five centuries in 576 pages, with neither nostalgia nor score-settling.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it on 12 September 2023 and it won the inaugural Women's Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024. Being persistently mistaken online for Naomi Wolf gave Klein a method rather than a grievance: follow your double into what she calls the Mirror World, where wellness, conspiracy and the far right have fused. Funnier than the subject deserves, and harder to wave off.

Youngest winner the Baillie Gifford Prize has had, taking it in 2022. Her John Donne is born in 1572 into a Catholic family broken by persecution, wrecks his prospects by secretly marrying Anne More, teenage niece of his employer Sir Thomas Egerton, without her father's consent, and ends as dean of St Paul's and the most admired preacher of the age. Faber published it in 2022. Criticism and biography braided until the join disappears.

Biography of someone other than its author, which is the only kind this list takes. Four loves structure Boggs's life of James Baldwin — the painter Beauford Delaney, Lucien Happersberger, Engin Cezzar and the artist Yoran Cazac, one to a section — and the argument is that they drove the work rather than sitting alongside it. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it on 19 August 2025, and with sixteen year-end lists it was the best-placed biography in Lit Hub's aggregate.

Bloomsbury published it in 2021, subtitled Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. Srinivasan has been Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford since January 2020, and her essays refuse the comfortable landing: pornography and the internet, sex work and carceralism, the ethics of desire, the state. Argument treated as a practice rather than a verdict, and the sharpest essays of the decade.

Five lives carry it — Ray, Bapu, Naomi, Laura Delano and Hava — and the question Aviv keeps asking is what a diagnosis does to a person once they start living inside it. Delano's long taper off psychiatric medication is the section that lingers. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it on 13 September 2022, and even the subtitle shifts between editions.

Avid Reader Press published it on 14 May 2024 at 576 pages, and the engineering is only half of it. Rocket engineers Allan McDonald and Roger Boisjoly spent the night before the 28 January 1986 launch arguing that cold had stiffened the booster O-rings; McDonald then refused to sign the recommendation and it flew anyway. Seven crew, each given a life rather than a role.