Business books: the best-written of the century
Read the opening pages of our pick below ^ Plus Nicola Griffith on prose style
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COMING SOON:
—The best-written books of 2024, chosen by the year’s best writers and literary Substackers.
—Julian Evans on prose style.
IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—‘Was this the New World, the Old World, or the Next World?’: the best-written previous winner of the Financial Times award for business book of the year (this choice is part of our project to identify the best-written books of the century). This year’s winner will be announced on the 2nd of December.
—‘The voice of each piece is born on the first page, spilling out slippery and alive’: Nicola Griffith on prose style. We chose her novel Spear as the best-written work on last year’s shortlist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.
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THE FINANCIAL TIMES BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD - PREVIOUS WINNERS
2005: The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Friedman
2006: China Shakes The World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future – and the Challenge for America by James Kynge
2007: The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan
2008: When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change by Mohamed El-Erian
2009: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed
2010: Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram G. Rajan
2011: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
2012: Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll
2013: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
2014: Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
2015: The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment by Martin Ford
2016: The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby
2017: Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein
2018: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
2019: Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado-Perez
2020: No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier
2021: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth
2022: Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller
2023: Right Kind of Wrong: Why learning to fail can teach us to thrive by Amy Edmondson
The best written of these is
One: While I Was Sleeping
No one ever gave me directions like this on a golf course before: “Aim at either Microsoft or IBM.” I was standing on the first tee at the KGA Golf Club in downtown Bangalore, in southern India, when my playing partner pointed at two shiny glass-and-steel buildings off in the distance, just behind the first green. The Goldman Sachs building wasn’t done yet; otherwise he could have pointed that out as well and made it a threesome. HP and Texas Instruments had their offices on the back nine, along the tenth hole. That wasn’t all. The tee markers were from Epson, the printer company, and one of our caddies was wearing a hat from 3M. Outside, some of the traffic signs were also sponsored by Texas Instruments, and the Pizza Hut billboard on the way over showed a steaming pizza, under the headline “Gigabites of Taste!”
No, this definitely wasn’t Kansas. It didn’t even seem like India. Was this the New World, the Old World, or the Next World?
I had come to Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, on my own Columbus-like journey of exploration. Columbus sailed with the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María in an effort to discover a shorter, more direct route to India by heading west, across the Atlantic, on what he presumed to be an open sea route to the East Indies—rather than going south and east around Africa, as Portuguese explorers of his day were trying to do. India and the magical Spice Islands of the East were famed at the time for their gold, pearls, gems, and silk—a source of untold riches. Finding this shortcut by sea to India, at a time when the Muslim powers of the day had blocked the overland routes from Europe, was a way for both Columbus and the Spanish monarchy to become wealthy and powerful. When Columbus set sail, he apparently assumed the earth was round, which was why he was convinced that he could get to India by going west. He miscalculated the distance, though. He thought the earth was a smaller sphere than it is. He also did not anticipate running into a landmass before he reached the East Indies. Nevertheless, he called the aboriginal peoples he encountered in the new world “Indians.” Returning home, though, Columbus was able to tell his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, that although he never did find India, he could confirm that the world was indeed round.
I set out for India by going due east, via Frankfurt. I had Lufthansa business class. I knew exactly which direction I was going thanks to the GPS map displayed on the screen that popped out of the armrest of my airline seat. I landed safely and on schedule. I too encountered people called Indians. I too was searching for India’s riches. Columbus was searching for hardware—precious metals, silk, and spices—the sources of wealth in his day. I was searching for software, brainpower, complex algorithms, knowledge workers, call centers, transmission protocols, breakthroughs in optical engineering—the sources of wealth in our day.
Columbus was happy to make the Indians he met his slaves, a pool of free manual labor. I just wanted to understand why the Indians I met were taking our work, why they had become such an important pool for the outsourcing of service and information technology work from America and other industrialized countries. Columbus had more than one hundred men on his three ships; I had a small crew from the Discovery Times channel that fit comfortably into two banged-up vans, with Indian drivers who drove barefoot. When I set sail, so to speak, I too assumed that the world was round, but what I encountered in the real India profoundly shook my faith in that notion. Columbus accidentally ran into America but thought he had discovered part of India. I actually found India and thought many of the people I met there were Americans. Some had actually taken American names, and others were doing great imitations of American accents at call centers and American business techniques at software labs.
Columbus reported to his king and queen that the world was round, and he went down in history as the man who first made this discovery. I returned home and shared my discovery only with my wife, and only in a whisper.
“Honey,” I confided, “I think the world is flat.”
RECOMMENDED:
FROM THE ARCHIVE: NICOLA GRIFFITH ON PROSE STYLE
George Saunders proposed on his substack that it’s in the editing process that literary voice emerges -- the more a writer edits the more they’ll make choices different to other writers, resulting in a voice and style unique to them. Does this strike you as correct?
In terms of voice, no. Very no. The voice of each piece is born on the first page, spilling out slippery and alive. It grows with the story. By the end the voice stands proud, distinctly itself—unlike any other, even from the same writer. All editing can do is wash and tidy that original voice, teach it to speak a little more clearly or how to play nicely with others. But the essence is unchanged.
Voice rests on style—the sinuous rhythm or blunt word choice, the metaphor systems and narrative grammar, the choice of what is stated and what left unsaid—and here revision, the series of conscious choices made after the fact, can sharpen and shape the style. To the extent that there is a difference between style and voice perhaps it's that style is conscious, voice more primal.
I'm wary of one aspect of editing: the self-doubt that becomes self-censorship. Doing something new requires an almost psychotic self-belief. But how can we tell when we're following our star to undiscovered country and when we're just wandering the woods, ranting and lost? It can be a tenuous distinction, and never more so than at the beginning.
Beginning feels a little like hearing a voice or glimpsing a shape in the mist, and, with no rational hope for success—only the sudden sense that it's important, it's necessary, it might just be magic—leaping up and flinging yourself into the void in pursuit. Sometimes there's a moment when you find yourself alone on the moor with the mist rising and night falling, and behind you the door back to reality is closing. What do you do? You listen to the still quiet voice inside.
I've learnt to tell when a shape in the mist is real and when it's just an echo, something insubstantial that will vanish on contact, or a misbegotten monster that will torment you for years. I can't tell you how I know the difference; perhaps this is the central mystery of creativity. A wordless knowing. A thing of the body. Visceral.
What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of Spear?
I couldn't tell you. Writing Spear was writing Spear—its own, indivisible action. The language and rhythm, the place and the pace and the prose are entwined, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It's difficult to consider one element independent of another.
What I can do is tell you a Spear origin story—not the origin story, because there's no such thing. (Writers' origin stories are just that, stories, narratives assembled after the fact to try make sense of events. Perhaps this is what art is: rendering meaning from randomness.)
Spear was born from the collision of random events: one, research into the sixth-century beginnings of seventh-century place names for my novel-in-progress, Menewood, and the resulting deep dive into Welsh etymology; and, two, being asked to contribute a 'race-bent, queer-inclusive Arthurian retelling' to a short fiction anthology. I have always loved the Matter of Britain—the wild magic of the landscape, the mist on the moors, Camelot not as a place but a state of mind where people fight for truth and justice and all that's good and bright. What I didn't love was never seeing people like me there. In Camelot there were no crips and no queers, no realistic women and zero people of colour. The legend is after all a national origin story; it orbits a dense core of nativist Manifest Destiny. I couldn't see how a story could escape that gravitational pull yet still feel Arthurian, still have the power to immerse the reader in the sense of myth and mystery, rooted in and belonging to a place. I turned down the request and went back to writing Menewood.
But then an image drifted into my mind: a figure in mended armour riding a bony gelding and carrying a red spear. And between one breath and the next I knew I could sidestep the nativism and remake the legend for people like me. I didn't know how I would do these things, exactly, only that I could.
These visionary beginnings are as delicate as a newly unfurled butterfly wing—a single breath can cripple it—so I didn't stop to think. I closed Menewood, opened a document for a short story called "Red," and leapt. Seventeen days later I returned with Spear.
The style of Spear was born from the need to hold the magical and the possible in perfect tension, to span the mythical and visceral, building the bridge even as I ran across it. It was only when I reached the other side, when both ends were anchored and the whole thing solid enough to stand on, that I could consider what I had made.
How important is style to your characterisation and to the reader's immersion in your writing?
Spear began as a short story and, like a short story, is a single unbroken narrative that, even without chapter breaks, falls naturally into two parts. In the first, the main character is nameless, growing up in a cave wholly isolated from the world, talking only to nature and her traumatised mother. This is a gauzy and dreamlike world of myth and magic and present tense—or at least present participles, and narrative distance, and periphrastic prose—where time flows strangely and reality is fluid. With no name for her sense of self to coalesce around, the main character can't quite solidify.
When Peretur gets her true name and leaves the cave, the narrative pivots around a single sentence:
Outside in the clearing her feet faltered but she walked on, through the thicket, and once on the other side she felt in her heart a snapping, like the parting of a sinew.
She is expelled into the outside world, solid under her feet, peopled with living breathing folk. The prose snaps into past tense, sharp and clear. It's now, with a name to hold onto and a world of people to interact with, as events become linear and cause is followed by effect, that Peretur can accrete experience and begin to cohere. Most of this is achieved using tense and sentence structure, just two elements of style.
Almost all the many elements of my style serve one goal: the creation of narrative empathy, that is, immersion. (My Writer's Manifesto gets to the meat of the matter. My PhD thesis explains at length how I do it. But let me see if I can come up with something better mannered than the former and less academic than the latter.)
Evidence from cognitive neuroscience suggests that as readers we take the experience—the feelings, thoughts, struggles—of well-drawn characters as our own. That immersion is made possible by triggering a particular set of the reader's neurons, called mirror neurons. These bundles of brain tissue fire when you do something such as pick an apple. The fascinating part is that they also fire when you simply observe another person picking an apple. The mirror neurons reflect the behaviour of the other person, they behave as though you yourself were the one reaching for that apple. You are physically—neurologically, biochemically—recreating another's actions and experience inside yourself. Your body echoes theirs. You feel the apple-picking as intimately as if it were you doing it. In a very real way, it is you doing it. You have experienced picking an apple even though, in real life, you have not.
Part of this is achieved through word choice. The more specific and particular a word is the more likely it is to trigger the memory of touch and scent, the two most evocative senses. For example, if I read ‘rose,’ a functional MRI scan will show the areas of my brain relating to smell lighting up—whereas the more general 'flower' might not have the same effect. Similarly, reading ‘leather glove’ instead of ‘glove’ stimulates my brain in the same way as actually touching leather. So if I read of a character who picks up a fallen glove scented with rose water and lifts it to her face, as a reader I will feel the cool-then-warm of the leather against my upper lip, hear the faint but distinctive creak of the leather, smell that rose: I am right there, not beside the character but inside her, wearing her skin, seeing, hearing, feeling as she does. And when an arrow thunks into the tree by her head I jump as she jumps. I'm not reading, I'm living.
So much of what I do in Spear—sentence rhythm and world choice, tense and metaphor; what Peretur notices and how she responds; the punctuation and paragraph length—is bent to that overarching purpose: for the reader to smell, hear, taste and know Early Medieval Britain as Peretur does; to gradually adopt her mindset and worldview; to think her thoughts and understand her choices. To become her, just for a while.
You clearly believe that the quality of your prose matters, but could you explain why this is so?
I write from the body about the body. My fiction is about the body moving through and interacting with natural and built environments: People in their place, how each becomes aware of and influences the other. Every shocked breath and gust of wind, heartbeat and hoofbeat, work together. And so much of that is in the rhythm, the rise and fall of syllables and phrases, sentences and paragraphs—the music of the prose.
So when I write about the passing of time, sentence becomes stately, paragraphs measured and inevitable as the turning of the seasons. Weather changes demand short words in flicks and flirts. And the feel of a word in the mouth—like a sigh or a thorn—can determine the word I pick to describe the rain so that the reader feels it on their skin.
Tension—the rising fear of a child crouched behind a hedge as footsteps grow closer, or the swell and mutter of a gathering crowd—is largely done with rhythm, at micro- and macro-level. And if you write sentences that lean each upon the other then when the reader begins they can't stop, racing to keep up as the words fall one by one, faster, faster, a radiating ripple of dominos.
Can that musicality be taught?
It can be absorbed by osmosis through reading. Can it be taught? I don't know. Maybe if a musician and a writer taught together. Or— Oh.
It just occurred to me: when I started writing I was fronting a band in the north of England. I was writing all the lyrics, some of the music—certainly my own lyric melody—and even a percussion rhythm or two. And though I've always known that the band and my writing were deeply connected I thought it was about the joy of performance, the intoxication of watching my words sway a crowd. I hadn't thought about the music. The music influencing my prose. How very cool…
Do you read your work out loud?
Not as I write. But when I'm really rocking and rolling and typing fast I can feel myself riding the rhythm of the keyboard. And I hear the words in my head—particularly dialogue—but I don't speak them. Sometimes when rewriting I'll stop and test a phrase, but usually the first time I read aloud is when I'm preparing for a public performance or to narrate the audiobook.
I love performing my work. It's exhilarating to feel words I wrote take flight and soar, clothed in the power of the human voice. Reading aloud has taught me so much about how prose works.
I love reading to Kelley, my wife, too—not my own books, but mutual favourites. Though we do that a lot less now that buying and using audiobooks has become almost frictionless.
Having said that, I don't listen to audiobooks. Partly because the information density is too low: listening at normal speed makes me impatient; speeding it up makes it sound ridiculous. But partly it's that a narrator's choices—accent, tone, timbre, rhythm, emphasis—feel constricting: they are the narrator's interpretation of the text, not mine.
And lastly, the subject we’d like to explore with you in most detail: your stylistic pet peeves.
This applies across genres: most writers do not understand present tense. There's a mistaken belief that present tense makes prose more immediate when in fact it has the opposite effect. Present tense is the language of dreams and childhood. It's unanchored in a specific narrative moment which renders it slippery and indefinite. Think of present tense narrative as a flowing river, flowing endlessly onwards. There's no easy way to slide through narrative time, to go back, which means present tense can only show what is. Present tense is a terrible tool for character development because unless you break the narrative flow—and you will break it if you step out, because you never step in the same river twice—you can't compare and contrast past and present; you can't judge and therefore can't learn.
Think of past perfect narrative as the boat on the river. You can row upstream, or downstream, or stop and tie-off to a tree. You are anchored to the boat, to the narrative reality. As long as you don't get out of the boat you won't break the narrative. And in that boat you have so much freedom: you can glide downstream with the current encountering new things. You can row back upstream and re-examine something you saw earlier but now would like to reconsider in light of what you've just seen. You can tie-off to a tree and eat some lunch while daydreaming about the future. And you can weigh and assess and learn from what you see and hear and feel and remember and hope for.
Present tense, on the other hand, works well for a novel's initial, omniscient paragraph—that opening panoramic survey of the story's sometimes literal terrain. Beginnings set context—here is what we have—with no need for opinion. Beginnings are ideally suited to present tense. Everything else is difficult to do well, and most people shouldn't try.
Any peeves specific to prose in speculative fiction?
Long and self-conscious titles. SFF started to take itself seriously as literature in the sixties and seventies, and titles changed from prosaic but evocative—Fahrenheit 451, More Than Human, The Long Tomorrow—to quotes from classics (of various traditions) and enigmatic phrases trying to sound like blank verse. Novel titles such as Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang or The Left Hand of Darkness work well, but some of the longer short fiction, "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side" or "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" make me want to hammer them to rubble. Fortunately that fashion died a quiet death some time ago.
However, I'm sorry to report a recent resurgence. At least this time it is often a pragmatic choice for this world of online book discovery: a unique phrase rises instantly to the top of search results.
Even so, there's something about long titles that makes me wary. Is the writer unable to identify their theme, or encapsulate the central image of their work in a simple phrase? Do they not trust the clarity and strength of their own words?
I can understand why some genre writers might worry about this—our work has been shunned by the gatekeepers of the literary garden for generations. And in literary circles simple is often misread as less—less good, less challenging, less daring, less creative, less radical, less meaningful. This is nonsense, of course, a close cousin to the equally nonsensical notion that misery lit—narratives of pain, trauma, cynicism, oppression, hopelessness, cruelty, and angst—is inherently superior to any fiction rich with joy or hope or the search for solutions.
This privileging of negativity is a human thing. In evolutionary terms it makes sense to devote more brain space, more processing power and long-term memory to the things that can hurt us. But that's all it is, an evolutionary byproduct. Humans are creatures of the body—the whole body, not just the genes that made us and those we might pass on. And the body is made for use—to do all the things and feel all the feels—for struggle and grief, for pain and loss, yes, but also joy, for love and lust, growth and delight and learning, for sharing and storytelling and singing. The point of life is living, not just to avoid death. Our stories should reflect that.
Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women’s self-defence, fronting a band, and counselling at a street drugs agency, before discovering writing and moving to the US. In 1993 a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis slowed her down a bit, and she concentrated on writing. Her novels are Ammonite (1993), Slow River (1995), The Blue Place (1998), Stay (2002), Always (2007), Hild (2013), So Lucky (2018), Spear (2022) and Menewood (Oct 2023). She is the co-editor of the BENDING THE LANDSCAPE series of original short fiction. Her multi-media memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life, is a limited collector’s edition.