Nonfiction of the year: the best-written book on the Baillie Gifford Prize shortlist

Plus this century's best-written winner of the prize

COMING SOON:

—November is the busiest month for literary prizes, so we’ll be featuring the best-written books from their shortlists, and also from the century’s previous winners of these prizes. To avoid sending you too many posts, we’ll leave the recent releases until December.

—THIS SATURDAY: Eleanor Anstruther and Samuél Lopez-Barrantes will be joining me for a live video discussion of what we mean by the term ‘literary’. All of you are welcome to join us, and you can find more information here, restacks of which would be appreciated.

IN TODAY’S ISSUE

—‘I, whose unending obsession with the styling and maintenance of my hair begins at sixteen, should have asked Ba, when he could still remember, what hair product he used. I could try to fix my own hair in that same fashion, the way I tried on my mother’s gray sweatshirt after she died and discovered that I could fit inside its void’: the best-written work on this year’s shortlist for the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction. The winner w…