Five of the best international nonfiction books of 2024 – according to expert readers

Memoir: Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell

Recommended by Jay Prosser, reader in humanities at the University of Leeds.

Rachel Cockerell’s Melting Point explodes the genre of memoir. For years, I’ve been teaching my students that memoir needs the author to guide us through their story. Opposed to this, Cockerell removes herself entirely, speaking about her irritation with her “voiceover” in earlier drafts.

Her book instead consists wholly of quotes from diaries, letters, memoirs and articles of those who were there. As in a film (both Cockerell’s parents are documentary filmmakers), the reader experiences events as they happen, and from all sides.

The subject of the memoir is also extraordinary and topical. Through three generations of her family, Cockerell tells the story of Zionism before the Balfour Declaration expressed support for a national homeland for Jews in Palestine. We see how Jews were granted or sought homelands in various outposts, from Galveston, Texas in the US to Angola and Mesopotamia in Iraq. And before our eyes we witness the rising antisemitism, including pogroms, that drove their desperate search.

Politics: London, 1984 by Stephen Brooke

Recommended by Kieran Connell, senior lecturer in contemporary British history at Queen’s University Belfast.

Stephen Brooke’s London, 1984: Conflict and Change in the Radical City is a powerful study of a city – and a country – at a political...

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