Best non-fiction books 2017 – the list so far
Some of us are recent converts to non-fiction, and we feel rather zealous about it. Contrary to what we thought, non-fiction shouldn't remind you of school. You shouldn't struggle through it or only have it on your shelf for showing off.
No, it should be un-putdownable, life changing. You should want to press these pages into your friend's hands, into stranger's hands, rearrange your local bookshops' shelves and start Twitter-stalking the authors.
All this madness awaits: first you have to read our pick of the best non-fiction of 2017.
Click through our gallery to see them all.
If you loved The Year of Magical Thinking, then for you 2017 is a year of the curious follow-up memoir. Joan Didion's new book, South and West is an intimate piece of writing – the words come straight from Didion's 1970s notebooks, bald notes and recorded conversations for pieces that never got published.
She documents two trips: one 'south' during a road-trip of the southern states of America, and one 'west' on assignment for Rolling Stone in San Francisco.
Enjoy her clear and unsentimental prose, "Weather would come in on the radar, and be bad. Children would take fever and die" on sheets typewritten in motels and inns across the south of the US.
