The Longlist

Andrew Brown lived in Sweden as a child in the 1960s. Ten years later, he returned: he married a Swedish woman and worked in a timber mill, raising his small son, first of all in a housing estate on the edge of Gothenberg, and then in a makeshift chalet in the forest. This book tells his story and woven into it is the landscape of Sweden.

• Extract Read the first chapter of Fishing in Utopia
• Buy the Book Amazon.co.uk
• Buxton Festival Andrew Brown in conversation with David Blunkett MP
• Granta Essay by Sigrid Rausing on Fishing in Utopia
• New Statesman Sigrid Rausing interviews Andrew Brown
• Helmintholog Andrew Brown's blog
• Journalisted Articles by Andrew Brown

Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Shia insurgency and the Mehdi Army, is the most important political figure in post-occupation Iraq. At first grossly underestimated by the US, Muqtada has become the kingmaker of this divided country through a potent combination of nationalism and religious fervour. This is the first biography of the controversial and influential cleric, and draws on Patrick Cockburn's more than thirty years of reporting from the Middle East, as well as being one of the few books to be based on interviews with Iraqi eyewitnesses.

• Buy the Book Faber and Faber
• Journalisted Articles by Patrick Cockburn

'Finally I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession.' When award-winning journalist Nick Davies decided to break Fleet Street's unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of reporting the truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance. With the help of researchers from Cardiff University, who ran a ground-breaking analysis of our daily news, Davies found most reporters, most of the time, are not allowed to dig up stories or check their facts - a profession corrupted at the core.

• Buy the Book Random House
• FlatEarthNews.net Website
• Journalisted Articles by Nick Davies

Eva Figes and her family fled the horror of Nazi Germany when Eva was only six, forced to leave behind them friends, relatives and their housemaid, Edith. Ten years later, Edith suddenly re-emerged in their lives. Having miraculously survived wartime Berlin, she had reluctantly emigrated to hostile, volatile Palestine.

• Buy the Book Amazon.co.uk

Somewhere in the jungles of Uganda, there hides a fugitive rebel-leader: he is said to take his orders direct from the spirit world and, together with his ragged army of brutalised child soldiers, he has left a bloody trail of devastation across his country. Joseph Kony is now an internationally-wanted criminal, and yet nobody really knows who he is or what he is fighting for. Intrigued by the myths, Matthew Green heads off into a war zone, meeting the victims, the peacemakers and the regional powerbrokers, as he tracks down the man himself.

• Buy the Book Portobello Books
• Journalisted Articles by Matthew Green

In 1925, in the aftermath of World War One and the vengeful Treaty of Versailles, six of Germany’s leading chemical companies banded together in a cartel to protect their business from increasing international competition. The merger succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and within a few years I. G. Farben, as the cartel was named, dominated the lucrative global chemical business. Yet twenty years later the directors found themselves on trial in the same Nuremberg courtroom that had decided the fates of the surviving leaders of the Third Reich. They were accused, in the words of the prosecutor, Telford Taylor, of being: ‘the men who made war possible…the magicians who made the fantasies of Mein Kampf come true.’ Diarmuid Jeffreys shines a bright light on I. G. Farben’s Faustian pact with the Third Reich to reveal the detailed story of the original military-industrial complex.

• Buy the Book Bloomsbury Publishing

Today’s world is so utterly unlike the world of just twenty years ago that we have set aside our immediate past even before we could make sense of it. We literally don't know where we came from, and the results of this burgeoning ignorance are proving calamitous, with the clear prospect of worse to come. We have lost touch with three generations of international policy debate, social thought and public-spirited social activism. We no longer know how to discuss such concepts and we have forgotten the role once played by intellectuals in debating, transmitting and defending the ideas that shaped their time. In Reappraisals, Tony Judt resurrects key aspects of the world we have lost and reminds us how important they still are to us: now and to our hopes for the future.

• Extract Read the first chapter of Reappraisals
• Buy the Book Random House
• New York Review of Books Articles by Tony Judt

Hatim Kanaaneh is a Palestinian doctor who has struggled for over 35 years to bring medical care to Palestinians in Galilee, against a culture of anti-Arab discrimination. This is the story of how he fought for the human rights of his patients and overcame the Israeli authorities' cruel indifference to their suffering. Kanaaneh is a native of Galilee, born before the creation of Israel. He left to study medicine at Harvard, before returning to work as a public health physician with the intention of helping his own people. He discovered a shocking level of disease and malnutrition in his community and a shameful lack of support from the Israeli authorities. After doing all he could for his patients by working from inside the system, Kanaaneh set up The Galilee Society, an NGO working for equitable health, environmental and socio-economic conditions for Palestinian Arabs in Israel.

• Buy the Book Amazon.co.uk
• A Doctor in Galilee Hatim Kanaaneh's Blog

For about the last 10 years Sara Maitland has been trying to understand more about silence: what it might mean in 21st century; what effects it has on people; how it has been used and understood in the past; why we are so frightened of it; and why she has come to love it so much. Her new book is an account of that adventure, a sort of mixture of personal journey and cultural history, both deeply personal and intellectually exciting. In the course of researching and writing the book Maitland spent silent time in silent places – on Skye in the Hebrides; in the Sinai Desert; in forests and mountains; in a flotation tank; in monasteries and libraries. She was trying to match her personal experiences to those of other people – from fairy stories to single-handed sailors, from hermits and romantic poets to prisoners and castaways, from reading and writing to mountaineering and polar exploration, from mythology to psychoanalysis.

• Buy the Book Amazon.co.uk
• Sara Maitland Sara Maitland's Website

Decades later, Owen Matthews pieces together his grandfather’s passage through the harrowing world of Stalin’s purges, and tells the story of his parents’ Cold War love affair through their letters and memories. Interspersed with the story of his family is his own journey as a young reporter in nineties Moscow. This is a raw, vivid memoir about a young man’s struggle to understand his parents’ lives and the strange country which ‘made us and freed us and very nearly broke us.’

• Buy the Book Bloomsbury Publishing
• Newsweek Articles by Owen Matthews
• Journalisted Articles by Owen Matthews

Hitler's Empire constituted the largest, most brutal and most ambitious reshaping of the continent ever attempted in Europe's history. This book charts the landscape of the Nazi imperial imagination - from economists who dreamed of turning Europe into a huge market for German business, to Hitler's own plans for new trans-continental motorways.

• Buy the Book Amazon.co.uk
• Mark Mazower Mark Mazower's Website

You know the people in this book. You’ll remember the harassed waitress from your local Chinese restaurant. You’ve noticed those builders across the street working funny hours and without helmets. You’ve eaten the lettuce they picked, or bought the microwave they assembled. The words ‘cockle-pickers’, ‘Morecambe Bay’, ‘Chinese illegals found dead in lorry’ will ring a bell. But did you know that there are hundreds of thousands of undocumented Chinese immigrants in Britain? They’ve travelled here because of desperate poverty, and must keep their heads down and work themselves to the bone. Hsiao-Hung Pai, the only journalist who knows this community, went undercover to hear the stories of this hidden work force. She reveals a scary, shadowy world where human beings are exploited in ways unimaginable in our civilized twenty-first century.

• Extract Read the first chapter of Chinese Whispers
• Buy the Book Amazon.co.uk
• Journalisted Articles by Hsiao-Hung Pai

Since 9/11, the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, the West has been fighting a ‘War on Terror’, through force and through the building of new societies in the region. In this clear and devastating account, with unparalleled access and intimate knowledge of the political players, Descent into Chaos chronicles our failure. Having reported from central Asia for a quarter of a century, Ahmed Rashid shows clearly why the war in Iraq is just a sideshow to the main event. Rather, it is Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the five Central Asian states that make up the crisis zone, for it is here that terrorism and Islamic extremism are growing stronger.

• Buy the Book Penguin
• Ahmed Rashid Ahmed Rashid's Website
• Journalisted Articles by Ahmed Rashid

What kind of hypocrite should voters choose as their next leader? The question seems utterly cynical. But, as David Runciman suggests, it is actually much more cynical to pretend that politics can ever be completely sincere. The most dangerous form of political hypocrisy is to claim to have a politics without hypocrisy. Political Hypocrisy is a timely, and timeless, book on the problems of sincerity and truth in politics, and how we can deal with them without slipping into hypocrisy ourselves. Runciman tackles the problems through lessons drawn from some of the great truth-tellers in modern political thought--Hobbes, Mandeville, Jefferson, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Orwell--and applies his ideas to different kinds of hypocritical politicians from Oliver Cromwell to Hillary Clinton.

• Buy the Book Princeton University Press
• Journalisted Articles by David Runciman

The biography of a one page memorandum signed by Donald Rumsfeld on 2 December 2002 authorising 18 techniques of interrogation not previously allowed by the United States. The memorandum was in effect for six weeks during which at least two detainees at Guantanamo and the US airbase at Bagram died and a third was tortured over a period of seven weeks. Torture Team traces the life of the memorandum and explores issues of individual responsibility. Four indivudals dominate the story: Rumsfeld, US lawyer John Yoo, victim Mohammed al-Qahtani and X, an anonymous European prosecutor.

• Buy the Book Penguin
• Philippe Sands University College London
• Journalisted Articles by Philippe Sands

The Refuge and the Fortress deals with British attitudes towards people fleeing racial, religious or political persecution in their own country. Current prejudice against asylum seekers is not new. It echoes much of the rhetoric that greeted Jewish refugees from Tsarist pogroms at the turn of the 20th century, and those escaping Hitler in the 1930s. But this only tells half the story. As well as rejection and hostility, there has always been a characteristically British generosity and kindness towards those who have suffered cruelty and injustice. The book tries to make sense of these conflicting responses. At times, it seems, Britain offers a tale of two countries - the xenophobic and the open-hearted. The aim of the book is to make sense of these apparent contradictions, through direct testimonies of refugees and their descendants over the past 75 years. In doing so, we can also gain an insight into the elusive quality of what it means to be British - a question which is now at the centre of much social and political debate.

• Buy the Book Palgrave Macmillan
• Journalisted Articles by Jeremy Seabrook

The first narrative history in English of the Italian front: a major forgotten conflict of the First World War. Mark Thompson relates this nearly incredible saga with great skill and pathos. Much more than a history of terrible violence, the book tells the whole story of the war: the nationalist frenzy that led up to it, the decisions that shaped it, the poetry it inspired, its haunting landscapes and political intrigues; the personalities of its statesmen and generals; and also the experience of ordinary soldiers - among them some of modern Italy’s greatest writers.

• Buy the Book Faber and Faber

When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, many proclaimed the start of a new Elizabethan Age. Few had any inkling, however, of the stupendous changes that would take place over the next 50 years, in Britain and around the world. In Our Times, A.N. Wilson takes the reader on an exhilarating journey from that day to this. With his acute eye not just for the broad social and cultural sweep but also for the telling detail, he brilliantly distils half a century of unprecedented social and political change.

• Buy the Book Random House
• Journalisted Articles by A. N. Wilson