The Economist Books of the Year

About the The Economist Books of the Year

The Economist's annual books-of-the-year round-up, published in late November or early December. One list a year, split into the paper's own sections. Section names drift, so they are folded into seven: Politics and current affairs, Biography and memoir, History, Economics and business, Science and technology, Culture, and Fiction. Culture covers "Culture and digressions", "Culture, society and travel", "Culture and ideas", "Culture and the arts" and similar names. Fiction includes the 2006-2008 "Fiction and memoirs" section and the 2010-2012 poetry sections. The 2024 "Science and health" section is filed under Science and technology and "Business, economics and technology" under Economics and business. Left out: the 2025 Food (cookbooks) section, lists of books by Economist staff, and the mid-year "best books so far" lists. Edited volumes credit the editor the page names. Titles drop a trailing ": A Novel". No list is ranked. economist.com disallows Claude-User in robots.txt, so 2006-2023 pages were read through Wayback Machine copies; the 2007 list is the old displayStory URL because no capture of its newer URL was found. Every 2024 and 2025 Wayback copy is cut off by the paywall, so those lists come from yearendlists.com, which matched the Economist pages title for title for 2021-2023. The 2023 page misprints Claire Kilroy's "Soldier Sailor" as "Solider Sailor"; the yearendlists spelling is used.

Organization: The Economist. Official site (opens in a new tab)