From gripping true crime books to blistering political critiques to a memoir written by a little-known singer from the 00s, here are the best non-fiction books published in 2023.

Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to 21st Century by Benjamin Y Fong

Quick Fixes is a fascinating, insightful and highly readable history of drug use, from the 18th-century coffee industry to the present-day US, where cannabis and psychedelics are inching towards legalisation. For a relatively short book, it covers a lot of ground, and Fong – who is an academic at Arizona State University – is a clear and engaging writer.

Reading this book changed my perspective on the politics of drugs, and helped me to figure out some things which I had felt ambiguous about but couldn’t quite articulate. As Fong argues, decriminalisation is not a sufficient solution to the problems which drugs can cause, unless this is accompanied by broader social reform. If we do nothing else to alleviate the underlying causes of addiction, including poverty and inadequate healthcare, then legalisation, he writes, “likely means bringing highly potent substances into the purview of profit extraction” and “virtually assures abuses detrimental to public health”. Quick Fixes shows that it’s possible to critique the very real harms caused by the criminalisation of drugs without becoming a libertarian.

The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America by David A Banks

No matter where you are (in the Western world at least), so many cities today feel exactly the same: new buildings spring up in the same architectural style; new shops, restaurants and bars adhere to similar aesthetic norms, whether that’s half-hearted attempts at quirkiness or the appearance of an earthy, homespun charm. The City Authentic explores the forces behind the often tedious homogeneity of modern urban life, including the property market, the ‘place branding’ industry, and the incentives of social media, which force businesses and public institutions alike to brand themselves with the specific goal of gaining attention on Instagram and TikTok. Banks argues that the modern city is built around “a nostalgic approach to both building preservation and new construction that foregrounds authenticity and uniqueness over mass production and conformity.” The book delves into what exactly ‘authenticity’ means, why we look to it as a source of meaning, and why the 'city authentic' model has made urban inequality even worse.

The City Authentic is focused on America, upstate New York in particular, but if you’ve recently been to Leeds, London or Manchester, then you’ll recognise exactly what it’s talking about. While Banks is a lecturer at the University of Albany and the subject matter is sometimes complex, this is far from being a dry, academic tome: he uses accessible examples to illustrate what he’s talking about, and writes in a witty, engaging style. Reading it reminded me of being in a classroom with a favourite teacher, and I felt a lot smarter for having done so.

We All Go into the Dark: The Hunt for Bible John by Francisco Garcia

We All Go Into the Dark is a book about a serial killer – Bible John – who very possibly never existed. Instead of attempting to solve a case that is likely to remain a mystery forever, Garcia sets out to explore the mythology behind the figure, which has loomed large over Glasgow for decades; the historical context in which the crimes took place, and the broader cultural fascination with violent crime.

This journey leads him to a Bible John musical; a true crime conference, and encounters with retired detectives, amateur sleuths and a fraudulent author who has for years been spinning an elaborate web of lies. In a sense, the book is an excellent example of the very genre it’s critiquing: it’s gripping, compassionate and meticulously researched, while Garcia’s prose is confident and elegant throughout.

A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention and Murder by Mark O’Connell

In 1982, an Irish aristocrat named Malcolm MacArthur went on a crime spree, murdering two people in a bungled and poorly thought-out effort to solve his mounting financial problems. MacArthur was eventually arrested while hiding at the Dublin home of Ireland’s attorney general (who was none the wiser), leading to a national scandal that almost brought down the Irish government.

In A Thread of Violence, author Mark O’Connell tracks down MacArthur, who, having been released from prison, is now an elderly man who spends his days doddering around Dublin. What follows is a gripping true crime story, a rich character study, and a thoughtful meditation on, among other things, the impossibility of understanding the motivations of another person or discerning the “truth” about a historical tragedy. MacArthur comes across as monstrously entitled, narcissistic and self-absolving (the book is in no way an exoneration), but he is also a comical, poignant and oddly sympathetic figure. A Thread of Violence is an ambiguous, searching, and compelling book from one of the finest non-fiction authors at work today.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

Palo Alto, a small city in northern California, is considered one of the birthplaces of Silicon Valley; it’s home to Stanford University and has served as headquarters for some of the world’s most powerful tech companies, including Google, Apple and Facebook. According to Malcolm Harris, a journalist and author who grew up there, it is also a place that is haunted by its past, and “the kinds of large historical crimes that, once committed, can never truly be set right”.

I came to this book expecting a history of the contemporary tech industry but, as the subtitle suggests, it’s about a lot more than that. Harris begins his narrative in the 1880s, when the colonisation of what is now the United States was still very much an ongoing process, and from then on covers an expansive range of topics, including the history of the eugenics movement, discrimination against Chinese workers in California, radical left movements, the birth of the military-industrial complex and, above all, the centuries-long development of racial capitalism. Palo Alto is a bold and ambitious work of history that provides a great deal of insight into the world today.

The Woman in Me by Britney Spears 

When Britney Spears released “...Baby One More Time” back in 1998, she likely didn’t foresee that, one day in the future, she would be a New York Times bestselling author. But, as Spears’ memoir The Woman In Me demonstrates, her life has always strayed into the unexpected, often with devastating results. Unlike other celebrity autobiographies, Spears’ book isn’t a blow-by-blow of her life, but rather a honed narrative about how she was exploited, abused, imprisoned and maligned by those in her life, from her father and ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake to a misogynistic media culture intent on dragging her down.

It’s often harrowing stuff (Spears’ father saying “I’m Britney Spears now” after placing her in a court-approved conservatorship is particularly chilling), but Spears manages to inject the quirkiness typified on her eccentric Instagram account into the book, giving it some levity. It maybe didn’t pull the curtain as far back as some wanted, but after being silenced for over 13 years, the fact that Britney Spears is sharing her story on her terms feels like the beginning of justice.

Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health by Micha Frazer-Carrol

The 2010s saw an explosion in writing about mental health, but much of it was insipid, reductive and overly reliant on the same set of platitudes (“talk to your friends!”, “self-care is important!”, “it’s OK not to be OK!”). In contrast, Mad World is a breath of fresh air. Engaging with the work of a broad range of theorists, activists and people with lived experience, journalist Micha Frazer-Carroll presents a radical new vision for understanding the issue in a social and political context, covering everything from the relationship between disability justice, queer liberation and mental illness, as well as the role of prisons, and the question of what a more liberatory form of care might look like. While dealing with some complex and challenging ideas, the book is clear, accessible and highly engaging, and a must-read for anyone with an interest in mental health.

Bad Taste: Or the Politics of Ugliness by Nathalie Olah

In Bad Taste, critic and author Nathalie Olah interrogates the value we place on aesthetic signifiers; the way that hierarchies of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste are constructed, how we construct meaning in our lives through consumption, and how cultural capital – or the lack of it – can have a profound impact on our lives. With chapters on interior design, food, leisure, and beauty, the book successfully combines political polemic and cultural criticism; running through it are a series of fascinating mini-essays, where Olah analyses the films of Pedro Almodovar, the class politics of Blue is the Warmest Colour, the influence of Frasier on 90s fashion, ‘Tough Mudder’, an event company which offers intense obstacle courses, and so much more. Prone to the occasional flash of acerbic humour, Olah is a delight to read, and one of Britain’s sharpest critics of contemporary culture.