Lawrence Wright is an absolutely fantastic storyteller, but the quality I most love when I reach for one of his books, is his exquisitely meticulous nature. I could probably write pages analysing the way that Wright conveys the precision and care that he brings to both his research and his writing. No doubt it’s easier to just reach for something he has written. It only takes a few pages for a reader to feel that they are in the hands of someone with great integrity and the endurance necessary to apply it to every tiny bit of information he considers. My favorite Wright book is Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. It’s a story about depravity, control and undue influence, with a riveting and horrifying chapter on—yes—taxes. It’s a hard book to put down.

To all of his writing, Grann brings the highest form of the storyteller’s skill and an addictive taste for adventure. His book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon was a fantastic exploration of human folly, told via Grann’s own retracing of the footsteps of an early adventurer. Killers of the Flower Moon includes all the same intense research, evocative world-building, and vivid characterisation. It’s also a deeply moving book that will change everyone who reads it. It tells the story of the wealth of the Osage Indians and the despicable humans who sought to take it from them. It’s also a book about the way that crimes and misdeeds are covered up not just by the criminals who commit them, but by the community around them, and by the passing of time. It’s a pleasure to experience the detective work that Grann undertakes.

Richard Rhodes is known to most people for his Pulitzer Prize winning opus, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The book is famous for its close-up narrative history of one of the world’s epic stories, and for the remarkable facility with which Rhodes tells compelling human tales while explaining science. As a model, the book is a marvel. However, I want to call attention to two other Rhode’s books from his lengthy catalogue. Rhodes wrote A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood about his experience at the hands of an abusive stepmother, his time in a twentieth century childcare institution, and the beloved brother who saved him. Rhodes’ experience of the institution was quite different to that of the many children in catholic orphanages at the same time, so for people who are interested in the topic, the book provides another perspective, and is a fascinating and moving read. But the Rhodes book I have picked up and again is his wonderful How to Write. It’s clear, practical, reassuring, and inspiring, a masterclass.

Carreyrou’s book was a searing expose of the fraud at the heart of Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos and the murky cult of personality that shaped the culture of her organisation. Indeed the book was so brilliant and so necessary, I’ve lost count of the movies, documentaries, and TV series that have since been made about the company and its backers. Carreryou is of course an incredible reporter. The story wasn’t just sitting there, waiting for someone to come along and write it, he tracked people down, put pieces together, dug up information that was hidden. It’s interesting to imagine exactly how long Theranos could have gone on for without Carreyrou’s hard work—quite some time, I suspect. For that reason, Carreyrou’s book is all the more impressive as a model of the genre. It’s so economical and so well-paced. He says everything he needs to weave a powerful story, but to do that, he must have gathered a mountain of information and then in a very disciplined way left a lot on the cutting room floor.

Pullman is of course a novelist, not a journalist, and his books are written for children. They are also exceptionally beautiful, intensely rich novels about love, loss, identity, evil, totalitarianism, and adventure. I found myself reaching for a number of young adult books while I was writing Ghosts, such as The Book of Dust, a connected series to Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy. I wanted to understand how Pullman so effectively inhabits the minds of children and young people, how he conveys the limitations of age without being patronising. I am also a great admirer of Pullman’s bewitching skill with landscape and geography. Reading him reminded me to think about beauty and place while I was writing.

For much of the twentieth century, a series of terrible events—abuse, both physical and psychological, and even deaths—took places inside orphanages. The survivors have been trying to tell their astonishing stories for a long time, but disbelief, secrecy, and trauma have kept them from breaking through. For ten years, Christine Kenneally has been on a quest to uncover the harrowing truth.
Centering her story on St. Joseph’s, a Catholic orphanage in Vermont, Kenneally has written a stunning account of a series of crimes and abuses. But her work is not confined to one place. Following clues that take her into the darkened corners of several institutions across the globe, she finds a trail of terrifying stories and a courageous group of survivors who are seeking justice. Ghosts of the Orphanage is an incredible true crime story and a reckoning with a past that has stayed buried for too long, with tragic consequences.