Best books of 2024: Sport, Health and Wellness

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Sport

by Simon Kuper

How to Win the Premier League: The Inside Story of Football’s Data Revolution by Ian Graham (Century)
Graham got a PhD in physics from Cambridge before becoming Liverpool FC’s director of research from 2012 to 2023, for almost all of the Jürgen Klopp era. This is a highly intelligent insider’s account of how Liverpool and other leading clubs use data. Graham also suggests possible futures for sport’s analytics revolution.

Bill Edrich: The Many Lives of England’s Cricket Great by Leo McKinstry (Bloomsbury Sport)
Bill Edrich played cricket for England from the 1930s through the 1950s, was an RAF bomber pilot who survived the war by a series of miracles, played professional football for Tottenham Hotspur, and was a compulsive womaniser who married five times. This is a well-researched account of a remarkable life.

Godwin by Joseph O’Neill (4th Estate)
A compelling novel about a family of western fortune-seekers that tries to track down and monetise a brilliant young footballer in West Africa, despite knowing little more than his name, Godwin. The sports-loving O’Neill, who tackled cricket in his 2008 novel Netherland, is strong on the avarice of football agents.

Munichs by David Peace (Faber & Faber)
Peace is a novelist whose subjects range from US-occupied Tokyo to northern English football. This meticulously researched novel, larded with period detail, recounts the Manchester United team’s plane crash in Munich in 1958. Twenty-three people including eight players died, while 21 survived. Peace spends time on almost all of them.

My Beautiful Sisters: A Story of Courage, Hope and the Afghan Women’s Football Team by Khalida Popal (John Murray)
Popal was the founder and first captain of Afghanistan’s women’s national football team. This memoir recounts her team’s struggle for existence in a country where women were barely allowed to go outside alone, let alone play sport. Popal ended up fleeing to Denmark. Some of her teammates were much less lucky.

Health and Wellness

by Anjana Ahuja

Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman (Bodley Head)
Anyone fruitlessly chasing the Insta-perfect life might prefer the advice of bestselling self-help author Burkeman, who advocates that we embrace “imperfectionism”. As someone who feels like I’m coming up for air every time I cross an item off an infinitely long to-do list, I am soothed by his mantra that one’s life is never truly sorted. 

The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke (Abacus)
On a fateful Sunday in 2017, a nine-year-old girl called Keira was involved in a catastrophic car accident. She was declared brain-dead and her heart transplanted into a nine-year-old boy called Max. Dear Life author and palliative care doctor Clarke tells the human and medical story of this gift, and the history of transplantation, in poetic, propulsive prose.

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (Allen Lane)
Not everyone buys into American academic Haidt’s provocation that smartphones are rewiring the brains of young people, to damaging effect. But this must-read poses urgent questions: how can kids navigate the digital world without falling prey to self-loathing — and how can we hold the tech giants to account for their addictive products?

Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human by Guy Leschziner (William Collins)
The London neurologist Leschziner sensitively explores the genetic, neurological and psychological basis for human failings such as wrath, sloth and gluttony. Along the way we meet patients — the outsized recluse who became wedged in his shower cubicle, the soldier who couldn’t stop talking about sex after a head injury — who reveal how medical conditions are often lashed to the mast of morality.

Books of the Year 2024

All this week, FT writers and critics share their favourites. Some highlights are:

Monday: Business by Andrew Hill
Tuesday: Environment by Pilita Clark
Wednesday: Economics by Martin Wolf
Thursday: Fiction by Laura Battle
Friday: Politics by Gideon Rachman
Saturday: FT Critics’ choice

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