Best books of 2017: the hits and misses of the publishers’ year

Thomas Penn

Editorial director, Penguin

The book that made my year: It feels strange to talk about John Berger in the past tense. His writing gets to the heart of the human condition, and Confabulations, his last work, is a characteristic bear hug of a book: warm, vital, conspiratorial and full of hope. The cosmologist Max Tegmark is an astonishing thinker. In the face of vast leaps in the development of artificial intelligence, his Life 3.0 is a call for people and governments alike to think hard about what kind of future we want to create.
Familiar Stranger by Stuart Hall
Familiar Stranger by Stuart Hall

Our book that deserved to do better: Familiar Stranger, the acclaimed memoir by the pioneering, hugely influential cultural theorist Stuart Hall, is a powerful depiction of the end of empire and of the entanglements of race and class. Hopefully, paperback publication next year will see it find the wider readership it deserves.

I wish I'd published: Miranda Kaufmann's preconception-confounding Black Tudors: The Untold Story (Oneworld). Deeply researched, vividly told, it places people of African origin at the heart of a pre-colonial, pre-imperial, pre-modern England. Their presence, says Kaufmann, "was common knowledge at the time, and it needs to become common knowledge again".