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2009 FT/GOLDMAN SACHS BUSINESS BOOK AWARD
The winner
Liaquat Ahamed’s ‘Lords of Finance’ swept away a strong field of finalists for the 2009 prize
BOOK EXTRACT
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BooksPrincipal content
On the side of the angels
Four new books show the startling extent to which images of the next world still both reflect and shape life in this one
Heaven and the Afterlife
Pocket Guide to the Afterlife
Who Goes There?
The Garden and the Fire
Related content and features
Non-fiction
No Enchanted Palace
Mark Mazower offers a scholarly review of the origins of the UN and how it has failed to live up to the heady expectations raised by its founding fathers
Prosperity Without Growth
With lucid prose and sensible policy prescriptions, Tim Jackson’s challenge to mainstream economic thinking is both accessible and robustly argued
Small Memories
Nobel laureate José Saramago writes with fondness about his rural upbringing in his first memoir, which bears many of the hallmarks of his fiction and gives clues to its origins
Changing My Mind
The half-dozen ‘literary’ pieces in this collection by Zadie Smith are oddly incontestable, but the three essays set to memorialise her father and a stack of brief and semi-indulgent film reviews are the core
Journeying Boy
John Evans provides commentary on the intriguing and infuriating diaries of composer Benjamin Britten written during his precocious adolescence, writes Andrew Clark
Blood Matters
Masha Gessen pursues a cancer-inducing gene’s lethal path through her ancestry in this courageous, lucidly researched memoir
The Invention of the Jewish People
Tel Aviv professor Shlomo Sand attacks long-standing myths and pushes forward many controversial points in his survey of Jewish history, identity and culture, writes Simon Schama
Fiction
The Original Of Laura
Vladimir Nabokov’s last and previously unpublished novel – an ingenious story about confronting death – is further proof of the Russian writer’s literary talent
The Passport
Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller’s first novel is a poetic chronicle of one family’s desperate attempt to flee Ceausescu’s Romania
Happy Families
Carlos Fuentes’ tales of domestic iconoclasm, father-child relationships and civil unrest provide an outraged commentary on Mexico’s institutionalised corruption
Spade & Archer
This enjoyably navigated prequel by Joe Gores traces investigator Sam Spade’s career before it reached the case featured in Dashiell Hammett’s ‘The Maltese Falcon’
Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill
In Dimitri Verhulst’s fable of enduring passion, a woman in a Flemish village mourns the death of her composer husband, finds solace in a dog and waits 20 years to make a cello for her dead lover
Your Face Tomorrow 3
In the final volume of Javier Marías’s spy trilogy, Spaniard Jacques Deza begins to question the morality of his profession while working for a shadowy London agency as an interpreter of character
A Dead Hand
A writer travelling in Calcutta gets dragged into a murder case after receiving a letter from a beautiful woman asking his help in this latest novel from Paul Theroux
Dear Book Doctor
Pregnant pause
I’m about to go on maternity leave. Will anyone remember me or take me seriously when I return?
Book cover
Columbine
A faint gunmetal grey sky dominates the sparse cover conceived for Dave Cullen’s masterful retelling of the 1999 Colorado massacre
Small Talk
David Malouf
What am I most proud of writing? ‘Imaginary Life’. If you’re lucky as a writer you get one ‘gift’ book where you break through into a different kind of writing
