Winner
Fire Weather A True Story from a Hotter World
John Vaillant
On the Form, Variety and Errors of the Human
Armand Leroi
Why are most of us born with one nose, two legs, ten fingers and twenty-four ribs – and some of us not? Why do most of us stop growing in our teens – while others just keep going? Why do some us have heads of red hair – and others no hair at all? The human genome, we are told, makes us what we are. But how?
Armand Marie Leroi takes us to the extremes of human mutation – from the grotesque to the beautiful, and often both at the same time – to explain how we become what we are. Through the tales of long-lived Croatian dwarves, ostrich-footed Wadoma tribesmen, sex-changing French convent girls, and many more wonders of human development, Leroi has written a brilliant narrative account of our genetic grammar and people whose bodies have revealed it.
Armand Leroi was born in 1964 in New Zealand, and has lived all over the world;. He has published widely in technical journals on evolutionary and developmental genetics, and is currently Reader in Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College London.
Winner
John Vaillant
Longlist
Chris van Tulleken
Longlist
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Longlist
Thomas Halliday