From The Big Short to Normal People: the books that defined the decade
It began with the fallout from the global financial meltdown and ended with two women sharing the Booker. Which titles shaped the last 10 years?
We entered a new decade in largely gloomy fashion, still suffering from the ramifications of the global financial crisis two years before. No surprise then that Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, which explained how America’s subprime mortgage crisis made a few people very rich and everyone else a lot poorer, struck a chord. Lewis is a literary whistleblower: a former Salomon Brothers employee who dished the dirt on his brash colleagues in 1989’s Liar’s Poker and then went on to make a career as an explainer of complex economics and organisations to mass audiences who couldn’t believe people got away with this stuff.
