The most awaited nonfiction of 2015

Three years ago, a well-known literary agent told me that biography was on the way out. Sales were down, he said, and advances with them, and in the near future, he believed they would be written hardly at all. I remember flinching at this doom-laden announcement: I was about to start work on my own (group) biography. But I also felt in my marrow that he was wrong.

And so it has proved. Not only is a younger generation reinventing the form (think of “H Is for Hawk”, in which Helen Macdonald combines memoir and nature writing with an account of the life of TH White). Even traditional biographies — the kind that begin at the beginning and end at the end — continue to be published and, in some cases, to rack up sales and prize nominations.