The FT Press/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Shortlist

A shortlist for the 2014 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award was announced yesterday. The books chosen focus very much on the big-picture issues of the day, "the most important trends shaping our world" as the press release puts it, so the switch from Goldman Sachs to McKinsey as a partner to FT has not reduced the scope of the books as I thought it may. (I speculated back in May when the announcement was made that McKinsey would now be backing the award that it may change focus to the more nuts-and-bolts business management issues that McKinsey ostensibly focuses on in its own work. I was wrong.)

If you're interested in the debate amongst the award's judges (which include two past winners, Mohamed El-Erian and Steve Coll) that winnowed the longlist down, you can read Andrew Hill's full take on the Shortlist unveiled for [the] FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year on FT.com. That post also contains brief descriptions of each book.

The books included are:

• Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin, Times Books
• The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee, W. W. Norton & Company
• Creativity, Inc. Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, Random House
• Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught up with Rupert Murdoch by Nick Davies, Faber & Faber
• House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again by Atif Mian & Amir Sufi, University of Chicago Press
• Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Belknap Press

The winner will be awarded £30,000 on November 11 at a dinner in London. The runners-up receive £10,000 each. We'll update you with who took home the big prize the morning of the 12th.