Michael Lewis

The story of the 2008 financial crisis told from the inside — specifically from the perspective of the small number of contrarian investors who saw it coming and bet against the mortgage bond market. Lewis follows three distinct groups: Michael Burry, a neurologically atypical fund manager who read the actual mortgage bond prospectuses and figured out they were fraudulent; Steve Eisman, a deeply cynical investor who turned his contempt for Wall Street into a trade; and a pair of young outsiders who found the same idea independently. Lewis uses their stories to explain a financial system so opaque that even the people running it didn't understand what they were selling. Won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. Adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. The starting point for anyone interested in Lewis.

Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, armed with a Harvard economics graduate and a spreadsheet, tries to build a competitive baseball team on a budget that the New York Yankees spend on three players. The book is ostensibly about baseball analytics, but its real subject is the same as all Lewis's best work: the gap between conventional wisdom and reality, and the specific kind of person willing to bet against the established consensus. The resistance Beane encounters from scouts who trust their eyes over the numbers is a case study in institutional inertia that applies to almost any field. Changed how sports organisations think about player evaluation. Required reading for anyone interested in decision-making, not just sport.

Brad Katsuyama, a Royal Bank of Canada trader, notices that every time he tries to buy stocks, the price moves against him before his orders arrive. He investigates and discovers high-frequency trading: a system in which firms co-locate their servers next to exchange computers, shave microseconds off latency, and effectively front-run every ordinary trade. Lewis follows Katsuyama as he builds a stock exchange specifically designed to make this impossible. The book generated a regulatory firestorm — 60 Minutes interview, Senate testimony, FBI investigation — because Lewis made the case that the market was rigged in a way that most people found credible and infuriating. His most propulsive narrative and most politically contentious book.

A Princeton art history graduate with no financial background somehow ends up as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the mid-1980s, at the peak of the firm's influence over global financial markets. Lewis's memoir of those years is the book that invented his career — he intended it as an exposé of Wall Street's excesses and was alarmed when it became a handbook. The writing is funnier and more personal than his later work, and it contains the seeds of everything he later developed: the outsider looking at a closed system, the ridiculous extremes of institutional behaviour, the single individual who understands something the institution doesn't. Essential for anyone who wants to understand how Lewis became Lewis.

The story of the friendship between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky — the two Israeli psychologists whose collaboration produced behavioural economics, the field that showed that human decision-making is systematically irrational in predictable ways. Lewis became interested in them after critics of Moneyball pointed out that baseball analytics was essentially applied Kahneman and Tversky. The book is his most literary — the friendship between the two men is rendered with the same intimacy that distinguishes good biographical fiction — and it manages to explain a body of academic work (the availability heuristic, loss aversion, prospect theory) without ever feeling like a textbook. The book for readers who want Lewis at his most emotionally complex.

The story of Sam Bankman-Fried — founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, once the second-wealthiest person under 30 in the world, and subsequently convicted of fraud. Lewis had unprecedented access to SBF before and during the collapse, and the book generated significant controversy: some readers felt Lewis was too sympathetic to a man convicted of stealing billions from customers. The more interesting reading is that Lewis is doing what he always does — following the person who most doesn't fit the system — and SBF's particular version of cognitive dissonance (genuine belief in effective altruism combined with genuine fraud) is the kind of character Lewis has always been drawn to. Whatever you think of his conclusions, it's his most gripping narrative since Flash Boys.

Michael Oher grows up homeless in Memphis and is taken in by the Tuohy family — a wealthy white family whose son plays football at a private school. He becomes a first-round NFL draft pick as an offensive tackle. Lewis uses Oher's story to trace the evolution of the left tackle position in American football — a position that barely existed as a premium role until Lawrence Taylor showed how destructive a great pass rusher could be — and the result is simultaneously a social history of football and an intimate portrait of a family. The film adaptation (with Sandra Bullock) was a major commercial success, though Oher himself has since disputed some of its characterisations. The book is more nuanced than the film.

In the transition between the Obama and Trump administrations, the incoming team failed to show up for the briefings that explain how the US government actually works — the nuclear weapons management, the weather forecasting, the food safety systems, the programmes that send money to people who need it. Lewis followed the people responsible for those systems to understand what was at stake. The book is an argument for competent government built entirely through specific stories of what specific departments actually do, told by the people who do it. Unlike Lewis's financial books, the heroes here are civil servants — and he treats them with the same attention and respect he usually reserves for mavericks. His most quietly angry book.

The European sovereign debt crisis, reported from the inside. Lewis travels to Iceland (bankers who turned into fishermen-turned-bankers who made catastrophic bets), Greece (a country where the national sport appeared to be tax evasion), Ireland (property developers and bankers who borrowed everything they could), Germany (a culture with a complicated relationship to financial prudence and bodily functions), and California (a state that had essentially already failed). The book is funnier than his financial books and shorter — more like a series of extended essays — and the anthropological readings of each country's relationship to money are the best thing he's written at essay length. Entry point for readers who want Lewis in a lighter mode.

The story of the Americans who saw COVID-19 coming — a small group of public health scientists and doctors who had spent years preparing for exactly this kind of pandemic — and the institutional failures that prevented their warnings from being acted upon. Lewis follows Charity Dean, a California public health official, and Carter Mecher, a Veterans Administration doctor, as they watch a disaster unfold in slow motion while the CDC bureaucracy fails to respond effectively. His most direct indictment of institutional dysfunction and his most timely book — though as the pandemic fades into the past, the institutional argument becomes the most lasting part. The story of what competent government looks like compared to what actually happened.