The eight books shortlisted for the 2023 Cundill History Prize.

Eight books have been shortlisted for the 2023 Cundill History Prize.

The $75,000 (U.S.) prize, administered by McGill University, is awarded annually to a book that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality, and broad appeal.

The shortlist was announced at an event in New York City on September 27.

The shortlisted titles are:

• The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution by Alison Bashford (University of Chicago Press)
• Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan (Faber & Faber)
• The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets by Matthew Connelly (Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House)
• The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance by Mackenzie Cooley (University of Chicago Press)
• Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine’s Confessions by Kate Cooper (Basic Books/Hachette Book Group)
• Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in India by Douglas Ober (Navayana)
• Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future by James Morton Turner (University of Washington Press)
• The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullit, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson by Patrick Weil (Harvard University Press)

The finalists will be announced in mid-October, with the winner to be announced on November 8.

Update, September 28: An earlier version of this story listed a different publisher for Douglas Ober’s Dust on the Throne.