He is the author of five non-fiction works, and his writings appear regularly in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Telegraph and Condé Nast Traveler magazine, among many other publications internationally. He is the British correspondent in Copenhagen for Monocle magazine and Monocle 24 radio, and travels regularly to give talks and lectures on the Nordic lands and its peculiar people.

Booth started writing Near Perfect People when he moved from England to Denmark 17 years ago. One of the things that surprised him the most was how different the Nordic countries seemed to be from each other. He wanted to explore these differences and explain what he saw as "a fascinatingly dynamic large dysfunctional family." In particular, he wanted to investigate Denmark's consistently high scores on various happiness indices, as these figures conflicted with his own observations, and he wanted to challenge the perception of the Nordic nations as a single green and joyous unit. Booth conducted four years of research, traveling to all five countries and interviewing his most prominent political and cultural figures. He tried to examine the successes and weaknesses of these countries in order to "rebalance the utopian point of view" of the Scandinavian countries and present a different perspective than the excessively positive one promoted by the media around the world.