The 24 Best Books We Read in 2025 |
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By Greg Grandin
Nonfiction What if we had international law—a rules-based order that bound every country, big or small, rich or poor, to shared standards? I was taught that those were American questions, sparked mainly by the world wars. They are indeed, the historian Greg Grandin argues in America, América—encompassing the entire North and South American continents. Within 50 years of the US’s founding, more than a dozen American republics won their own independence, beginning with Haiti. They had to build out a foreign policy and navigate discord (notably around slavery and Indigenous rights) with rules subtler than “might makes right” to govern sovereignty, territorial integrity, and defense. That struggle, Grandin writes, helped define the new republics, including the US—our laws, attitude to internationalism, and self-concept—and laid groundwork for institutions like the League of Nations and UN. Grandin’s Pulitzer-winning The End of the Myth tracked the collapse of an American devil’s bargain: hoovering up Lebensraum to ease domestic tensions. The US of the titular myth is self-made. Its neighbors are supposedly there as insulation and grist, not to chat about republican thought. But America, América, picking up there, traces the political legacies of Spanish and English settlers, then their descendants; often dueling, always in dialogue. Grandin makes legal debates as lively and interesting as the personalities of key players; America, América enriches the story of both the US and the hemisphere. Next time someone mentions the “rules-based order,” ask, as Latin Americans did: Whose rules? —Daniel Moattar
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By Yrsa Daley-Ward
Fiction I read The Catch a while ago, and have thought about it quite a lot, and I’m still not sure what actually happened. And yet this book completely mesmerized me. Here’s what I’m generally sure to be true: Clara and Dempsey are twins whose mother, Serene, mysteriously disappeared into the Thames when they were babies. They are adopted into different families; Clara becomes a bestselling author, Dempsey a clerical worker. Clara spots a woman she’s certain is their mother on the streets of London. The catch is that Serene hasn’t aged at all; she appears to be the same age as Clara and Dempsey. The Catch—Yrsa Daley-Ward’s fiction debut, following two memoirs and a book of poetry—jumps between timelines, perspectives, and large sections of Clara’s fictional bestseller. The writing is as beautiful as you’d hope coming from a poet, and yes, the plot is compelling, but mostly I was captivated by the nerve of it. I wanted to know what would happen next to Clara and Dempsey, but mostly I wanted to know what would happen next to the prose itself. —Ruth Murai
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By Diana Marie Delgado
Poetry In September, the Black liberation activist Assata Shakur died in Cuba, where she had sought asylum for more than four decades. The news of her passing prompted me to return to a poem she had written while incarcerated in New York and included in her self-titled autobiography. “Leftovers—What Is Left” is simultaneously devastating and hope-giving. “Love is my sword and truth is my compass,” Shakur writes. “What is left?” There aren’t many published poetic accounts of life behind bars. But this anthology is full of them, and, like the work of the late Shakur, is something I see myself returning to again and again. I picked up a copy in the spring, shortly after it came out, and sat with it for a long time, reading a couple poems every few days and then spending several more turning them over in my mind. Like a Hammer features the works of some of my favorite writers like former poet laureate Ada Limón and poet and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib, as well as lesser-known poets affected by the US carceral system. “While the legal system may appear established and unchangeable, art has the power to question dominant narratives…and organize communities in support of reform,” Delgado writes in the introduction. The collection is informative, challenging, and unabashedly real, somehow shining a new light on the cruelty and injustice of the prison system and serving as an act of resistance in and of itself. —Chasity Hale
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By Sophie Elmhirst
Nonfiction Survival stories tend to be epic tales of disaster suffered by men doing dumb things to prove a point. Think Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air or Alfred Lansing’s Endurance, the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton, who attempted the first land crossing of Antarctica but instead spent a year with his ship stuck in the ice. Women rarely feature prominently in these narratives, which is why I so liked A Marriage at Sea. It also starts out with a bad idea: In June 1972, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey give up their life in Derby, England, to set sail for New Zealand. Maralyn, who’d worked in a tax office, couldn’t swim. Maurice was a stubborn know-it-all with a dull job in a printing office. They longed for something more interesting. For the journey, they packed a tinned Huntley & Palmers Dundee cake for Maralyn’s birthday, but no motor or radio. Maurice “chose to sail the old way, by his wits and the stars.” Things go well until an injured whale hits their yacht, the Auralyn, and for the next four months they float in a lifeboat. But in this story, it is the man who falls to pieces. Maralyn figures out how to make fishhooks from safety pins, carefully rations their food, and turns turtles into meals, while writing her way out of loneliness in the diary that provides some of the basis for the book. What’s unique about this adventure isn’t just the way the Baileys get food or water or patch their leaky dingey, but how this odd couple didn’t kill each other before they could be rescued. Married people everywhere will recognize where the real survival story in this book lies. —Stephanie Mencimer
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By Alejandro Varela
Fiction You’ve probably heard the joke about Brooklyn polycules. Which joke? Pick one. The proliferation of nonmonogamy, particularly in the studied hipster enclaves of America’s most liberal cities, has become fodder for TV shows (Black Mirror, Sense8) and magazine covers. But for all its prevalence in pop culture, polyamory still tends to be relegated to the domain of punchline or spectacle. We rarely get access to the inner lives of people who, even in queer communities, are often ostracized for their nontraditional lifestyles. That’s what makes Middle Spoon, by Brooklyn-based novelist Alejandro Varela, such a delight. In it, we meet a middle-aged gay man struggling with heartache and forced to retreat to “the barren, antiseptic land of boundaries.” Varela writes his characters with such playful humor that any reader can learn a thing or two about commitment and desire while being thoroughly entertained in the process. —Jamilah King
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By Arundhati Roy
Nonfiction Arundhati Roy wrote one smashingly successful semi-autobiographical novel, 1997’s The God of Small Things, before turning her searing attention to politics, culture, and human rights activism in her native India. (Her second work of fiction, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, was published 20 years after the first.) In between, she also quietly managed a complex, often fraught relationship with her famous mother, the indomitable Mary Roy, a women’s rights activist and educator who founded an influential secondary education school and crusaded against unjust inheritance laws that unfairly cut women out of family fortunes. But Mary Roy, as her daughter writes with equal parts tenderness and stern, unflinching clarity, was also a tyrant in the home: verbally and physically abusive, despotic, and cunningly melodramatic, driving Arundhati and her brother into estrangement from her for long periods of time. Yet the book is improbably beautiful, a look at how history acted on one remarkable family, and the challenges of attempting to love—or at least understand—someone who’s made connection genuinely impossible. Under the younger Roy’s hands, what should be a harrowing tale of child abuse becomes luminous. And she doesn’t let what could be the most triumphant part of the book—her extraordinary success as a writer and cultural figure—make for a pat happy ending. —Anna Merlan
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By Victoria Zeller
Fiction This powerful YA novel makes the case for trans and women’s inclusion in sports, showing how meaningful it can be to be part of a team, even if on the margins. Zeller has a deep familiarity with her Western New York turf and a complicated love of football, plus a wicked sense of humor. Her debut novel centers on Grace Woodhouse, a kicker with D1 talent who has left her team—and her gender assigned at birth—behind. While much of the action takes place after Grace has transitioned, a nonlinear flow of chapters flashes us to earlier moments in the “before” times, like stealing a dress from her ex-girlfriend’s room. The structure puts us in Grace’s present while addressing for young readers what their transgender peers and classmates are going through. We watch Grace code-switch in “group chat” passages that offer a window into her new queer friend group, as well as the close bonds she maintains with her........