The Notable and Award-Winning Books of the Year

Winner of the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction

As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. But in the past 20 years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

Winner of the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction | Winner of the 2025 American Academy of Arts and Letters Lit. Award

A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Novel

A Holmes and Watson–style detective duo take the stage in this fantasy with a mystery twist, from acclaimed author Robert Jackson Bennett. The Tainted Cup mixes the charms of detective fiction with brilliant world-building to deliver a fiendishly clever mystery that’s at once instantly recognizable and thrillingly new.

Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History | Winner of the Bancroft Prize | Winner of the Cundill History Prize | Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize

“A magisterial overview of a thousand years of Native American history” (The New York Review of Books), from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today.

Winner of the 2025 Edgar Award for Best Novel

An electrifying, whip-smart whodunit about the dastardly misbehavior of London’s high society — where being “in” or “out” can be a life-and-death matter.

Winner of the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award

A stunning collection of interconnected stories set in New England, exploring how the past is often misunderstood and how history, family, heartache, and desire can echo over centuries. Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.

Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction | Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction | Winner of the Kirkus Award

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from Jim’s point of view. While many narrative set pieces remain in place, Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Biography

An epic, extraordinary account of scientific rivalry and obsession in the quest to survey all of life on Earth — a competition “with continued repercussions for Western views of race. [This] vivid double biography is a passionate corrective” (The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice).

Winner of the 2025 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime

A sweeping account of the anarchists who terrorized the streets of New York and the detective duo who transformed policing to meet the threat — a tale of fanaticism, forensic science, and dynamite.

Winner of the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction | Winner of the 2025 GLCA New Writers Award

By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race. Informed by KB Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency — whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as “other.”

Winner of the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction

Writer, actor, and director Desiree Akhavan shares the stories she was told to shut up about — hilarious, horny, heartbreaking tales of a life in pursuit of art, love, and a better haircut. Equal parts funny and heartfelt, these 17 essays chart an artist’s journey from outcast to overnight indie darling, to (somewhat) self-aware adult woman. The result is a collection that captures the pathetic lows and euphoric highs of our youth — and how to survive them.

2025 Booker Prize Shortlist | Kirkus Prize Finalist

A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years — an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

2025 Booker Prize Shortlist

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young — young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.