2025 Round Up: Favourite Nonfiction

Ideas, people, places. Here are the top titles that resonated with us in 2025.

Updated January 9, 2026
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1929 : inside the greatest crash in Wall Street history-- and how it shattered a nation
Sorkin, Andrew Ross
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "It is one of the best narrative histories I've read." --The Wall Street Journal A New York Times Notable Book of 2025 * One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2025 * Named a BEST BOOK OF 2025 by The Washington...
Apple in China : the capture of the world's greatest company
McGee, Patrick
Paper Book
"Phenomenal...a jaw-dropping book." --Jon Stewart, The Daily Show Named by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Prospect magazine as a best book of the year, this "scrupulously reported" (The New Yorker) and...
Between two rivers : ancient Mesopotamia and the birth of history
Al-Rashid, Moudhy N.
Paper Book
Thousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time. What they left behind, in a vast region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, preserves leaps in human ingenuity, like the earliest depiction of a...
Book of lives : a memoir of sorts
Atwood, Margaret
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD * NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE WASHINGTON POST * How does the greatest writer of our time tell her own story? "The most spectacular,...
Careless people : a cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism
Wynn-Williams, Sarah
Paper Book
#1 New York Times Bestseller A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK. NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME, THE NEW YORKER, AP, THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, AND MORE! "Careless People is darkly...
Dead and alive : essays
Smith, Zadie
Paper Book
Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker, TIME, Vanity Fair, and Kirkus Reviews * One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2025 "Smart, somber . . . There's pleasure in watching a novelist wired to see all sides at once wrangle with her own dynamic subjectivity...
Enshittification : why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it
Doctorow, Cory
Paper Book
Enshittification: it's not just you--the internet sucks now. Here's why, and here's how we can disenshittify it. We're living through the Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit...
Everything is tuberculosis : the history and persistence of our deadliest infection
Green, John
Paper Book
#1 New York Times bestseller * #1 Washington Post bestseller * #1 Indie Bestseller * USA Today Bestseller John Green, award-winning author and passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world's...
A flower traveled in my blood : the incredible true story of the grandmothers who fought to find a stolen generation of children
Cohen Gilliland, Haley
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2025 * THE WASHINGTON POST'S 5 BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF 2025 * THE ATLANTIC'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2025 * THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S BEST BOOKS OF 2025 * TIME MAGAZINE'S BEST BOOKS OF 2025 * NPR'S BEST BOOKS...
Girl on girl : how pop culture turned a generation of women against themselves
Gilbert, Sophie
Paper Book
A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book * Named one of the Best Books of the Year by TIME, NPR, Elle, and The Boston Globe "Searing... rigorously researched but never stuffy... Gilbert has compiled perhaps the first comprehensive...
The Golden Road : how ancient India transformed the world
Dalrymple, William
Paper Book
The internationally bestselling author of The Anarchy returns with a sparkling, soaring history of ideas, tracing South Asia's under-recognized role in producing the world as we know it. For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse...
The haves and have-yachts : dispatches on the ultrarich
Osnos, Evan
Paper Book
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and The Times (London) From National Book Award-winning author Evan Osnos comes a "sharp...charming...regrettably timely" (The Washington Post)...
Here comes the sun : a last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization
McKibben, Bill
Paper Book
Our climate, and our democracy, are melting down. But Bill McKibben, one of the first to sound the alarm about the climate crisis, insists the moment is also full of possibility. Energy from the sun and wind is suddenly the cheapest power on the planet and growing faster than any energy source in...
How to share an egg : a true story of hunger, love, and plenty
Reichert, Bonny
Paper Book
An "absolutely transformative" (People) culinary memoir about the relationship between food and family-sustenance and survival-from a chef, award-winning journalist, and daughter of a Holocaust survivor. "Beautifully written, heartbreaking and hopeful."-Ruth Reichl, New...
Is a river alive?
Macfarlane, Robert
Paper Book
Hailed in the New York Times as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler," Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an...
King of kings : the Iranian revolution : a story of hubris, delusion and catastrophic miscalculation
Anderson, Scott
Paper Book
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER * From the author of the landmark bestseller Lawrence in Arabia comes a stunningly revelatory narrative history of the Iranian Revolution, one of the most momentous events in modern...
A marriage at sea : a true story of love, obsession, and shipwreck
Elmhirst, Sophie
Paper Book
THE RUNAWAY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER & ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2025 A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2025 ALSO NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2025 BY NPR, VOGUE, TIME MAGAZINE, THE NEW YORKER, AND MORE "This is nonfiction that...
The mission : the CIA in the 21st century
Weiner, Tim
Paper Book
New York Times Bestseller * A New Yorker Best Book of 2025 * A New York Times Editors' Choice * A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year "No one has opened up the CIA to us like Weiner has, and The Mission deserves to win Weiner a second...
Motherland : a feminist history of modern Russia, from revolution to autocracy
Ioffe, Julia
Paper Book
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NAMED ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2025 BY THE WASHINGTON POST NAMED ONE OF THE 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2025 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF 2025 NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF FALL...
Nobody's girl : a memoir of surviving abuse and fighting for justice
Giuffre, Virginia Roberts
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The unforgettable memoir by the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the woman who dared to take on Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell "Make no mistake: this is a book about power, corruption, industrial-scale sex abuse and the way in which...
No more tears : the dark secrets of Johnson & Johnson
Harris, Gardiner
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER . An explosive, deeply reported expose of Johnson & Johnson, one of America's oldest and most trusted pharmaceutical companies-from an award-winning investigative journalist "A damning portrait."-Associated Press "A page-turning...
One day, everyone will have always been against this
El Akkad, Omar
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK * PALESTINE BOOK AWARD WINNER * LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR CRITICISM * From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful...
The serviceberry : abundance and reciprocity in the natural world
Kimmerer, Robin Wall
Paper Book
An Instant New York Times Bestseller From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world....
The sirens' call : how attention became the world's most endangered resource
Hayes, Christopher
Paper Book
The #1 New York Times Bestseller * One of Barack Obama's Summer Reading List Picks From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has...
There is no place for us : working and homeless in America
Goldstone, Brian
Paper Book
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE ATLANTIC'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR * ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR * Through the "revelatory and gut-wrenching" (Associated Press) stories of five Atlanta families, this landmark work of journalism exposes a new and troubling...
The tragedy of true crime : four guilty men and the stories that define us
Lennon, John J.
Paper Book
A New York Times Notable Book of 2025 * An NPR Best Book of the Year * A Kirkus Best of 2025 In 2001, John J. Lennon killed a man on a Brooklyn Street. Now he's a journalist, working from behind bars, trying to make sense of it all. The Tragedy of True...
We survived the night
NoiseCat, Julian Brave
Paper Book
A stunning narrative from one of the most powerful young writers at work today, and the director of the Oscar®-nominated documentary, Sugarcane, We Survived the Night interweaves oral history with hard-hitting journalism and a deeply personal father-son journey into a searing...

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