2025 Round Up: Favourite Nonfiction

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

Updated January 9, 2026
Drag items up and down to your preferred order then select the "Save Order" button.
Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company
McGee, Patrick.
Paper Book
Apple isn't just a brand; it's the world's most valuable company and creator of the 21st century's defining product. The iPhone has revolutionized the way we live, work and connect. But Apple is now a victim of its own success, caught in the middle of a new Cold War between two superpowers. ...
The art spy : the extraordinary untold tale of WWII resistance hero Rose Valland
Young, Michelle
Paper Book
A riveting and stylish saga set in Paris during World War II, THE ART SPY uncovers how an unlikely heroine infiltrated the Nazi leadership to save the cultural legacy of the West. On August 25, 1944, Rose Valland, a woman of quiet daring, found herself in a desperate position...
Between two rivers : ancient Mesopotamia and the birth of history
Al-Rashid, Moudhy N.
Paper Book
Book of lives : a memoir of sorts
Atwood, Margaret
Paper Book
'Fat and satisfying' Observer * 'I loved it' Dua Lipa * 'Deliciously naughty' iNews * 'Beautifully told' Woman & Home * 'Spellbinding' FT * Book of the Year Guardian, Financial Times, Observer, Belfast Telegraph ...
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
Empire of AI : dreams and nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
Hao, Karen
Paper Book
A New York Times Notable Book * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award * An Instant New York Times Bestseller * Named a Best Book of the Year by Smithsonian, Scientific American, and Elle "A bestselling page-turner that has made waves...
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...
Forest euphoria : the abounding queerness of nature
Kaishian, Patricia Ononiwu
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * VANITY FAIR BEST BOOKS OF 2025 * TIME 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2025 "An antidote to the loneliness of our species."--ROBIN WALL KIMMERER "A master class in how to love the world."--MARGARET RENKL A...
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 INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A Waterstones and TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR A SPECTATOR and History Today BOOK OF THE YEAR A revolutionary new history of the diffusion of Indian ideas...
The haves and the have-yachts : dispatches on the ultrarich
Osnos, Evan
Paper Book
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...
John Candy : a life in comedy
Myers, Paul
Paper Book
The definitive biography of John Candy--a heartwarming portrait of one of comedy's most beloved and enduring stars. INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Vulture's #1 Comedy Book of 2025 * A Globe and Mail, National Post, and CBC Best Book of 2025 "Reading this book was like...
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 mind electric : stories of the strangeness and wonder of our brains
Anand, Pria.
Paper Book
The mission : the CIA in the 21st century
Weiner, Tim
Paper Book
'No one has opened up the CIA to us like Weiner has, and The Mission deserves to win him a second Pulitzer' JOHN SIMPSON, GUARDIAN The epic successor to Tim Weiner's National Book Award-winning classic, Legacy of Ashes: a gripping and revelatory history of the CIA in...
Motherland: ; A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy
Ioffe, Julia.
Paper Book
'A fresh, unexpected, and revealing portrait of Russia' ANNE APPLEBAUM, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Red Famine 'A century of Russian history told through the women who lived it, shaped it, and survived it' NADYA TOLOKONNIKOVA, founder of Pussy Riot Award...
Mother Mary comes to me
Roy, Arundhati
Paper Book
Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir, this is a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as 'my shelter and my storm...
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
We all feel it - the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they're us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the...
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...
A truce that is not peace : life and death so far
Toews, Miriam
Paper Book
THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2025 'The best memoir you will read all year' NICK HORNBY 'A triumph - a meditation on writing, suicide, guilt and silence' GUARDIAN 'Curious and idiosyncratic and enjoyable'...
We Survived the Night: An Indigenous Reckoning
NoiseCat, Julian Brave.
Paper Book
An unforgettable father-son story and portrait of Indigenous North America, announcing a major new talent.

Library staff! You can create and contribute to lists. Contact your catalog administrator or log in here.