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The Book Review
The 10 Best Books of 2025
01:18:29
In this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz gathers a group of fellow editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the most exciting fiction and nonfiction of the year.
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- [00:01]
Isabella Rossellini
What happens when an ancient rose farm in France becomes an open sky laboratory? And how can a cosmetology program in.
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Dave Kim
India offer a road to economic empowerment?
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Isabella Rossellini
Hi there, I'm Isabella Rossellini and in.
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Gilbert Cruz
The latest episode of this Is Not.
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Isabella Rossellini
A Beauty Podcast from l' Oreal Group, we speak to an organic flower farmer and a beauty school graduate and how beauty shapes business. Listen now on your favorite podcast platform.
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Gilbert Cruz
Hello, I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review podcast. It is time, it's time for our Best Books of the Year episode. How many books? We have 10 books, as we do every year, five fiction, five nonfiction. This is gonna be an extra full episode. It's gonna be like a double stuffed Oreo of book conversation. Later on, I'm going to be joined by several editors to talk about our nonfiction books of the year. But we are going to start with Dave Kim and Jumana Khatib here to talk about the best fiction of the year. Dave, welcome.
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Dave Kim
Hello.
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Nima Jeromey
Gilbert.
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Gilbert Cruz
Hi, Joumana. Hello.
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Isabella Rossellini
Hello.
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Gilbert Cruz
So last year when we did this episode, I don't know if you recall, but the three of us had been at the National Book Awards the and we're feeling very hazy.
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Dave Kim
Yes, our energy level was much lower.
- [01:29]
Gilbert Cruz
Hopefully we are going to hit a higher note today.
- [01:32]
Dave Kim
I think so.
- [01:33]
Gilbert Cruz
Okay, good. So we have five books on this list and before we start our conversation in earnest, I'm going to read off the titles and the authors here they are as follows. The Loneliness of Sonja and Sunny by Kiran Desai, the Sisters by Jonas Hasan Kamiri angel down by Daniel Krause, the Director by Daniel Kelman and Stonyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood Joumada, I would love for you to start with one of the earliest books that we discussed this year. Listeners, for those of you who don't know, this is a year long process. We start essentially in January, even a little bit before January, looking ahead because we get advanced copies and galleys at books that are coming out and we meet every month and then every week to debate. And the Scus Stonyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood was early on in the year. Shumana, you were a big fan of this. Tell us about it.
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Jumana Khatib
I read this book actually over a year ago because it was shortlisted for the Booker and it hadn't yet come out in the States. So I felt like somebody in the department should read it in case it won. And I was totally bowled over. So this is the story of a woman in midlife and she goes back to the area of Australia where she's from, and she goes to the really remote plains of New South Wales and she goes to visit a convent. This is a surprising choice. She's not particularly religious, although she has a very active spirituality. She actually is extremely against the Catholic Church and its, quote, unquote, savagery, to use her term. And basically, she walked away from a full, rich life, a marriage, a job, friends in Sydney. And she had one stint and was really lulled into this sense of retreat that she needed. And then she ends up staying for much, much longer. So this novel is structured really like its title, like a devotional. So it reads almost like a diary or a chronicle. And, you know, for a convent, there actually is quite a bit of action that happens. There are three main events or three main arrivals, and I think that those are felt much more keenly just because a convent, by definition, is really cloistered. So any kind of interpolation is jarring. So first, there is a horrific mouse infestation. I mean, it's biblical. They're everywhere. There's a crazy scene about mice under the. Not under the hood, on the piano strings playing this demented music that's haunting and has stayed with me, literally, for 13 months. And this really forces the sisters to think about or reconsider their commitment to doing no harm, because there comes a point where you've got thousands of mice and you can't really let them run ramshod over your convent.
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Gilbert Cruz
Does this resonate with you as the occupant of multiple New York City apartments?
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Jumana Khatib
This was really good exposure therapy for me, I will tell you. I've. I've made my peace with roaches. Roaches, I think, are almost respectful in terms of vermin. Mice are anything but. And rats, I don't acknowledge.
- [04:57]
Gilbert Cruz
I absolutely disagree. Roaches are gross. And, no, they usually get out still terrified by them.
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Jumana Khatib
Listen, you turn on the light, they get out. They're not.
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Dave Kim
Please and thank you.
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Jumana Khatib
Right. I think this is just useful to know what you're going into. One thing that I think is incredibly important to keep in mind when you're reading this. I read this book pretty quickly because I was like, God, what if this wins the book? And this is a type of reading that I think all of us in the department do when we have to. It's like eating without chewing. You're just trying to, like, get through a book almost right away. Like, after the first couple entries, I slowed down to a normal pace because I was like, there is something going on with the Language here that is really beautiful. And there's a phrase from the narrator's first stint. The silence here is so thick it makes me feel wealthy. I remember 13, 14 months after the fact. Now, readers, I am sorry I cannot give you more of my favorite bon mot because my copy with all my underlines has mysteriously gone missing.
- [05:58]
Gilbert Cruz
But I We're not gonna call out who at the New York Times has stolen your book.
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Jumana Khatib
Somebody has my copy and I hope they got as much joy out of it as I did.
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Dave Kim
Jomana is so not bitter about it.
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Jumana Khatib
No, I definitely all the Christ like messages away from this book.
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Gilbert Cruz
Dave, you read this one?
- [06:16]
Dave Kim
I did, yeah. I love the sort of fable like structure of it. The three invaders and the three things that try as she might, she's been her whole main goal in this is to shut out the world, is to escape from society and to just reflect on what's within. And the world just keeps coming in and it doesn't, you know, let up. And the mice is the last straw. Right. It's this huge wave of climate refugees, essentially. I mean, there is that sort of aspect of it too, but it starts with innocuous things, right? Just the bones of a dead nun.
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Jumana Khatib
That's innocuous.
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Dave Kim
Innocuous in that it's not going to like chew through your house. Right. Like innocuous in that it's an inanimate formerly, but now inanimate objects. So in that sense. But they start to unravel what she worked hard to preserve, which is this sort of inner peace that she's so desperately seeking. And I love that structure and I just love the idea, the basic premise of it. But the execution, I think also brought it over the top for me. Like, it really, it's great writing. It's disciplined writing. It's beautifully descriptive and meditative and I loved it.
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Gilbert Cruz
Earlier this year I read a memoir, a piece of nonfiction by Pico Iyer. The title of that was A Learning from Silence. And I interviewed him on this podcast and it was a memoir about his visits over decades to a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California. He's been going for more than 30 years. And I think I read this and Stonyard Devotional at around the same time. And everything you're saying about the book, Dave, and Joumana is correct. It's beautifully written. The main character is inviting in how much to me she was inviting in how much she wanted to shut out the world. And that appealed to me in some sick way. But reading these two books at the same time really made me want to go on a silent retreat. And I think that is what is in store in 2026. Have either of you ever done anything like that?
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Dave Kim
I go camping a lot, but it's actually no, it's not like that at all because I have two screaming children with me who go feral. So, yeah, it's not quite an escape. But yeah, occasionally there are moments where you can unplug and get away. Your. Your phone goes out of service and you feel disconnected in at least briefly.
- [08:57]
Jumana Khatib
I think the closest I've come is like long airplane trips.
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Gilbert Cruz
You never hit the WI fi?
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Jumana Khatib
No. That's crazy. First of all, they're definitely tracking everything I do. I don't need them to know that. But also, I like the feeling of being intentionally out of reach while I'm in transit. There was a time when I was going to like a Buddhist center pretty regularly. It has totally imploded under a power scandal. But yeah, it's been a while. It's totally imploded. But I think the tenets remain.
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Gilbert Cruz
You know what, we're all just human and flawed.
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Isabella Rossellini
Truly.
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Jumana Khatib
I mean, really, if you want to see the fallibility of the human, just look at what happened at this Buddhist.
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Gilbert Cruz
Order that was Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. Dave, I'd love to talk about the next book on our list, which is the Director by Daniel Kelman. This is a book that I've recommended to so many people this year. This is not a brag. I'm just gonna say I was in Telluride this summer for the film festival and I was at the bookstore there and I was talking to. To a bunch of people and they asked me what book I should recommend. And this is always, always, always the first book that I have since I read it early this year, sort of given to people. And one of the ladies went, I think, and took it off the shelf and bought it. It's so wonderful.
- [10:16]
Jumana Khatib
It's very gratifying when that happens.
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Gilbert Cruz
I know, I know. She probably went back afterwards, got a refund. She was like, I'm not gonna listen to that jerk. Tell us about this one.
- [10:24]
Dave Kim
Yeah, it's such a great book to recommend because I think it would please so many different types of readers. He's the rare writer who can deliver the goods for a popular audience, like have action and a lively plot and Nazis whom everyone loves to read about. But there's also this subtlety and the stylistic range and the bristling intelligence for that stuck up reader who's always telling you that he Never reads contemporary and it's always a man. I never read contemporary fiction. This sort of arrogant reader that I also am. And so I think it. It really covers those bases. It's a great book to recommend to anyone. The book is about the life and times of G.W. pabst, who is an Austrian filmmaker who sees success in the silent era with films like Pandora's Box, which was a very popular vehicle for the actress. Louise Brooks is famous by the 30s and is invited to Hollywood to come and make movies for Hollywood. And he's a fish out of water there. It doesn't really work out for him, but he's trying. And he decides to go back to Europe because his mother is ailing and he wants to see her and take care of her. But the timing couldn't be worse. Hitler has come to power, The Nazis have taken over, they've invaded Poland and quickly taking over Europe. And he's stuck there. He can't leave. And so now he is stuck in what is now called Ostmark and working as a filmmaker essentially for the Reich. He has this harrowing meeting with Joseph Goebbels who tells him, you can do whatever you want, you're free to do anything. And of course, that's exactly the opposite of what he says. He's not forced to make propaganda per se, but he definitely is hampered in his ability to cover anything political, anything with a social message, and is forced to compromise artistic principles at every juncture. So this is the sort of awkward circumstances he finds himself in. And the book goes from there. It's a wonderful portrait of a time and a place. But I think the best, the most interesting themes are around this central tension between your artistic integrity and your life. Staying alive.
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Gilbert Cruz
Yeah, yeah. And your family.
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Dave Kim
And your family. Exactly, yeah.
- [12:48]
Gilbert Cruz
Cause he has a young son and a wife, and they go back. And the wife, very wisely is against going back to his home. She knew what was up. And there are scenes in which you see the son essentially being co opted by the Hitler Youth, a young person trying to sort of make his way through the world. And it feels like through each of these characters you get a sense of the different reactions that one would have to a terrible situation like this. A situation where you have to make compromises with a fascist or authoritarian regime. A situation where, in the wife's case, you have to try to go along to get along with other wives and other people who are part of this apparatus. And in the young son's case, he's just trying to figure out who he is as a person, let alone all this other stuff going on. I thought they were all sketched out incredibly well.
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Dave Kim
Yeah.
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Jumana Khatib
And I think the staging, you know, your point about the wife, one of the standout scenes in my mind is she's gone to a book club with other wives of artists who are in similar situations. And the dialogue is so over the top, and it's comedic. The humor of that moment is amazing to perceive. I think one of the things that I really admired about this book was how in control Kelman was, to the point that there are moments of absurdity and humor and levity. I mean, he's still pulling at all these different modes, even under this overarching, oppressive, airless environment. And the climax was, I think, so unbelievably well done. I actually had the feeling when I was reading it of, like, when I was a kid and I was reading something that I could comprehend the words, but I was clearly not ready for the emotional ramifications. You know, I was, like, reading something I wasn't really ready for. And I had that feeling reading this. It was one of the more emotionally affecting novels I've read this year. And for that, I really also credit the translator, Ross Benjamin. I've said this before about, but when we're talking about a universe in which the wrong gesture or the wrong amount of eye contact, let alone the wrong word, can have disastrous consequences, I think being able to bring a text into English with all those nuances is a real feat.
- [15:16]
Gilbert Cruz
That was the director by Daniel Kaman. I am going to talk about a book that I think will be somewhat divisive, but that many of us at the Book Review were pretty passionate about. It is a book called angel down by Daniel Krauss. This is essentially historical fiction, horror. The basic story is it takes place during World War I. You have these group of soldiers in France in the muddy, bloody trenches. And at some point early on in the book, they hear a screaming, a wailing somewhere off in the distance. In no man's. Obviously, no one wants to go there because you have to wade through barbed wire and corpses and the German bullets coming from the other side. But they are ordered to go, stop the screaming, find this person and put them out of their misery. They get there and they find this is where the fantastical elements come in, that it is an angel. It is a genuine fallen angel, a female angel. Do angels have genders? I don't know. Female angel. They have to get the angel out of there and figure out what to do with her. That's the basic plot. There are a couple of other things to know about this book, which is that the entire book is essentially one sentence long. It is one sentence over almost 300 pages. And each short paragraph, as far as I recall, begins with the word and it's just a sort of a never ending series of. And statements over and over again all stitched together into one sentence. The other thing to know is that this book is very gross. And if you've read Daniel Krauss before, or at least if you read his last book, which was called Whale Fall, came out two years ago, we put it on the COVID of the Book Review the summer it came out then. You know, he can be a very gross writer. That book, Whale Fall was about a scuba diver. He goes off to find his father's remains, which have. His father died. He was also a scuba diver underwater off the coast of California. The son goes to find his dad's remains. He gets swallowed by a whale and he has to make his way out of the whale and he has to make his way out in incredibly visceral detail. And I'm using visceral here because there's.
- [17:33]
Jumana Khatib
A lot of viscera.
- [17:35]
Gilbert Cruz
Viscera. These are very gushy books. There's a lot of squelching, a lot of squelching, a lot of blood. Just everything you can imagine, right? The whale fall. It's not like Geppetto and Pinocchio inside Monstro, a giant, clean cathedral of the inside of a whale with the rib bones holding up the ceiling. This is some nasty, nasty stuff. And in the same way, angel down, incredibly nasty. I, as someone who loves horror and I, as someone who can appreciate historical fiction, was surprised to find that they work so well together in this book. It's not going to be to everyone's taste, but I actually think it's part of the fun and it's kind of part of our responsibility at the Book Review to find books sometimes that people have not heard of that may be not to everyone's liking and elevate them. And I think, and I'm hoping that's what we are doing here with angel.
- [18:30]
Jumana Khatib
Down at what paragraph starting with and. Or did you think, oh, we're in for a treat. Did you know, like from the first page? Sometimes I have that with books that end up on this list.
- [18:40]
Gilbert Cruz
It's hard to remember exactly because it is possible that every single book body part that a person have is described in some way detached from the human body in this book. So it wasn't when the main Character has the ear plastered to his face because I think that's in the first few pages. But it might be. There might have been teeth involved. Again, if you think this is not for you, not for everyone, that's fine. But I say give it a chance.
- [19:07]
Jumana Khatib
Yeah, yeah.
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Dave Kim
It's remarkable at how. And this word is intentional.
- [19:13]
Gilbert Cruz
Beautiful.
- [19:13]
Dave Kim
Some of these descriptions can actually be. It's bizarre, like how you can read something about decapitation, a description of something harrowing, and be like, wow, this can be made into a beautiful sentence or part of a sentence, I should say.
- [19:29]
Jumana Khatib
Yeah. There's a moment where he's holding somebody under the arms, like a breech baby or something, and it's like, okay, wow. All right, all right. For my obstetrician friends out there, it.
- [19:39]
Gilbert Cruz
Is quite a performance. There are, as you say, descriptions and metaphors that I don't think I'd ever heard before. Of course, they're attached to a war story, which is one of the most stereotypical pieces of historical fiction that one can produce. But I think the way in which he takes The World War I story, the War story, the story about men dealing with their own mortality and the emptiness of the world, and turns it into something unexpected was surprising in a good way.
- [20:09]
Dave Kim
Yeah. And I thought he really did make that very tired trope very interesting.
- [20:14]
Gilbert Cruz
So that is angel down by Daniel Krauss. I am going to turn to Joumana to talk about. I don't know if it's the direct opposite of angel down because it's hard to describe angel down, hard to describe what the opposite would be, but it's something that is very different. And again, Joumana, few people on the desk are as passionate about a book as you can be when you really get behind something. And the Sisters is a book that you've been talking about for months and months.
- [20:42]
Jumana Khatib
Everybody's ready for this year to be over. All my colleagues are ready for this year to be over. I can tell.
- [20:47]
Gilbert Cruz
Well, we've all heard about the Sisters a lot, so please tell our listeners about it.
- [20:52]
Dave Kim
I heard you like this book, Jumana.
- [20:53]
Jumana Khatib
Yeah, I'm working out my feelings about this book. So just when I thought that I had really sworn off Autofix, there comes an auto fictional novel that has totally knocked me sideways. And I've stayed there for the last six months. So this is the story of the Mikola sisters, Ina, Evelyn and Anastasia. They are Swedish Tunisian, which sort of sets them apart in the parts of Stockholm where they're growing up. But they are fiercely Bonded. And they are also the object of fascination for our narrator, who is also named Jonas, who is also Swedish, Tunisian, and is a sort of goofy, neurotic, exuberant depressive stand in for the author himself. So this book is one of the first things you'll see if you look at it, if you look at a physical copy, is that it is quite long. And even that's not a bad thing.
- [21:56]
Gilbert Cruz
No, no, no, I'm agreeing with you. I think there's a. The next book we're gonna talk about is also long, and we think that that's a good thing.
- [22:03]
Jumana Khatib
And the length is intentional. And it flies, because I remember reading a little about this book, and it has a very strict structure, which is the first section covers one year, then the next six months, and then, you know, in decreasing amounts of time. And I know I profiled the author, so I know a lot, or I know more about the sort of interior machinations he had when he was working on this. And I do have to appreciate when you ask an author and you're like, yeah, what did you have in mind when you were working on this? And he's like, oh, War and Peace, naturally. But it's actually apartment in the sense that he's working on a huge canvas because this is a book that goes from Stockholm to Tunis to Germany to, like, New Paltz or Kingston, New York. There is a bit of family lore about the Empire State Building. It just manages to contain so much life, including life's really low moments. I think it's one of the most moving descriptions of being depressed or grief that you can feel. And I was very excited by the central conceit of this book, which is that the Mikkola sisters, they have a very eccentric mom who is a Tunisian carpet seller. And she makes a point of uprooting the girls almost like, every six months, basically, when I think she sold every carpet she can in a various neighborhood. They change neighborhoods. So she has raised her girls by saying, somebody's put a curse on us. Somebody's put the evil eye on us. And so the girls are trying to outrun this. And Kamiri himself, when we talked, said, I actually have been living. He's in his 40s. I have been living for decades with the feeling that I was cursed by my own father. And this book is the way that I wrote myself out of it. I'm very primed. Okay, I will say somebody who has witchy, witchy Middle Eastern family. I'm sort of like, yeah, if that's all I had to do is write a book. Like, yeah, maybe I should do that and get out from whatever evil eye I've got on me.
- [24:08]
Dave Kim
Are you a witch?
- [24:09]
Gilbert Cruz
Yeah.
- [24:09]
Jumana Khatib
No, I'm not a witch. I'm a Buddhist.
- [24:12]
Gilbert Cruz
You know, curses don't exist, right?
- [24:13]
Jumana Khatib
That's not true.
- [24:14]
Gilbert Cruz
That's not true.
- [24:15]
Jumana Khatib
Let me tell you, as I sort of Fertile Crescent Middle east correspondent, curses are very real. Right? Like you just walk down Hamra Street. It's just. They're real. You will just have to agree to disagree on that.
- [24:28]
Dave Kim
I think we need a disclaimer for this episode.
- [24:30]
Jumana Khatib
Yeah, I think everything I've said is factual and based in reality. So actually that's a good point though, because. So it's clear that I had a very visceral and personal reaction to this book. I would love to hear what somebody else thought about this book who did not necessarily recognize members of their extended family and the characters.
- [24:53]
Gilbert Cruz
Okay, Yeah.
- [24:55]
Dave Kim
I just love the portrayal of the sisters. They're so independently realized. They're really fully realized. They're just great. They work as characters in tandem, but also in opposition. And he just did a really good job fleshing out their various idiosyncrasies and desires and wants. I thought that was very impressive.
- [25:13]
Gilbert Cruz
We're only talking about three sisters here, but even with that, you could see yourself in a different book, seeing them blend into each other and losing track of like, okay, who you know, this, this, and what did this person do? But they feel so distinct, each of them. And I never got lost. The book has such an energy, particularly at the beginning. It shoots you into their lives and over the length of this book, which is not insignificant, I feel like you stick with them the whole time. We like to make fun of long books partially because of the book review. We have to read a lot of books. So when we find a long book, it's like, oh, no, I could be reading three books while I'm reading this one. But this one justifies the length. It really does.
- [25:57]
Jumana Khatib
There's so much life in this book. There really is. And there's just energy and movement to it.
- [26:03]
Gilbert Cruz
So that was the Sisters by Jonas Hasan Kamiri. We're gonna transition to the fifth book on our fiction list, the Of Sonia and Sunny by Kieran Desai.
- [26:15]
Dave Kim
It's a great old fashioned novel and old fashioned in the best way. It is a story of. It's a romance. It's set in the late 90s, early 2000s between two Indian American people named Sonia and Sonny. Sonia is a college student. When we first Meet her. She meets an older artist named Ilan, who is this sort of manic, arrogant artist who acts as a real Pygmalion figure and is somewhat abusive, but also very much very important to her sort of awakening as an artist. He moves her to New York. She wants to be a writer, by the way. He moves her to New York and then promptly breaks her heart. And we go from there. And Sonny is a burgeoning journalist from India. He lives in Brooklyn with Ula, who is a white woman from Kansas. And things don't quite work out between them. And so Sonia and Sonny meet on a train while visiting India and begin their romance. They knew each other from before because their parents had tried to arrange a marriage that neither of them at the time was particularly interested in pursuing. But the second time around, when they meet independently, the sparks fly. But, of course, complications remain. I love this book because you could just really sink into it. It's long, and so many people are going to complain that it could have been shorter, which is the perennial complaint about long books, obviously. But I really felt there was just an energy to this book. It was one of those books that I found it very difficult to put down.
- [28:01]
Gilbert Cruz
A friend of mine, while they were reading this book said something to the effect of, every time I wasn't reading this book, I wanted to be reading this book. And art critic Alexandra Jacobs, I just want to quickly read the first paragraph in her review, which was a rave. She wrote, quote, almost 20 years in the making, the Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kieran Desai is not so much a novel as a marvel. In an era of hot takes in Chile, optimized productivity, here is sweet validation of the idea that to create something truly transcendent, a work of art depicting love, family, nature, and culture in all their fullness might take time.
- [28:41]
Jumana Khatib
There's so much life in this book. And the backstory of this novel is that it's been about 20 years since Kieran Desais published a novel. And I think that it's safe to say that Sonia and Sonny totally took over her life in the intervening time. At one point, the manuscript was over 5,000 pages, which she didn't realize until she started printing it out. So we should probably donate to whatever writing center or fellowship she was at at the time. And I think that accounts for how much sort of wisdom and heartbreak and perspective there is. And I think another thing to mention is there's a lot of sensuality and tactile feeling in this book that's so important. And she's drawing from a lot of literary traditions. I think a lot of us have compared it to a great sweeping, old fashioned novel. But there's elements of surrealism, there's maybe some folklore. There's a dog that literally dogs Sonja. That's a little, I'm not gonna say magical realism. I'm not gonna say magical realism. And it's just, it's really just wonderful to watch her pull this together like on this huge loom. And actually this was a book that I was reading on vacation, did not realize, was so absorbed in it that I did not realize that the neighbor's orchard was on fire. The other thing that I should mention is that the audiobook is wonderful. The narrator just gives like a real bravur performance. Everybody has these unbelievable voices and it really rounds it out. It's already such a richly textured book and then to hear it in audio sends it over the top, I would say.
- [30:24]
Dave Kim
One of the things that I really loved about this book was the central theme of the challenge. The pressure of an artist to fall into racial tropes and questions of identity and the sort of Western expectations for Eastern and Orientalist art. And her dealing with that is so complex and interesting. One of the things that Ilan emphasizes to Sonja is to not do that, is to resist. Stay away from narratives that, you know, that white readers want of Asian writers, of South Asian writers. And she both, Kieran decide the author both resists and reinvents that. She doesn't necessarily shy away from those themes, but she really makes them uniquely hers. I think the biggest danger, of course, is, and what Ilan was chiding her against was to avoid cliches and to avoid writing things that had already been done in formulaic stuff. But this couldn't be further from what Kieran Desai is doing. I mean, it really just like I said, just making it hers.
- [31:37]
Gilbert Cruz
That was the Loneliness of Sonya and Sunny by Kieran Desai, Joumana and Dave. Before we end this segment of our best books of 2025 episode, I'd love to hear from each of you about a book or that you wish had been one of our top ten books of the year.
- [31:56]
Jumana Khatib
Yeah, I have two at the ready. One is audition by Katie Kitamura. I'm always interested in what she publishes. Every single novel, she's changing her perspective and what she's up to. And that just makes her very exciting to follow. And so this novel, I describe it as like Mulholland Drive in novel form. It's a psychological thriller.
- [32:19]
Gilbert Cruz
Yeah.
- [32:19]
Jumana Khatib
That's a movie.
- [32:20]
Gilbert Cruz
You have my attention.
- [32:21]
Jumana Khatib
Yeah. That is a movie I have seen.
- [32:23]
Gilbert Cruz
Okay.
- [32:24]
Jumana Khatib
And the whole gambit of the book is, we meet this woman. She has a young man on her trail. He thinks she's his mother, and she's like, that's impossible. That's biologically impossible. And then it just gets a little weirder. And then midway through the book, the entire circumstances change and you're really left wondering, how do I reconcile these two halves? And what does it mean to be in a family? Or what does it mean to be an artist? This woman is a pretty renowned stage actress. I thought it was elegant, understated. I really, really liked this book and I was glad to see it recognized for some prizes. You know, it was shortlisted for the Booker. And that's a book that deserves attention, for sure. The other one that I love and my colleagues know I love this book. But now listeners get to know. It's called Trip by Amy Baradale.
- [33:17]
Gilbert Cruz
I've never heard you talk about this book.
- [33:20]
Jumana Khatib
I really, really, really fought for this book. So this is the story of a woman who is a documentarian. She is raising a son with her ex, who is neurodivergent, I think is on the autism spectrum. She's sent to Nepal to cover this Buddhism conference. And now, listeners, you know why I'm primed to like this book. The Buddhist stuff is hysterical. She dies and she's sent to the Bardo, which is the Buddhist, like, limbo. That's not a spoiler, just to be clear. And what unfolds is this sort of interdimensional romp that's really powered by a mother's love for her son and concern for him that traverses time and space. And I'm very moved by it. And frankly, it's weird and daring. I've never read anything like it. I think it is such an accomplishment.
- [34:11]
Gilbert Cruz
Dave, what about you?
- [34:12]
Dave Kim
I really liked a book called the Tokyo Suite by the Brazilian writer Giovanna Mataloso. This is a novel about two women. The first is a maid, her name is Magu, and the second is her boss, Fernanda, who is a hotshot TV producer. And Maju the maid has kidnapped Fernanda's daughter. And then the novel begins and we don't know why she's kidnapping her, but they're on the run. And we get both of their perspectives. We get their internal lives, their histories, their motivations, and it's just a fascinating look at so many themes, motherhood, class. Just a great, sensitive portrait, but also very, very funny and it moves. It moves very quickly. I really love that book.
- [34:58]
Gilbert Cruz
So again, the five fiction books in our Top 10 Books of 2025 list are the Loneliness of Sonja and Sunny, the Sisters angel down, the Director, and Stonyard Devotional. We are going to take a break and when we come back, we are going to hear from several other editors from the Book Review who will talk about the five nonfiction books that are on this year's list. Before we take a break, though, Joumana, thank you so much for being on once again.
- [35:26]
Jumana Khatib
Thank you, Dave.
- [35:28]
Gilbert Cruz
Thank you.
- [35:29]
Dave Kim
It was my pleasure.
- [35:45]
Isabella Rossellini
The energy of reggaeton, the spirit of salsa, the beat of La Bamba, the music of Puerto Rico is known worldwide. When you visit the island, you aren't just visiting Puerto Rico. You're stepping into music's past, present and future to a beat that lasts all year long, not just for one summer. Learn all the ways you can discover Puerto Rico. Learn more@discoverportorico.com Hear that? That's what it sounds like when you plant more trees than you harvest. Work done by thousands of working forest professionals like Adam, a district forest manager who works to protect our forests from fire.
- [36:25]
Greg Coles
Keeping the forest fire resistant synonymous with keeping a forest healthy. And we do that through planting more.
- [36:31]
Gilbert Cruz
Than we harvest and mitigate those risks through active management. It's a long term commitment.
- [36:37]
Isabella Rossellini
Visit workingforestsinitiatiatiative.com to learn more. Don't just imagine a better future, start investing in one with betterment. Whether it's saving for today or building wealth for tomorrow. We help people in small businesses put their money to work. We automate to make saving simpler. We optimize to make investing smarter. We build innovative technology backed by financial experts. For anyone who's ever said, I think I can do better, so be invested in yourself. Be invested in your business. Be invested in better with betterment. Get started@betterment.com Investing involves risk. Performance not guaranteed.
- [37:15]
Gilbert Cruz
Welcome back. This is the Book Review podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm now joined by Nima Jeromey, Greg Coles, and Emily Aiken to talk about the nonfiction books on this year's top ten list. Nima, welcome.
- [37:30]
Nima Jeromey
Hi, Gilbert.
- [37:31]
Gilbert Cruz
Greg, hello. Hi, Gilbert. Emily, thanks for being here.
- [37:35]
Isabella Rossellini
Hi Gilbert.
- [37:37]
Gilbert Cruz
I am going to quickly start by listing all five of these books and because they're nonfiction, they all have a good, incredibly long subtitles. And then we're going to jump right into it. And then at the end of the conversation, we're all going to talk about some other books that we loved from 2025. So our five best nonfiction books of the year are. A Marriage at A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhurst Mother Two Centuries of Race, Resistance and Forgiveness and One Charleston Church by Kevin Sack There Is no Place for Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone Wild A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux and Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy. No subtitle there. Thank you, Arundhati Roy. Let's start with A Marriage at Sea. This is a book that so many of us loved at the Book Review. I was able to interview the authority Sophie Elmhurst on this podcast earlier this year. Greg, I'm gonna give this one to you. Tell us about the book.
- [38:45]
Greg Coles
Sure. Well, A Marriage at Sea is the story of a couple, Morris and Marilyn Bailey, who were restless adventurers by nature and lived out of touch with the domestic ideals of England in the early 1960s when they got married. So in June 1972, after almost 10 years gamely going through the motions in suburbia, they decided to sell their bungalow, build a boat, and sail to New Zealand to start again. It would be a challenge and a great adventure. And in some ways, they were catastrophically unprepared. They had no radio transmitter with them.
- [39:20]
Gilbert Cruz
It's so crazy that they had no radio.
- [39:23]
Greg Coles
Maryland didn't even know how to swim. But it all went well until one day they had reached the Pacific already. They're about 300 miles away from the Galapagos Islands. A sperm whale surfaced right under their boat, tearing a hole through it and capsizing them. So Morris and Marilyn grabbed the life raft and whatever supplies they were able to gather. Some tins of food and water, some tools, interestingly, some books and notebooks. And for the next four months, they had to fend for themselves in this little dinghy on the open ocean, hoping for rescue as ship after ship passed by without spotting them.
- [40:01]
Gilbert Cruz
A very elegant summary of a gripping story. I'm someone who loves a tale on the high seas. I love a shipwreck. I love the idea of figuring out how to survive out there in the wild. This is a story that I'd never heard of before, even though the couple themselves had written an account of it in the 70s. But the author, Sophie Elmhurst, she takes that account. She takes all the contemporaneous news stories of the time and really weaves together not only an amazing retelling of their 118 days on the high seas, but also, as the subtitle indicates, it is really this story about their marriage.
- [40:46]
Greg Coles
Yeah.
- [40:47]
Gilbert Cruz
This odd couple's odd and wonderful and unique marriage.
- [40:52]
Greg Coles
I love a good seafaring tale as much as you do. You may remember from our discussion last year of Hampton Sides Wide Wide Sea.
- [40:59]
Gilbert Cruz
What a book. What?
- [41:00]
Isabella Rossellini
I loved that book.
- [41:01]
Greg Coles
I read the Perfect Storm. I read Nathaniel Philbrick's story of the whaleship Essex disaster, and I thought as I was reading this book that I had maybe read the Baileys memoir, because when I was growing up, I read a memoir from the 1970s of a disaster very similar to the Baileys thing. It was by a guy. Turns out it was not the Baileys book. It was a book called Survival on the Savage Sea by a guy named Dougal Robertson, a Scotsman who with his family was a couple of hundred miles off of the Galapagos, capsized by. In his case, it was a pod of killer whales and they survived for more than a month at sea before they were rescued by a Japanese trawler. A lot of similarities there. Catching turtles.
- [41:46]
Isabella Rossellini
Not just catching turtles, but with paper clips, safety pins. Safety pins.
- [41:52]
Greg Coles
As Gilbert what makes this book different is that it really is a portrait of a marriage and a marriage under the most extreme duress. And it could have torn them apart or brought them closer together, and in their case, it bonded them for the rest of their lives. Having gone through this experience together, absolutely.
- [42:10]
Isabella Rossellini
I loved this book. The writing is extraordinary. It's so vividly imagined, and I felt reading it, that the feat of imagination that Elmhurst brings to this story was equivalent to the feat of imagination that it took for this couple to persevere, mainly thanks to Marilyn. And that's what really interesting is that she did all kinds of things that Morris thought was completely irrational. She sat there planning dinner parties on this boat. She planned their next home. She drew playing cards on pieces of paper that would get totally soggy, but she kept them alive by imagining that they were alive.
- [42:49]
Nima Jeromey
For me, I think one of the most remarkable aspects of this book also is the way that it's shifts perspective. You are so on the boat with them, feeling so tense, kind of mad at them at times, but also impressed. And Elmhurst is relaying throughout how they're decaying and falling apart and gaining all these wounds. It gets pretty disgusting, but you don't really realize how bad it's gotten until they are. Is it safe to say it's not a spoiler to say they are rescued?
- [43:23]
Gilbert Cruz
I don't think it is. I don't think it is.
- [43:26]
Nima Jeromey
South Korean fishing vessel. And then you really find out what they've come to look like after all these months at sea. That's what I think helps elevate this book beyond just a retelling of what was when it was published. A bestselling memoir, is the way that she doesn't let up the detail after they get off the raft and onto the fishing vessel. And that kind of adds vividness to the whole ordeal.
- [43:55]
Gilbert Cruz
When we were talking about this book in our meetings and listeners, at a certain point, we meet every week in the fall to discuss and debate books that we're considering for this top 10 list. And this came up. The fact that this tale had been told before in their own bestselling memoir, as you say, and that was 50 years ago. I don't know if anyone remembers that. The way that Elmhurst here, without putting too much mustard on it, without underlining it too much, without giving you any more than you need, just elegantly tells this tale. She knows that the story is dramatic enough on its own that she doesn't need to amp it up. I've recommended this book also because of its relatively short length compared to some of the other books on our list. I've recommended it to so many people this year, and I predict that this is one that a lot of readers are gonna share with others.
- [44:50]
Isabella Rossellini
One interesting footnote. I read that she started writing the book during the pandemic, when she was essentially adrift on a dinghy, which was her home. She was stuck on it for the duration of the lockdown in England. And I think you really feel the passion that she brought to this project, as if her own survival was at stake. There's just an energy in the writing. It's beautifully done.
- [45:12]
Greg Coles
She actually, I believe, Gilbert, you can confirm this because you talked to her for the podcast. She wanted to write an article about people living on houseboats, people making the decision to live at sea, off of land. And in researching for that article, she came across a picture of the Baileys, black and white. She wasn't setting out to write about shipwrecks at all, but she was just seized by the imagination of this couple surviving this.
- [45:37]
Gilbert Cruz
That's correct. And I think what was further alluring to her was the fact that in looking at photos of people who had been in shipwrecks and who had been at sea and had survived. They were almost all men. And all of a sudden you see this photo of a man and a woman. She's like, who is that woman? What is she doing there? You never see women out there.
- [45:55]
Greg Coles
And to Emily's point. Marilyn is remarkable. She took charge. Morris is the dreamer and the social curmudgeon who maybe originally introduced her to a life of adventure. But Marilyn was the one who was up to the task. She was pragmatic. She did all the work. She took care of him and nursed him along. He was the one who fell ill more often and she just became a trad wife at sea.
- [46:25]
Gilbert Cruz
Before we move on to our next title, I want to ask this question. When I spoke to Sophie Elmhurst, the author, she said she plays a game in her head sometimes having written this book. And after having written the book, it comes up at dinner parties that she's at, which is if you and your partner were in this raft, who would be Maurice and who would be Or Morris and who would be Marilyn? Who wants to answer that? Emily, who would you be?
- [46:53]
Isabella Rossellini
I hate to say, I think I would be Morris. Morris. Let's remember to add that after a couple days, maybe not even that many on the raft, Morris said, let's commit suicide. And Marilyn said, no, unfortunately I think I would be Morris.
- [47:07]
Nima Jeromey
Greg Morris, Nima, 100% Morris. But also I want to say, Emily, please don't do that. You'll pull through.
- [47:17]
Gilbert Cruz
Okay, let us move on to a depressing, to be frank, a depressing but important and moving book. Emily, you're gonna talk about this one. This is There Is no Place for Us.
- [47:28]
Isabella Rossellini
All right. There is no Place for Us by Brian Goldstone. This is a prodigiously researched and reported book about a phenomenon that affects hundreds of thousands of Americans, but which has gone basically unnoticed. And that is the phenomenon of the working home. And Goldstone points out right away that the phrase itself sounds impossible. It sounds like a contradiction or an oxymoron. Why would someone with a job not have a home? And unfortunately, in America that describes a hell of a lot of people. And I want to get one statistic out of the way that he gives us early on because I think it tells you almost everything you need to know, which is that apparently there is no city in America where a full time minimum wage worker can afford to rent a two bedroom apartment. So that's pretty discouraging. And Goldstone's feat in this book is to bring us into the lives of five families in Atlanta where he lives, whom he followed for a very long time. We get to know these families quite intimately for whom working homeless describes their lives. These are in one case at least a two parent family with a couple of kids. In several other cases, it's a single mom with several kids. And for these families, home is a car, a relative's couch, or more typically, a roach and mold infested room in an extended stay motel. This is a beautifully written book. We really root for these families. We rage with these families. And one of the I think really artful things that Goldstone does is make make clear that there's not simply one factor that accounts for why a family would fall into this situation. Yes, the depressed wage economy is a big culprit, but there are many other var that he considers predatory. Real estate companies, often run by private equity firms far away, who will evict you if you're so much as a day late on your rent. A boss who won't give you a day off to look for an apartment. Urban development that favors growth over affordability. In New York City, we just elected a mayor who ran on a platform of affordability and drew a huge turnout of voters concerned about this issue. So this is a big problem. And finally, law that are designed to favor landlords over tenants. And there's one story that really stuck with me from this book that I wanted to share about one of the families. The head of household is a woman whose rental home was burned down by an arsonist and she was removed to a shelter paid for by the Red Cross. And then she found another apartment that she could afford and she applied to rent it and the landlord said, actually, I can't rent it to you. You have an eviction on your record. And it turned out that even though her rental home had burned down, her mailbox was still standing. And in Georgia, the law allows a landlord to simply send an eviction notice by mail. And if it's uncontested over a certain number of days, the eviction stands. And so she was unable to rent an apartment after that. This is a book that really changed how I looked at my environment. And I think you look at the people you interact with, an Uber driver, your cashier at cvs, even a coworker, and wonder, just because they have a job, do they have a home?
- [50:52]
Gilbert Cruz
Emily, I was so infuriated reading this book. It made me so sad. Having grown up in New York, I've always been surrounded by the sight of people living on the street and sleeping in subway cars. And one of the things that Goldstone really tries to impress upon his readers very quickly as we have these preconceived notions of what it means to be hopeless, awful stereotypes about what the types of people that are homeless, you're living on the street, you're living in a shelter. There are many people that believe homelessness is a moral problem. They did something to deserve it. That you have a substance abuse problem. That's not the totality of what it means to be homeless, certainly in this country. And as you well pointed out, the number of people in major cities across the country. He found five families in Atlanta who have jobs. The thing you are supposed to do if you are trying to support yourself and your family and still cannot afford to have a regular home is incredibly depressing. I don't know, however, how to tell people that it is depressing. But it is also important and worthwhile to read this book because once you get into the lives of the subjects that Bryan Goldstone focuses on, you feel like you are in their lives. You feel like you are rooting for them, you are failing with them, you are sad for them, you are sad with them. It's incredible how immersive the book is.
- [52:26]
Isabella Rossellini
I think that's absolutely the right word. Yes, it is depressing. It's also enraging. And I think the enraging part is so angry. The enraging part gives you energy as well as. As sadness. So please don't be deterred by the subject matter. I think there are so few books that actually really affect a profound change in how you see the world. And this is one of those books. I think it belongs on a shelf with Evicted by Matthew Desmond and Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott. Recent books that have looked at the American underclass in a new way. This is just a really important book.
- [53:00]
Greg Coles
I want to say recent books. Yes, but Matthew Desmond's Evicted was one of the Book Review's 10 best books almost a decade ago.
- [53:07]
Isabella Rossellini
Wow.
- [53:08]
Greg Coles
And it just highlights. It makes this book all the more disheartening, but also important to the extent that it shows how little has changed in the intervening years. If I can climb on a soapbox, and it's Coldstone's soapbox. One theme running through this book is the role that government could and should play and that it's in. And in the absence of market regulation or tenant protection laws, all of the interested parties here are acting completely logically to improve their own stations in life. From the private equity firms to the landlords who evict the people or sell in a rising market, leaving these working people homeless.
- [53:48]
Isabella Rossellini
So how do we solve this problem? Right.
- [53:50]
Jumana Khatib
Right.
- [53:51]
Greg Coles
It makes no allowance for the tenants who are at the mercy of a missed paycheck or an abusive ex. That arson that you're talking about who burned down her apartment was her ex partner who burned it down out of revenge. Or this Kafkaesque bureaucracy that splits families up Once boys are 13 and no longer allowed to stay in the same shelters as their mothers. So the problem is just so large and it is an enraging book. You just come away feeling like there's nothing to be done, but also how important it is to do something because it's so dehumanizing for the people living through it.
- [54:27]
Gilbert Cruz
I know certainly in this time when it feels like the news is overwhelming, the idea that you should read a book about the working homeless in America is like a convincing pitch. But I think that part of the reason that I read nonfiction, hopefully that we in this room read nonfiction and that people out there read nonfiction, is to get a greater sense of the world, both good and bad. And I think it is good to feel angry about, about things that are happening in this country and around the world. And this is an under known problem in America.
- [55:01]
Greg Coles
It's an undercounted problem. Goldstone makes the point early on. These are the hidden homeless. There are no statistics for them because you can't count them because technically they're not living on the streets, they're not living in a shelter.
- [55:13]
Isabella Rossellini
The government doesn't keep track of them.
- [55:14]
Greg Coles
Exactly.
- [55:15]
Nima Jeromey
One thing to keep in mind is the reason that this book stands out. It's not the only book about homelessness or pseudo homelessness out there. But it's really propulsive because it has this kind of unbelievable fly on the wall quality that never lets up, even when he is on his soapbox giving you statistics, telling you about the history. And I think one of the best examples is when he explains the housing voucher program where one of his subjects, Britt, gets one of these coveted housing vouchers. And he tells you about the whole history of why she currently is still unable to get a place to live and uses her own family tree, descends down into her grandmother's generation and explains what was going on with Section 8 housing and how the city of Atlanta demolished a lot of it, or all of it, in part at the behest of real estate lobbyists who said that this was distorting the market and they all really loved housing vouchers. And then lo and behold, once the housing vouchers spread and a lucky few like Britt have them in their hand, no one will take them in because landlords find the paperwork to be incredibly onerous. They wanna be able to raise rents. And the fact he never loses sight of Britt the whole time he's giving this description. And that's what kind of makes this superlative book on this subject.
- [56:41]
Gilbert Cruz
Getting angry all over again. Nima, take us away. Take us into the past. I'd love for you to talk about the biography on this list. Wild Thing. A Life of Paul Gauguin.
- [56:50]
Nima Jeromey
Okay. This is a biography of the painter Paul Gauguin that is in Technicolor. There are lush scenes both in Paris and French Polynesia, where Gauguin spent the last years of his life. Sophisticated art analysis, there's political complexity. We learn that Gauguin was born basically into privilege. He had to leave Europe with his family during the Revolutions of 1848, in part because his. His grandmother, we find out, was this radical leftist feminist who the state really did not like. So they went to Peru. The grandmother died basically when they got there, but they ended up with a family relation who was wealthy. Gauguin had an enslaved person as a servant when he was growing up. And yet somehow, when they moved back to Europe, kept calling himself a savage from Peru. And he had a kind of radical political chip on his shoulder. But then he became a stockbroker. But then when the market crashed in the late 19th century, he had been collecting all of these painters, a lot of, I believe, both Impressionists and post Impressionists, some of the heavy hitters of his generation. And then he started to take up the brush himself, and he thought, this is how I'm going to make back my family's fortune, with mixed results. And ended up toward the end of his life in French Polynesia. One thing that this biography hopes to show is that Gauguin is seen as this sort of like, lustful monster. Sue Prideau, the author of this book, goes so far as to talk about four teeth that were found in an old well that seemed to prove that Gauguin didn't have syphilis.
- [58:40]
Gilbert Cruz
I really was surprised by how many people appear to have known that Paul Gauguin had syphilis. It seems like she opened the book.
- [58:51]
Greg Coles
One thing.
- [58:51]
Gilbert Cruz
Yeah. Trying to say, like, he didn't have syphilis.
- [58:55]
Isabella Rossellini
Yes.
- [58:55]
Nima Jeromey
And I went into the book thinking that he had slept with my favorite post Impressionist sister, Emile Barnard's sister, Madeleine. But that turned out not to be true. He was faithful to his wife Mette, for as long as they were married. They had an acrimonious divorce with her selling some of his collection. After they divorced, he did it is important to stay impregnate two teen Polynesian girls. And it's disturbing. No matter how many times it is relayed to us that the French age of consent at the time was 13. And that's a testament to how thorough Prideaux is in this portrait. Unsparing, but at the same time leaves you with so many kind of unforgettable scenes. I think the one that stuck out to me most, I think it's somewhat common knowledge that. But I didn't know that Gauguin was there when Van Gogh, just before he cut off his ear. And he sees Van Gogh holding the razor in his hand and does nothing and thinks for the rest of his life. I could have stopped this from happening. This is a haunted biography. It's a beautiful biography. And Gauguin really becomes the savage from Peru. He insists that he is at the end of the. Or the savage from abroad. Anyway, when I think he writes a letter to a friend near the end of the book when he's in his declining years in French Polynesia, where he's become a kind of political bombast inveighing against the colonial administration, that he would like to come back to Europe and his friend says, no, you are much more powerful where you are. This wild man sending missives from abroad.
- [60:33]
Isabella Rossellini
This is. I agree with everything you've said, Nima. This is a beautiful book. She's such an excellent biographer. She is a prolific biographer. She's written biographies of Nietzsche and Strindberg and I think one or two other painters. Edvard Munch, Edvard Monk. And so she's so in command of the material. The book is dotted with little asides about the art. Close readings of Gauguin's very innovative paintings and ceramics and wood carvings. He was a crazy man artist rejecting the impressionists templates for how to paint color and really inventing it entire new idiom. I would say that this is the wittiest book maybe among our nonfiction best books. It's got a very unassuming low key wit that's just utterly a pleasure to read. And you really feel that you get a sense of the late French 19th century through the life of this man who knew so many people, experienced so many highs. He was extremely wealthy. We learned that he owned 14 pairs of pants, an extraordinary number when he was a stackbroker. He kept a taxi running on the while he worked at the office. And then he experienced abject poverty when he literally had nothing to eat, couldn't afford to rent a room in some rural part of northern France where he'd gone to paint.
- [61:55]
Greg Coles
He worked on digging the Panama Canal. Money was in the early days of his marriage, a constant struggle and a source of their acrimony.
- [62:03]
Gilbert Cruz
Genzillai Emily, who you edit every week, reviewed this book. She reviewed several of these books, and she said of Prideaux, who, as you point out, has written all these biographies, she's everything you want in a biographer, diligent, judicious and compassionate without being indulgent. And I think those are particularly important qualities to bring to a story like this, which is Nima. And as Greg just pointed out with the Panama Canal is so much more sprawling than I thought Gauguin's life would be going into this book. He lived a global life in a way.
- [62:36]
Jumana Khatib
He absolutely did.
- [62:37]
Isabella Rossellini
And Jen said it perfectly. And Nima is right. I think there is this sense, or there was this sense that Gauguin had been. He had syphilis, he slept with minors in Polynesia, the teeth. And so he's uncanceled in this book in a very clever, undogmatic way, where we see a very complicated man who had a much more interesting and complicated relationship with colonialism than the cliche would suggest.
- [63:03]
Greg Coles
Prideaux says in her introduction or preface, she lays out a statement of intent. She says the recent appearance of so much new material, coinciding with contemporary debate around his troubling reputation, made it seem important to reexamine Gauguin's life. Not to condemn, not to excuse, but simply to shed new light on the man and the myth. And I feel like that is exactly what she accomplishes in this book.
- [63:27]
Isabella Rossellini
Amen.
- [63:28]
Gilbert Cruz
What do you think of the criticism which came up in the discussion over this book? We often have biographies on our top 10 nonfiction books, and a question that was asked is, why now? And Prideaux tries to make the case, well, it was time for a reassessment. But, Emily, I will ask this to you in particular. What do you say what it's like? Why now? Why this person now?
- [63:52]
Isabella Rossellini
Well, I think the introduction does offer one explanation, which is the recent discovery of the teeth and their testing and not finding. In fact, what they found was that the teeth did not suggest that he had been treated with mercury and the various compounds that a syphilitic person would have been treated with. So you can't prove a lack, but it's suggestive. The teeth were suggestive. And then this manuscript was also recently discovered. That was the original manuscript of a book, I guess, that Gauguin eventually wrote. And to see this, the full version of it as he wrote it, was revealing of his advocacy for the local people among whom he lived in Polynesia. And so those are her explicit motivations. But my sense is that she would have written this book without those pieces of evidence coming to light. I think that she's someone who's interested in kind of European, Scandinavian connections. Her other biographical subjects have that connection. And in this case, Gauguin being French, his wife being Danish, I think that may have been an appealing thing to her. I think she just understood that this was a very singular man, his life is a wild ride, and that she had the tools to tell this story.
- [65:06]
Gilbert Cruz
We are going to go from biography to memoir. Nima, I'm going to come back to you over here to talk about Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy.
- [65:15]
Nima Jeromey
This is a memoir by Arundhati Roy, as you said, the charming, cheerful, sardonic activist and novelist who wrote the God of Small Things. And it's really, it's a portrait of her life, but it's also a portrait of her mother and how her mother shaped her life. Her mother was this dynamic, formidable figure who ran this school that was nominally Christian in Kerala in a pretty un Christian like way. And she inspired much fear and reverence in her pupils as she did in her children. And she gained a national reputation having fought a lot of legal battles through her school. But also she was an abusive mom. And there've been a lot of tell all memoirs out lately about bad marriages and bad parents. I think the most obvious example is Jennette McCurdy searing I'm glad My Mom Died about the abuse she got from her mother as a child actress. But Arundhati Roy states from the very beginning, I'm not glad my mom died. In fact, I thought she would be alive forever and it was inconceivable to me that she would go. And the thing that Roy does, which is almost a magic trick, is despite her mother, who was very unstable, shot at her children, hit her brother for having a subpar report card, is she somehow makes all of this funny. Every chapter. It's hard to pull out one sentence and say where the jokes are, but every chapter is like comedian's tight 10. And she's able to somehow show how Arundhati Roy herself is politically active. She's spoken out a lot against the nationalist right wing government of India's current leader Narendra Modi. And the way that she's able to show how her mother's kind of manic disposition and public face, both these things helped make Arundhati Roy the person that she is, is what is so engrossing about this book, you get a lot of Easter eggs about this or that. Personal detail ran its way into the God of Small Things, her life as an architect, her run of success after working on screenplays. But really, when Mrs. Roy, as she refers to her mother, just as all the children in the school that her mother runs do, whenever her mother is offstage, you just start to miss her, just like Arundhati does.
- [67:43]
Gilbert Cruz
And do you feel like you need to have read the work of Arundhati Roy in order to enjoy this memoir?
- [67:49]
Nima Jeromey
In fact, I did not. I have never read the God of Small Things and I still enjoy this memoir.
- [67:55]
Isabella Rossellini
It is a superlative book. She's just such an excellent writer, we should say. The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize and a subsequent novel was long listed for the Booker Prize. You are in the hands of such an excellent writer. What I loved about this memoir was the unsentimentality, the completely matter of fact way she goes about recounting a seriously abusive relationship with a parent who was unstable, irrational. You never knew when she was going to sweep all the teacups off the table and throw them on the floor. But yes, it's done with such a light touch and so matter of factly that it's humorous. And yes, I was aware too that each chapter read like a standup bit with a great kicker. And it's just, it's upsetting and delightful simultaneously.
- [68:41]
Greg Coles
When we discussed this book as a group, one of the things that kept coming up, people kept saying, Arundhati Roy just seems like a great hang, a great person to hang out with. And this book, it's so disarming. She is describing becoming a woman who is undeniably monstrous as a mother, but it is a forgiving and fully human portrait of her. Her mother suffered from severe asthma and had to take steroids from it. It affected her weight, it affected her temper. I mean, a lot of her rage was chemically driven because of her health condition. And a lot of the forgiveness comes from Arundhati's sense of her mother. Even growing up as this political figure, a fierce feminist, fighting for a better world for people like Arundhati herself. So even as her mother was terrifying and punishing, she also thought, well, she's paving the way for people like me.
- [69:36]
Gilbert Cruz
We're going to come back here to the States with our final book. This is Mother Two Centuries of Race, Resistance and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church. This is by Kevin Sack, who, who used to work here at the New York Times. And Emily, I recall you just stumping so, so hard for this book. Please tell us about it.
- [69:56]
Isabella Rossellini
I blush, Gilbert, but this is a really good book. Of course, Mother Emanuel is a name seared into the minds of many Americans as the site of a horrific hate crime. Mother Emanuel being the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where in 2015, a white supremacist shot and killed nine members of a bipartisan Bible study class who had invited him into their midst. This book is a searing account of that tragedy, but it's also a lot more. It's a powerful history of the black church in the south, and ultimately, it's a history of the imbrication of race and religion in America. And as Gilbert said, Sack, the author, is a former longtime New York Times reporter. He's from the South. He went to school in the south, and he was assigned by the paper to cover the aftermath of the massacre. And he quickly realized, as he explains in the book, that there was a lot more to this story than this terrible event. Mother Emanuel wasn't just any church. It was the first AME church in the South. It's one of the oldest black congregations in Charleston. And Charleston is a city that was long at the center of black life. It was the heart of the slave trade. And, of course, it was the place where the Civil War began. So, so much symbolism converging around this event. But Sac has it completely under his control. He spent 10 years, almost 10 years writing this book. He actually moved to Charleston at some point in the process, and it is another feat of research and reporting. So he takes us through the night of the massacre. And, yes, this is a visceral, unsparing account. We get to know each of the victims and the survivors very intimately. But he does this with enormous sensitivity. And we then get to know the church as well. This church is the protagonist, if you will, for the book, a kind of a through line. And it's an extraordinary structure containing all this history. And we get a history of Charleston, which turns out to be fascinating. It was a very, very wealthy city, one of the wealthiest in the 13 colonies, and had, from very early on, a substantial black population. By the early 19th century, it was more than 50% black, although most of those residents were enslaved. And what this meant was that the white authorities were incredibly paranoid about the possibility of insurrection and that the rules and regulations governing black life in Charleston were just particularly draconian. You couldn't walk down a street and sing if you were a black resident. You couldn't raise your voice and think public if you were a Black resident. And you certainly did not have the right to freedom of assembly to worship in a black church. It took a walkout and a lawsuit in the early 19th century for the first Black AME congregation to form. And we also get simultaneously, a history of Methodism, which turns out to be fascinating, too. A strain of Christianity that offered a more personal, intimate, even ecstatic version of Christianity compared with the dominant Calvinist tradition, and notably was abolitionist. And tragically, the church, as it expanded to the Southern slave states, abandoned its abolitionist stance. And so you see the black church evolve not just as a site of worship and faith, but as resistance through Reconstruction, through the civil rights period, Martin Luther King comes to speak there. Pastors are often politicians, including the pastor who was killed in 2015. The Reverend Clementa Kinckney was a very well regarded, beloved state senator. So we get all of this history. And at a moment when religion and race are so much a part of our national politics and conversation, this book just feels incredibly timely and essential. Our reviewer, Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor, called it a masterpiece, and I would not disagree.
- [73:55]
Gilbert Cruz
Nima, I remember when we first discussed this at a meeting, you were just very impressed at how deep the history was. That was in this book.
- [74:03]
Nima Jeromey
The history really carries on far past the Civil War into Reconstruction, showing how this church tried to be both a moral anchor in American life while also negotiating itself with American political reality, as any kind of influential entity in any country might. I do, despite what I said, I do think actually this book really shines in the bookends, in the descriptions of the rampage, which make you feel like you're about to be shot in the head, in the mixed reactions to the. The forgiveness offered to the assailant, Dylann Roof, by the survivors, and finally, in Roof's remorselessness and the fight over how money donated from around the country became an issue in the wake of the tragedy. It really shows how the present and the past are these beacons that bounce light off of each other.
- [74:57]
Gilbert Cruz
Yeah. The book, Emily, you alluded to this is bookended by the tale you have. The first couple chapters tell the story of what happened that terrible night. Towards the end of the book, we get the aftermath, and the middle is really that history of Charleston, history of Methodism, history of the AME Church. But the structure is seamless. I thought each of those parts flows into pretty well.
- [75:21]
Isabella Rossellini
It's really tricky if you think about it, because there is no single protagonist aside from the church itself.
- [75:28]
Gilbert Cruz
Your idea of the church as a protagonist is he needed that piece.
- [75:31]
Isabella Rossellini
Great framing he's such an eloquent writer, though, and it is beautifully structured. It was smart to frame the book with the tragedy and its aftermath.
- [75:40]
Gilbert Cruz
The five nonfiction books that we put on this year's list of the top 10 books of 2025 again, a marriage at Sea, Mother Emmanuel, There is no Place for Us, Wild Thing and Mother Mary Comes to Me. As we draw towards the end of our conversation here, I wanted to ask each of you to mention a nonfiction book that's not on this list that you nonetheless, really loved.
- [76:04]
Greg Coles
I will go with the biography Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs. It's a biography of the writer James Baldwin. The subtitle is A Love Story. And this is a biography that specifically looks at Baldwin's life through the frame of his romantic relationships, which previous biographers have largely shied away from, partly because Baldwin was gay and was often involved with men who went on to marry women and have families. And so there was many. Maybe a sense of circumspection in uncovering those. And also because it took some digging to find out who those were. But where you might feel a sense of prurience, knowing that's the framing, it's in fact, you come away feeling this is an absolutely necessary way to approach Baldwin's life and work. That love was such a resounding theme through everything that he wrote. And you realize how intimately these relationships affect his life and his work. So that was a biography I really enjoyed this year.
- [77:04]
Gilbert Cruz
A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs.
- [77:07]
Isabella Rossellini
Let's see, I'm gonna mention Dark Renaissance by Stephen Greenblatt. This is just a very exciting book by Greenblatt, the Harvard professor historian who is a world authority on Shakespeare and the English Renaissance. It's a biography of the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who was born in 1564 in Canterbury. He was born just a couple months before Shakespeare and lived a wild and crazy life. He may have been a spy for the English crown. And he managed to write several really important plays before being murdered at the tender age of 29. Greenblatt's thesis, his very bold claim in this book, is that it was Marlowe, not Shakespeare, who jump started the English Renaissance. That before Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus, his most famous plays, England was, culturally speaking, just an insipid, banal backwater. This is quite a claim. And moreover, aside from the plays, Marlowe just didn't leave very much documentation about his life. But that does not stop Greenblatt. He is so knowledgeable about the period and such an excellent storyteller. And such a great close reader of the plays that he really lays out and makes his case and makes the book a thrill to read.
- [78:22]
Gilbert Cruz
That was Dark Renaissance by Stephen Greenblatt. Nima, take us home.
- [78:27]
Nima Jeromey
I'm going to recommend Julia Yoffe's A feminist history of modern Russia from Revolution to autocracy. And not just because it puts one more mom or mother title in our list. This is a really fascinating, very subtle, engaging, at times funny and interesting book about. About Julia Yoffe's own self discovery. She moved with her family to Maryland just as the Soviet Union was falling apart in 1990 when she was seven years old. Most of the older women in Yoffe's family were scientists or doctors, so this was her vision of the Soviet world, a utopia for women of intel. But then she goes back to Moscow as a journalist in 2009 and discovers there really isn't much of a vestige of this ideal in the country. And she wonders why. And she goes back through this history to discover that while there were many women like the women in her family that did exist, the Soviet Union again and again fell short of its own idea.
- [79:45]
Gilbert Cruz
That is Motherland by Julia Yaffe. Thank you, the three of you for coming on to talk about the best Nonfiction books of 2025. Greg, thank you so much.
- [79:55]
Greg Coles
Thank you for having me.
- [79:56]
Gilbert Cruz
Emily, you were wonderful.
- [79:57]
Isabella Rossellini
Thank you so much, Gilbert.
- [79:59]
Gilbert Cruz
Nima, you're okay.
- [80:02]
Nima Jeromey
I'll try and do better next.
- [80:03]
Gilbert Cruz
You were great. You were great. Thank you.
- [80:05]
Nima Jeromey
Thanks, Gilbert.
- [80:07]
Gilbert Cruz
Those were our conversations about the fiction and nonfiction books on this year's top 10 books of 2025. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thank you for listening. And Doug, here we have the Limu.
- [80:32]
Greg Coles
Emu in its natural habitat, helping people.
- [80:35]
Gilbert Cruz
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- [80:41]
Isabella Rossellini
Fascinating.
- [80:42]
Gilbert Cruz
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [80:45]
Dave Kim
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [80:48]
Gilbert Cruz
Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Liberty Savings Ferry unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.