The Best of 2025: Non Fiction

Shockingly, it’s already the time of year for best-of lists and season’s greetings, for us to look back and wonder how everything passes by in a blur. As always, we’re selecting our favourite books released in the year gone by in various categories – starting with a selection of nonfiction that stood out, before we bring you our fiction picks, as well as specific South Asian lists of our favourite fiction and nonfiction. 

Miriam Toews – A Truce That Is Not Peace

A memoir that stemmed from the question ‘why do you write’ at a literary conference, Toews’ first foray into nonfiction is also about her family, her sister’s suicide, creativity, consciousness and much more. A Truce That Is Not Peace is inventive yet masterfully controlled, slyly casual yet momentous, heartfelt and joyful. If you love her fiction, this is a must-read from a writer inventing brilliant literary forms to contain truths that are stranger than fiction. 

Omar El Akkad – One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This

An urgent reckoning about what it means to live today, this book is a chronicle of Omar El Akkad’s painful realisation that much of what the West promises is a lie. An acclaimed journalist and writer, El Akkad dissects the flawed hope that western democracies offered freedom and justice for all, re-examining it in the wake of the genocide in Gaza. A moral, personal journey that never veers into didacticism, it’s essential reading for our times, spanning the personal, political and moral with clarity. 

Melissa Febos – The Dry Season

In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to abstain from dating, relationships, and sex for a few months. The Dry Season is a propulsive, thoughtful memoir about the author’s yearlong hiatus in the context of . In a culture obsessed with love and sex, where being single is pathologized, this book blends intimate personal narrative and incisive cultural criticism. A book that’s as much about celibacy as its inverse: pleasure, desire and fulfillment, this is a surprisingly insightful read.

Yiyun Li – Things in Nature Merely Grow

“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them – Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.” So begins Yiyun Li’s memoir of radical acceptance, a remarkable and powerful book from the depth of the abyss, a book ostensibly about the death of her sons. Li is never sentimental, nor ‘mourning’,  nor seeking to answer the questions you might assume she would. Instead she reframes how we understand grief and life in prose is so spare and polished it is impossible to turn away from. 

Chloe Caldwell – Trying

Over the years that Chloe Caldwell had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she’d read everything she could find on infertility. But what begins as an investigation into trying for a child broadens into far more as, halfway through, Caldwell learns of her husband’s betrayals. A tale of choice and agency, of the pursuit of creating life and the pursuit of living, this is a memoir that investigates ‘trying’ in all its form, an open-minded perspective on agency, family, grief and relationships that is well worth checking out.

Robert Macfarlane – Is A River Alive? 

One of our era’s most compelling nature writers, Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of reporting and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyous exploration into the idea that rivers are living beings, taking readers on three journeys: from the cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada — imperiled by mining, pollution and dams. Powered by Macfarlane’s dazzling prose and lit throughout by other voices, this is a brilliant work reminding us how our fate always flows with that of rivers. 

Hala Alyan – I’ll Tell You When I’m Home

After a decade of yearning for a child, years marked by miscarriages, Palestinian-American writer Hala Alyan decides to use a surrogate. As her baby grows in the body of another woman, in another country, Hala finds her own life unraveling. She turns to the stories of her family, of grandmothers long gone, of jagged paths from Palestine, Kuwait, Syria and Lebanon, summoning tales of invading armies, midnight escapes, places of temporary. Reckoning with her past, and the legacy of her family’s displacement in the wake of Gaza, this is a powerful and important book where the personal and political merge in myriad ways. 

Keith McNally – I Regret Almost Everything

A memoir by the legendary proprietor of Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi, taking us from his gritty London childhood to his serendipitous arrival in New York, where he founded the era-defining establishments Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg, and Nell’s. Eloquent and opinionated, Keith McNally writes about his stint as a child actor, his travels along the hippie trail, his wives and children, his devastating stroke, and social media stardom to capture a life that is colourful and unabashed.