10 Best Books of 2025
The following list was decided after consultation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay and the journal's most frequent reviewers, Walter Cummins and George Yatchisin. As always when creating year-end lists, we could have easily generated another one that included dozens of additional outstanding books. However, we believe a reader who dives into these particular volumes will find work that is stimulating, provocative, deeply memorable--and in some cases unexpected. Once again, CRB's celebrated eclecticism is on proud display in this list. (The books are presented in alphabetical order by author's last name.)
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case (Grand Central)
Uber-talented singer-songwriter Neko Case pens a memoir as lyrical as one of her enchanting songs, less a standard music bio than a book examining and defending art—how and why we make it and need it. That involves digging, a care to ever reconsider the past, a drive to outrun whatever hunts and haunts us, from the Green River Killer to familial trauma. And a hope to be fiercely feminist—at one point she rightfully laments, “How do women have any space left inside us with all the shit we swallow?” (Read George Yatchisin's full review here.)
Collected Poems by Wendy Cope (Faber)
Wendy Cope is big in Britain, where poetry isn’t quite as sidelined from the literary mainstream as it is here in America. You can see why. Her poetry has a sense of humor, without being merely silly—a rare quality in verse from any era, much less our own. Over nearly five hundred pages, Cope creates a world that is whimsically sad, but not too sad, where the legacy of a deceased relative is “the suit / My teddy bear still wears, / And fifty pairs of woolly socks / In drawers all over England.” There's so much good poetry in here, it's hard to choose favorites, but I especially love the seasonally apt “Another Christmas Poem”: “Bloody Christmas, here again. / Let us raise a loving cup: / Peace on earth, goodwill to men, / And make them do the washing-up.” (Read David Starkey's coverage of the year in poetry here.)
The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by Marlene L. Daut (Knopf)
It’s no wonder the book is hefty, more than five hundred pages, often dense, but the end result is simply magisterial. Haiti's Declaration of Independence of November 29, 1803, was unprecedented: formerly enslaved Black people declared themselves independent from one of the world’s fiercest colonial powers. And yet it wasn’t until 1947 that Haiti was able to retire its enormous and unwarranted debt to France. “The independence debt and the resulting drain on the Haitian treasury,” writes Daut, “not only resulted in the underfunding of education in Haiti but also contributed to the country’s inability to develop public infrastructure.” The motto of Henry Christophe, the country's first and last king, “I am reborn from my ashes,” can just as easily sum up Haiti’s history. (Read Brian Tanguay's full review here.)
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Knopf)
This book pulls no punches, spares no feelings, and levels its rhetorical finger at those in power, be they politicians, diplomats or the editors of media outlets. El Akkad wants these people to be made uncomfortable for their moral blindness. What I find surprising is that the author maintains the hope that when a majority of people are confronted with gross injustice, they will act to stop it. While I believe this is true, it’s also undeniable that the will of the people is often thwarted by their own leaders and institutions. Capriciousness, hypocrisy, and cruelty are byproducts of unaccountable power. (Read Brian Tanguay's full review here.)
The Uncollected Stories by Mavis Gallant (New York Review)
Although the forty-four Mavis Gallant works assembled for the 2025 Uncollected Stories had their initial magazine publication in the 1950s and 1960s, they are still as fresh and inventive as they were when new. Often edgy in her revelations about her characters’ subjectivity and their inability to settle with their circumstances, Gallant frequently treats her people with a sense of irony at their groping and failures. Her story construction is especially striking because the work was written at a time when the well-made Joycean story dominated, with a central character involved in a dilemma that culminates in the surprise of a personal epiphany. Gallant, like Charles Baxter long after her, found the device clichéd and inauthentic. (Read Walter Cummins's full review here.)
A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Knopf)
A Guardian and a Thief is chaotic novel, filled with surprising turns and ironic shifts, with characters whose plans constantly backfire, causing accidental but often grave violence, and with both planned and spontaneous deceptions. People attempt to be in charge of their lives but fail as hard as they try. Even when they achieve a goal, it’s at an unhappy price that in great part is a defeat. Ultimately, everything for everyone, for all their effort, goes painfully out of control. Fortunately, Megha Majumdar, as author, knows exactly what she is doing. (Read Walter Cummins's full review here.)
Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels (Doubleday)
The subtitle of Elaine Pagels’s new book, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, isn’t meant to question whether Jesus existed—Pagels finds plenty of evidence to indicate that he did—but to suggest how early chroniclers of his life interpreted the events that were known or thought to be known about him. Her primary focus is the four canonical gospels of the Bible, although, not surprisingly for the author of The Gnostic Gospels, she has no qualms about referencing what has come to be called the Apocrypha, which in many ways is the richest writing about Jesus. (Read David Starkey's full review here.)
Our Beautiful Boys by Sameer Pandya (Ballantine)
The two main subjects of Sameer Pandya’s second novel are family and violence. Set in a vaguely Santa Barbara-ish fictional Chilesworth, CA, the book focuses on three high school football players and a vicious attack of a fourth student at a post-game party in a spot called the Cave House. This sly and captivating book fronts as a whodunit—crucial plot elements keep dropping until the very final pages—but even more so it’s a whoarewe, as all its well-limned characters must confront the chaos of their inner selves. And then try to find where their true selves allow them to be in the shifting and complex milieus of family, work, teams, friendships. (Read George Yatchisin's full review here. And watch David Starkey's interview with Sameer here.)
The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work by Sam Quinones (Bloomsbury)
Technically speaking, there’s no such thing as a perfect tuba. But perfection isn’t the point of the story Sam Quinones tells so masterfully: purpose is the point. The Perfect Tuba is about what happens when we find something we can devote our creative energy to achieving. The tuba is a metaphor for the journey. Reward comes from striving toward a productive end, toward mastery and self-fulfillment through simple hard work and earnest effort. The lesson isn’t new, it’s just one we have been conditioned to forget. (Read Brian Tanguay's full review here.)
Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloomsbury)
Ayşegül Savaş is a superb writer, both on the level of the sentence and as a designer of plot: there’s just enough incident in each story to make you feel that something has happened, even if you might be hard pressed to name what that something was. Displacement, disillusionment and disquiet are frequent themes. Things never go the way they were planned. If Savaş is currently generating the sort of buzz that makes other writers jealous, the thirteen stories in Long Distance make it clear that she deserves those kudos. (Read David Starkey's full review here.)
