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 non-fiction. This is going to be an extra full episode. It's going to be like a double stuffed Oreo of book conversation. Later on, I'm going to be joined by several editors to talk about our non-fiction books of the year, but we are going to start with Dave Kim and Juman Katib here to talk about the best fiction of the year. Dave, welcome.

Hello, Gilbert.

Hi, Jima. Hello. Hello.

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 night before and were feeling very hazy.

Yes. Our energy level was much lower.

Hopefully we are going to hit a higher note today.

I think so. 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 Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai. The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri. Angel Down by Daniel Kraus. The Director by Daniel Kehlmann. And Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood.

Jima, I would love for you to start with one of the earliest books that we discuss 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 discuss. Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood was early on in the year. Shimani, you were a big fan of this. Tell us about it.

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 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 is jarring.

So first there is a horrific mouse infestation. I mean it's 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.

Does this resonate with you as the occupant of multiple New York City apartments?

This was really good exposure therapy for me. I will tell you. I've I've made my piece with roaches. Roaches, I think, are almost respectful in terms of vermin. Mice are anything but. And rats, I don't acknowledge.

I absolutely disagree. Roaches are gross. And no, they usually get out. I'm still terrified by Listen, you turn on the light, they get out.

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. 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 Mo because my copy with all my underlines has mysteriously gone missing. But I

we're not going to call out who at the New York Times has stolen your book.

Somebody Somebody has my copy and I hope they got as much joy out of it as I did. Jamanna is so not bitter about it. No, I definitely took all the Christlike messages away from this book.

Dave, you read this one?

I did. Yeah, I loved the sort of fablelike structure of it. the three invaders and the three things that that 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 naan.

That's innocuous.

Innocuous in that it's not going to like chew through your house, right? Like innocuous in that it's an inanimate a formerly animate but now inanimate object. So, in that sense, but they start to to unravel what she worked hard to to preserve, which is this sort of inner peace that 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 it's beautifully descriptive and meditative, and I loved it.

Earlier this year, I read a memoir, a piece of non-fiction by Pico Ayer. The title of that was A Flame Learning from Silence, and I interviewed him on this podcast, and it was a memoir about his visits over decades to a Benedicting hermitage in in Big Su, California. He's been going for more than 30 years. And I think I read this and Stoneyard devotional at around the same time. And everything you're saying about the book, Dave and Jumata, is correct. It's beautifully written. The main character is 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?

I go camping a lot. That's but it's actually no it's not like that at all because I have two screaming children with me who go ferals. 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.

I think the closest I've come is like long airplane trips. You never hit the Wi-Fi? No. That's crazy. Okay, 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 a power scandal, but yeah, it's been a while. It's totally imploded, but I think the tenants remain, but

you know what? We're all just human and flawed. Truly, I mean really. If you want to see the fallibility of the human, just look at what happened at this Buddhist order.

That was Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. Dave, I'd love to talk about the next book on our list, which is The Director by Daniel Kehlmann. This is a book that I've recommended to so many people this year. This is not a brag. I'm just going to say I was in Tellide this summer for the film festival and I was at the bookstore there and I was talking 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 uh given to people and one of the ladies went I think uh and took it off the shelf and bought it. It's so wonderful.

It's very gratifying when that happens.

I know. I know. She probably went back afterwards got a refund. She was like I'm not going to listen to that jerk. Tell us about this one.

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 stuckup reader who's always telling you that he never reads contemp and it's always a man. Never. I never read contemporary fiction. This sort of arrogant reader that 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 GW 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. after they've invaded Poland and end of quickly taking over Europe and he's stuck there. He can't leave.

And so now he is stuck in what is now called Ostark and working as a filmmaker essentially for the Reich. He has this harrowing meeting with Joseph Gobles 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 and is forced to compromise artistic principles at every juncture. So, this is a 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.

Yeah. And your family. And your family. Exactly. Yeah. Cuz 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 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. Then it feels like through each of these characters, you get a sense of the different reactions that one would have to uh a terrible situation like this, a situation where you have to make compromises with a fascist or authoritarian regime.

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 Kehlmann 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 this book, 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.

That was the director by Daniel Kehlmann. I am going to talk about a book that I think will be somewhat divisive but but that many of us at the book review were pretty passionate about. It is a book called Angel Down by Daniel Kraus. 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 land. Obviously no one wants to go there cuz 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 a 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 as far as I recall, begins with the word and. It's just a sort of a neverending 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 Kraus before, or at least if you read his last book, which was called Whalefall, came out two years ago. We put on the cover of the book review the summer it came out. Then you know he can be a very gross writer. That book, Whalefall, 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 a lot of viscera. These are very gushy books.

There's a lot of squaltching, a lot of squelching, a lot of blood, a lot just every everything you can imagine, right? The whale fall. It's not like Jeppetto and Pinocchio inside Monstro, a giant clean cathedral of the inside of a whale with the ribbones 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're doing here with Angel 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.

It's hard to remember exactly because it it is possible that every single body part that a person have is described in some way detached from the human body in this book. So, it may it wasn't when the main character has the ear plastered to his face cuz 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.

Yeah. Yeah. It's remarkable at how and this word is intentional. Beautiful some of these descriptions can actually be. It's bizarre. like how you can read something about decapitation, a description of something harrowing and and be like, "Wow, this can be made into a beautiful sentence or part of a sentence, I should say."

Yeah. There's a moment where he's holding somebody under the arms like a breach baby or something and it's like, "Okay." Wow. All right. All right. For my obstatrician friends out there, it is quite a performance. There are, as you say, descriptions and metaphors that I don't think I'd ever heard before. or 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.

Yeah. And I thought he really did make that very tired trope very interesting.

So that is Angel Down by Daniel Kraus. I am going to turn to Jumanna to talk about I don't know if it's the direct opposite of Angel Down cuz 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, Jumanna, 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. Everybody's ready for this year to be over. All my colleagues are ready for this year to be over. I can tell. Well, we've all heard about the sisters a lot. So, please tell our listeners about it.

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. No, no, no. I'm agreeing with you. I think there's a the next book we're going to talk about is also long and we think that that's a good thing. 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 in peace naturally, but it's actually apt 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 Newalts 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 Mika 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 Chamir 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.

Are you Are you a witch?

Yeah. No, I'm not a w I'm a Buddhist.

You know, you know curses don't exist, right?

That's not true. That's not true. Let me tell you as as our sort of fertile crescent middle east correspondent, curses are very real, right? Like you just walk down Hamro Street. It's just they're real. You we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.

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.

Okay. Yeah. I just love the portrayal of the sisters. They're so independently realized. They're really fully realized. They're just great. They're 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 I thought that was very impressive. We're only talking about three sisters here, but even with that, you could see yourself in a different books, seeing them blend into each other and losing track of like, okay, who, you know, this, this, and what did this person do? And but they feel so distinct, each of them, and 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 you stick with them the whole time. It's it's 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.

So that was The Sisters by Yonas Hassan Kamiri. We're gonna transition to the fifth book on our fiction list, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kieran Desai.

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 Sunny. Sonia is a college student. When we first meet her, she meets an older artist named Elon, who is this sort of manic, arrogant artist who acts as a real pygmian 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 Sunny is a burgeoning journalist from India. He lives in Brooklyn with Oola who is a white woman from Kansas. And things don't quite work out between them.

And so Sonia and Sunny 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 a an energy to this book. It was one of those books that I found it very difficult to put down.

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 our critic Alexander 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 and 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 and all their fullness might take time.

There's so much life in this book. And the backstory of this novel is that it's been about 20 years since Kieran Desai published a novel. And I think that it's safe to say that Sonia and Sunny 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 there's a a dog that literally dogs Sonia that's a little I'm not going to say magical realism. I'm not going to say magical realism. And it's just it's really just wonderful to watch her pull this together like on this huge loom.

one of the things that I really loved about this book was the essential theme of the challenge, the pressure of an artist to to to fall into racial tropes and questions of identity and the ex those sort of western expectations for eastern and orientalist art and her dealing with that is so complex and interesting. One of the things that Elon emphasizes to Sonia is to not do that is to to to resist stay away from narratives that you know that that white readers want of Asian writers of South Asian writers and and she both Kieran des 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 Elon was chiding her against was to avoid cliches and to avoid writing things that had already been done and formulaic stuff but but this is this couldn't be further from what Kieran Desai is doing. I mean it really just like I said just making it hers.

That was the loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kieran Desai. Jima 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 two that you wish had been one of our top 10 books of the year.

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. Yeah, that's a movie. 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 Baradel. 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 neurode divergent. 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 Bardau, 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 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.

Dave, what about you? I really liked the book called The Tokyo Suite by the Brazilian writer Giovana Madalloso. This is a novel about two women. The first is a maid. Her name is Maju. And the second is her boss, Fernanda, who is a hot shot TV producer. And Maju, the maid, has kidnapped Fernand'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 and it moves. It moves very quickly. I really love that book.

So again, the five fiction books on our top 10 books of 2025 list are The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, The Sisters, Angel Down, The Director, and Stoneyard 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 non-fiction books that are on this year's list.

Welcome back. This is the book review podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm now joined by Nema Jeromi, Greg Kohl's, and Emily Aken to talk about the non-fiction books on this year's top 10 list. Nema, welcome. Hi, Gilbert. Greg, hello. Hi, Gilbert. Emily, thanks for being here. Hi, Gilbert. I am going to quickly start by listing all five of these books. And because they're non-fiction, they all have incredibly long subtitles. And then we're going to jump right into it.

So, our five best non-fiction books of the year are A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhurst, Mother Emmanuel, Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness, and One Charleston Church by Kevin Sack. There is no place for us. Working and homeless in America by Brian Goldstone. Wild Thing, 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 author Sophie Elmhurst on this podcast earlier this year. Greg, I'm going to give this one to you. Tell us about the book.

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.

It's so crazy that they had no no radio.

Maryland didn't even know how to swim. Um but it all went well until one day they had reached the Pacific already. They're about 300 miles away from the Galapagus 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.

A very elegant summary of a 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. this this couple's this odd couple's odd and wonderful and unique marriage.

I loved this book. The writing is extraordinary. It's so vividly imagined and I felt reading it that it the feat of imagination that Elmherst 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's 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.

For me, I think one of the most remarkable aspects of this book also is the way that it shifts perspective. You are so on the boat with them, feeling so tense, kind of mad at them at times, but also impressed. And Elmharst 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? I don't think it is. I don't think it is. By a South Korean fishing vessel and then you really find out what they've come to look like after all these months at sea.

I've recommended this book also because of its relatively short length compared to some of the other books in 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 going to share with others.

Okay. Let us move on to a depressing, to be frank, a depressing, but important and moving book. Emily, you're going to talk about this one. This is There Is No Place for Us.

All right. There is No Place for Us by Brian Goldstone. This is a predigiously 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 homeless. 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 twoarent 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 moldinfested room in an extended stay in 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 variables 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, laws that are designed to favor landlords over tenants. 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 co-orker, and wonder just because they have a job, do they have a home?

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 sights of people living on the street and sleeping in subway cars. And one of the things that Goldstone, you know, really tries to to impress upon his readers very quickly is 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, that you 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 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 Elliot. recent books that have looked at the American underclass in a new way. This is just a really important book.

I I want to say recent books, yes, but Matthew Desmond's Evicted was one of the book reviews 10 best books almost a decade ago. 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.

getting angry all over again. Nema, 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.

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 grandmother, we find out, was this radical leftist feminist who the state really did not like. So they went to Peru.

But then he became a a stock broker. But then when the market crashed in the late 19th century, he he had been collecting all of these painters, a lot of I believe both impressionists and postimpressionists, 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 and ended up toward the end of his life in French Polynesia." One thing that this biography hopes to show is that Gan is seen as this sort of like lustful monster. Suprio, 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. I really was surprised by how many people appear to have known that Paul Gauguin had syphilis.

I think the one that stuck out to me most is 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 Go 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 a haunted biography. It's a a beautiful biography and Gauguin really becomes the savage from Peru. He insists that he is at the end or the savage from abroad anyway.

this is I agree with everything you've said Nema this is a beautiful book she's such such an excellent biographer. She is a prolific biographer. She's written biographies of Nietze and Stinberg and I think one or two other painters. Edward Monk. And so she's so in command of the material. The book is dotted with little aides about the art, close readings of Goan'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 his entire new idiom. I would say that this is the wittiest book maybe among our our non-fiction best books. It's got a very unassuming, low-key wit that's just utterly a pleasure to read.

Prito 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 re-examine Goan'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.

We are going to go from biography to memoir. Nema, I'm going to come back to you over here to talk about Mother Mary comes to me by Arundhati Roy.

This is a memoir by Arandati 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 Carerala in a pretty uncchristian-like way. And she inspired much fear and reverence in her pupils as she did in her children.

but also she was an abusive mom and there have been a lot of tell all memoirs out lately about bad marriages and bad parents. I think the most obvious example is Janette Mccertie searing I'm glad my mom died about the abuse she got from her mother as a child actress. But Arandati 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, shout at her children, hit her brother for having a subpar report card, is she somehow makes all of this funny. It every chapter, it's hard to pull out one sentence and say where the jokes are, but every chapter is like a comedian's tight 10.

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 unscentimentality, the completely matter-of-act 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 matterofactly that it's humorous.

We're going to come back here to the states with our final book. This is Mother Emmanuel. Two centuries of race, resistance, and forgiveness in one Charleston church. This is by Kevin Sack, 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.

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 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 imation 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 AM 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 Sack 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 it is another feat of research and reporting. So he takes us through the night of the massacre and 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 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 in 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 walk out and a lawsuit in the early 19th century for the first black AM 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 Pinkney was a very well-reggarded 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 and essential. Our reviewer Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor, called it a masterpiece, and I would not disagree.

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 forgiveness offered to the asalent, Dylan 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.

The five non-fiction 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 non-fiction book that's not on this list that you nonetheless really loved. 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 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 purience 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 affected his life and his work. So, so that was a biography I really enjoyed this year.

Baldwin, a love story by Nicholas Boggs. Let's see. I'm going to mention Dark Renaissance by Steven Greenblat. This is just a very exciting book by Greenblat, 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. Greenblat's thesis, his very bold claim in this book is that it was Marlo, not Shakespeare, who jumpstarted the English Renaissance that before Marlo wrote Tamberlain and Dr. Foustus, his most famous plays, England was culturally speaking just an incipid benol backwater. This is quite a claim. And a moreover, aside from the ays, Marlo just didn't leave very much documentation about his life. But that does not stop Greenblat. 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.

That was Dark Renaissance by Steven Greenblat. Nema, take us home. I'm going to recommend Julia Yafi's Motherland: 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 Julia Yafy's own self-discovery. She moved with her family to Maryland just as the Soviet Union was falling apart in 1990 when she was 7 years old. Most of the older women in Yafy's family were scientists or doctors. So this was her vision of the Soviet world, a utopia for women of intellect. But then she goes back to Moscow as a journalist in 2009 and discovers there really isn't much of a vestage 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 ideals. That is Motherland by Julia Yaffy.

Those were our conversations about the fiction and non-fiction 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.