New year, new reading list. You already know about our favorite under-the-radar titles from 2024, on top of our favorite books of the year. But what's fresh in 2025? Here are eight titles our editors think you should pick up in the first quarter of the new year.
Aflame: Learning from Silence
Pico Iyer makes stillness his subject in this stunning look at the lessons he’s learned from his visits to a Benedictine monastery across 30-odd years. Graceful prose and an ability to find meaning in the mundane (and logic in chaos—like the wildfires that are seemingly constantly encroaching on the monastery) makes for a wise, often surprising meditation on how silence is as much a tool connect with one’s community as with the self. —Miriam Grossman, religion and self-help reviews editor
The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North
The North usually gets let off easy in histories of the civil rights movement, but Adams's richly detailed account of how white opposition to integration culminated in a 1974 Supreme Court decision effectively ending school desegregation efforts in states above the Mason-Dixon proves that white Northerners could be just as committed to white supremacy as their Southern counterparts. As today's Supreme Court sledgehammers away at the gains of the civil rights movement, Adams's chronicle provides an essential look at the era when, after a brief period of progressive rulings under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the tide started to once again turn against racial equality in the nation's highest court. –Marc Greenawalt, science and pop culture reviews editor
Helen of Troy, 1993
I'm particularly excited by Maria Zoccola's debut collection, a reimagining of Helen of Troy as a 1990s housewife in Tennessee. By turns hilarious and provocative, it's an affecting character study and modern mythic retelling. –Maya Popa, poetry reviews editor
King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Freedom Struggle Outside of the South
This stirring reexamination of MLK’s legacy argues that his work has been drastically misremembered and misrepresented by history in order to preserve a simplistic vision of the civil rights movement as concerned only with Southern racism. Instead, King’s critiques of Northern racism were extensive and long-running, as Theoharis extensively documents. It’s a stunning revisionist account of King’s life and politics. —Dana Snitzky, history and current affairs reviews editor
Precious Rubbish
There's always particular curiousity when a publishing insider puts their own book out (aside from 'how did they possibly have time'), but Fantagraphics designer Kayla E. has built deserved buzz for this debut by releasing eye-popping mini comics that portray horrible childhood memories like classic pop advertisements for years at indie comics shows—where she's been also been a firecracker panelist on topics like "trauma memoirs" (spoiler) who steals the show at any stage she's stepped onto. This is a fierce, dazzlingly creative first book from an artist who knows her stuff. —Meg Lemke, comics and graphic novels reviews editor
The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne
A heightened, feverish crime saga about a grieving matriarch and a forgotten New England town? Count me in. Currie’s strange, hypnotizing epic about the titular French-American mafiosa's quest to avenge her late daughter is darkly humorous, deeply tragic, and totally gripping. —Conner Reed, mystery and memoir reviews editor
Universality
In her debut novel, Assembly, Brown exhibited some of the most arresting writing I’ve come across in recent years. So I was excited to learn she has another one coming this spring, a Rashomon-like story of an assault at a party and the way narratives can be shaped and twisted by class and race. —David Varno, literary fiction reviews editor
When the Tides Held the Moon
I was immediately drawn in by the premise of Kelley's debut—a queer mermaid/human love story set against the backdrop of 1910s Coney Island--and blown away by the heartfelt, lyrical execution. —Phoebe Cramer, SFF, horror, and romance reviews editor
