The Books Behind the 2025 Academy Award Nominations

Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula

Bram Stoker's son claimed that the plot of Dracula (1897) came to his father ""in a nightmarish dream after eating too much dressed crab.'' Despite some melodramatic prose, that comment is as exciting as this biography of Stoker (1847-1912) gets. How a boring Victorian Dubliner could have produced the creepiest horror novel of his time remains one of the mysteries of fictional creativity. Belford, biographer of Violet Hunt, has struggled with the problem and sees in Stoker's mesmerizing employer, actor-impresario Henry Irving, the sinister reflection of Vlad the Impaler, but the part-time author, who was the business manager of the Lyceum Theatre, remains bloodless. A tempestuous inner life, fired by sexual frustration (although Stoker was married to an Irish beauty) and omnivorous reading in lurid subliterature, is as close to a solution as we get here. Since Stoker's routine, whether Irving's company traveled or stayed put, was prosaic, Belford often segues to his London acquaintances or his restaurant menus, and sights foreshadowings of Dracula far and near. For those who have been frozen in their armchairs by the spell of Stoker's unforgettable vampire, or who are riveted by its hardly hidden sexual pathology, Stoker's life will be an anticlimax. Illustrations. (Apr.)

Conclave

Thriller Award–winner Harris (Dictator) successfully dramatizes the selection of a new pope. In the near future, the pontiff dies suddenly of a heart attack, and the Vatican leadership works fast to ensure an orderly transition. The process is conveyed from the perspective of Cardinal Jacopo Lomeli, the dean of the College of Cardinals, a rational and sympathetic figure who a month earlier sought permission to retire to a religious order. As the cardinals gather from around the world to vote, factions quickly develop around the leading contenders, including Joshua Adeyemi of Nigeria, who’s seeking to become the first black pope, and Lomeli’s successor as the Vatican’s secretary of state, Aldo Bellini. Bellini gives Lomeli a glimpse at the hidden turmoil at the Vatican when he reveals that on the day of the Holy Father’s death, the dying pope confided to Bellini that he had lost faith in the church. As the maneuvering for command continues, Lomeli must try to steer a path toward consensus. This is another impressive outing from an extremely versatile author. Agent: Michael Carlisle, Inkwell Management. (Nov.)

Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties

This critical study takes a fresh look at the day Dylan “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival—coinciding with the event’s 50th anniversary. Wald delves into the folk revival, the rise of rock, and the tensions between traditional and groundbreaking music to provide new insights into Dylan’s artistic evolution, his special affinity to blues, and his complex relationship to the folk establishment. —Mark Rotella

Enigma of Arrival

Discursive and ruminative, more like an extended essay than a novel, the intricately structured chapters in this highly autobiographical book reveal ""the writer defined by his . . . ways of seeing.'' Naipaul, in his own person, narrates a series of events, beginning during a period of soul-healing in Wiltshire, circling back to the day of his departure from Trinidad in 1950 when he was 18, describing his time in London before he went up to Oxford, moving back to Trinidad after his sister's death: these journeys are a metaphor for his life. With beautiful use of detail recaptured from an extraordinary memory, with exquisitely nuanced observations of the natural world and his own interior landscape, he shows how experience is transmogrified after much incertitude and paininto literature. This is a melancholy book, the testament of a man who has stoically willed himself to endure disappointment, alienation, change and grief. Naipaul lays bare the loneliness, vulnerability and anxieties of his life, the sensibility that is both an asset for the writer and a burden for the man. He demonstrates this brilliantly by describing other peoplemainly his neighbors in a village near Stonehenge. Using these characters as catalysts, Naipaul peels back protective layers of memory, sparing himself nothing, revealing the mistakes and inadequacies of his life. The drama resides in small incidents: the death of a cottager, the firing of an estate's gardener; with each account, the narrative is spun more tightly into a seamless tapestry, a powerful document by a master of his craft. Readers Subscription Book Club main selection. (March 19)

Magic Candies

This poignantly told fantasy stars Tong Tong, a lonely child who, looking for new marbles in a shop, buys a small bag of hard candies that offer magical hearing powers. The first hard orb, which matches the pattern of the family sofa, lets loose the sofa’s voice, allowing Tong Tong to find a lost remote. (The sofa also puts forth a request: “Tell your dad to give the farting a rest.”) When Tong Tong’s father arrives home, the dad’s endless admonitions fill an entire page with closely printed words—translator Bowman handles these with skill—but another candy lets Tong Tong hear the love behind them. Still another reveals the voice of the child’s departed grandmother (“Don’t worry about me. I’m having so much fun here”). Show-stopping spreads by Baek, similar to art by Red Nose Studio, feature molded, emotive figures in meticulously constructed scenery with miniature furniture, photographed under dramatic lighting—an effect startlingly close to animation. It’s a fully realized world that considers discerning meaning and making friends, while offering artwork that lingers in the memory. Ages 4–8. Agent: Isabel Atherton, Creative Authors Limited. (Sept.)

The Maker of Dune: Insights of a Master of Science Fiction

Herbert, who died a year ago, wrote two collections of short stories and 22 novels, including the immensely popular, six-part Dune series. However, his short nonfiction essaysculled from newspaper features, correspondence, interviews, introductions to science-fiction anthologies and record-liner noteshave remained uncollected until now. Stimulating, cogent and thought-provoking, these pieces cover much of the same ground as Herbert's fictiondemonstrating his interest in ecology, the future, religion and the consequences of scienceand thus provide clues, as O'Reilly notes, to ""the myriad threads that make up the cloth on which Frank's stories are so lavishly embroidered.'' One section is devoted to ``The Origins of Dune,'' and the book includes a complete Herbert bibliography. (May)

Me

The legendary pop star looks back cheerfully on a melodramatic life in this rollicking autobiography. John recounts his ascent from toiling pub pianist to becoming the biggest singer-songwriter of the 1970s with hits such as "Rocketman" and "Bennie and the Jets," to elder statesmanship as one of the first openly gay stars and Britain's griever-in-chief with his "Candle in the Wind" tribute at Princess Dis funeral. Beyond a vivid account of his flamboyant showmanship and outfits (think pink suit with Eiffel Tower headdress), he gives an unusually candid look at his insecurities—his unrelentingly critical mother haunts the book—and at the bubble of celebrity entitlement that enabled his rock-star excesses, including childish tantrums, controlling and callous behavior toward a string of boyfriends, and rampant drug use. (After ingesting much vodka and cocaine with Duran Duran, he "returned to the video set, demanded they begin running the cameras, took off all [his] clothes and started rolling around on the floor naked.") John keeps his good humor throughout, treating even his suicide attempts as farces and poking fun at his own vanity. ("However much a hair transplant hurt, it was a mere pinprick compared to the sensation of hitting your head on a car door immediately after having a hair transplant.") John's fans will love this funny, down-to-earth, and openhearted self-portrait. Photos. (Oct.)

The Nickel Boys

“As it had ever been with Nickel, no one believed them until someone else said it,” Whitehead (The Underground Railroad) writes in the present-day prologue to this story, in which construction workers have dug up what appears to be a secret graveyard on the grounds of the juvenile reform school the Nickel Academy in Jackson County, Fla. Five decades prior, Elwood Curtis, a deeply principled, straight-A high school student from Tallahassee, Fla., who partakes in civil rights demonstrations against Jim Crow laws and was about to start taking classes at the local black college before being erroneously detained by police, has just arrived at Nickel. Elwood finds that, at odds with Nickel’s upstanding reputation in the community, the staff is callous and corrupt, and the boys—especially the black boys—suffer from near-constant physical, verbal, and sexual abuse. Elwood befriends the cynical Turner, whose adolescent experiences of violence have made him deeply skeptical of the objectivity of justice. Elwood and Turner’s struggles to survive and maintain their personhood are interspersed with chapters from Elwood’s adult life, showing how the physical and emotional toll of his time at Nickel still affects him. Inspired by horrific events that transpired at the real-life Dozier School for Boys, Whitehead’s brilliant examination of America’s history of violence is a stunning novel of impeccable language and startling insight. (July)

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Born with green skin and huge teeth, like a dragon, the free-spirited Elphaba grows up to be an anti-totalitarian agitator, an animal-rights activist, a nun, then a nurse who tends the dying--and, ultimately, the headstrong Wicked Witch of the West in the land of Oz. Maguire's strange and imaginative postmodernist fable uses L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a springboard to create a tense realm inhabited by humans, talking animals (a rhino librarian, a goat physician), Munchkinlanders, dwarves and various tribes. The Wizard of Oz, emperor of this dystopian dictatorship, promotes Industrial Modern architecture and restricts animals' right to freedom of travel; his holy book is an ancient manuscript of magic that was clairvoyantly located by Madam Blavatsky 40 years earlier. Much of the narrative concerns Elphaba's troubled youth (she is raised by a giddy alcoholic mother and a hermitlike minister father who transmits to her his habits of loathing and self-hatred) and with her student years. Dorothy appears only near novel's end, as her house crash-lands on Elphaba's sister, the Wicked Witch of the East, in an accident that sets Elphaba on the trail of the girl from Kansas--as well as the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman and the Lion--and her fabulous new shoes. Maguire combines puckish humor and bracing pessimism in this fantastical meditation on good and evil, God and free will, which should, despite being far removed in spirit from the Baum books, captivate devotees of fantasy. 50,000 first printing; $75,000 ad/promo; first serial to Word; author tour. (Oct.)

The Wild Robot

Brown’s middle-grade debut, an uplifting story about an unexpected visitor whose arrival disrupts the animal inhabitants of a rocky island, has a contemporary twist: the main character is a robot. A hurricane deposits Roz (short for ROZZUM unit 7134) on the island, where she is accidentally activated by a group of sea otters, who are terrified by the shiny monster awakening before their eyes. At first, Roz struggles to survive in an environment where she is treated as a frightening intruder, but after she adopts an abandoned gosling, she slowly becomes part of the island community, learning animal language and taking on motherhood and a leadership role. Brown (Mr. Tiger Goes Wild) convincingly builds a growing sense of cooperation among the animals and Roz as she blossoms in the wild. The allegory of otherness is clear but never heavy-handed, and Roz has just enough human attributes to make her sympathetic while retaining her robot characteristics. Brown wisely eschews a happy ending in favor of an open-ended one that supports the tone of a story that’s simultaneously unsentimental and saturated with feeling. Final art not seen by PW. Ages 8–12. Agent: Paul Rodeen, Rodeen Literary Management. (Apr.)