FICTION
‘Ruth’ by Kate Riley
Ruth, the impish narrator of Kate Riley’s debut novel, is born into a little and little-known Anabaptist sect in Michigan. Riley, drawing on her own experience, feels no rush to lay out the group’s beliefs; we come to feel the tight dimensions of this community just as Ruth does — with a mixture of innocence and incredulity. Riley finds plenty of comedy in the customs of these earnest folks, but it comes from a place of affection and frustration rather than derision. What really interests her is a bright child’s mind — Ruth’s questions, her wanderings and her disruptive sense of humor. Riley’s style, informed by decades of sermons, aphorisms and comic retorts, ensures the novel’s delightful buoyancy. (Book World review.)
‘The Slip’ by Lucas Schaefer
Schaefer’s sweaty, outrageous debut is about Nathaniel Rothstein, a troubled 16-year-old from a Boston suburb who is sent to Austin to spend the summer with an uncle. The uncle introduces him to David, a trainer at a local boxing gym. Nathaniel is fascinated by David, a charismatic Black man from Haiti who is everything the White teenager isn’t but suddenly wants to be: fit, confident, sexually experienced. Schaefer’s narration is wildly, transgressively hilarious, reminiscent of Philip Roth’s early novels. “The Slip” explores large themes about race in America and the human urge to slide into another identity. This is a high-wire act, but the breadth of Schaefer’s affection feels as wide as the depth of his comedy. (Book World review.)
‘Stone Yard Devotional’ by Charlotte Wood
The unnamed narrator of “Stone Yard Devotional,” a novel of great restraint and wisdom, is a woman of a certain age who’s joined a remote Catholic order — or, if not joined, at least moved in. Nobody there asks, but she confesses that she’s an atheist. Why she is in this abbey is a source of persistent mystery in this novel, which is built on the same rock of introspection that anchors Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series. There are petty disagreements but no real conflicts, no scandals, no affairs. And yet the quiet, intensely private voice feels more intimate than a library of confessional novels. This is a spiritual journey narrated by a woman who would scoff at such a phrase. (Book World review.)
‘The Wayfinder’ by Adam Johnson
“The Wayfinder” takes place almost 1,000 years ago in Polynesia, but its real setting is that realm beyond time and place where mortals contend with gods, and mythology and history merge like twinned tree trunks. In his first novel since he won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for “The Orphan Master’s Son,” Johnson boldly melds magic and psychological realism to cast a captivating spell. This long book is stuffed with wild adventure and unforgettable characters: villains worthy of Shakespeare, princes on the run, a teenage girl intent on saving her community, a king whose empire is about to fall. This astonishing novel, at once so primeval and so sophisticated, pulses with the same hopes and terrors that first pricked our imaginations around a fire as the sun set. (Book World review.)
‘The Wilderness’ by Angela Flournoy
Flournoy’s vivid second novel treats the subject of friendship with the dignity and fascination it deserves. Over more than two decades, the relationships among Desiree, Nakia, January and Monique withstand stressors of all kinds — geographical distance, philosophical difference, professional aspiration, postpartum distress — but there is no sentimental conclusion about the strength of their devotion. Some of the women are closer than others as they share love in all its contradictions and complexities, its steadfastness and its periods of imbalance. Each member of the quartet offers her own point of view, but Desiree emerges as the dominant voice. The novel moves among places, and its descriptions of Los Angeles in particular are incandescent — blending odes to its beauty with fears for its future. (Book World review.)
NONFICTION
‘The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780’ by Rick Atkinson
The second volume in Atkinson’s remarkably ambitious planned trilogy about the American Revolution infuses the events and leaders of the war with striking vibrancy, essentially bringing the conflict to life again. Atkinson writes with tremendous verve and detail. The book’s portraits of figures like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin are indispensable, and Atkinson humanizes those on the other side of the conflict as well — from King George to rowdy British parliamentarians to redcoat officers occupying South Carolina. His portrait of America’s arch-traitor, Benedict Arnold, is thorough and brilliant. Readers are subtly nudged into considering what might have been and what could still be. “Our cause is noble,” Washington is quoted as saying. “It is the cause of mankind, and the danger to it springs from ourselves.” (Book World review.)
‘A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children’ by Haley Cohen Gilliland
After a military coup in Argentina in 1976, the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla led the country through a years-long “National Reorganization Process,” systematically disappearing about 30,000 supposed “subversives.” Among them were more than 300 pregnant women. A brave and stalwart group known as the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo began protesting across from Videla’s presidential mansion for the return of their children and grandchildren. In 1979 and 1980, they located the first sets of stolen grandchildren, who had been kidnapped as toddlers and infants, left in public places, and adopted by unsuspecting families who were operating in good faith. In this deeply researched and cinematically told work of history, Gilliland uses the story of a single family to illuminate the broader devastation and the fight to hold those responsible accountable. (Book World review.)
‘Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife’ by Francesca Wade
Francesca Wade’s biography tells the story of the modernist American writer, her famed social life in Paris and the long path of her reputation. She was friends with Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso; regulars at the fabled salon at her Parisian home included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound. When she died at 72 in 1946, Stein was not yet comfortably canonized. It was emphatically not for her lack of trying. “I have been the creative literary mind of the century,” she once proclaimed. Many of her notoriously idiosyncratic texts languished unpublished; critics remained fiercely divided over the quality of her incantatory and repetitive writings. In the end, Stein had to entrust those who outlived her to secure her designation as the high priestess of literary modernism. (Book World review.)
‘Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land’ by Rachel Cockerell
In the early 20th century, Cockerell’s great-grandfather David Jochelman was part of the Galveston Plan, a globally coordinated effort to bring thousands of Eastern Europe’s increasingly desperate Jews to what might seem the unlikeliest of places: Southeast Texas. Ten thousand Russian Jews sailed to the port city of Galveston and settled there in waves from 1907 until 1914. The plan involved notable figures like Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of modern Zionism, and Israel Zangwill, a Jewish-English novelist known in his day as the Jewish Dickens. Cockerell began writing a conventional family history but eventually made it a purely archival project: The book is told entirely in excerpts taken from newspapers, diaries, books and letters, brilliantly arranged. The effect is electric, plunging readers into an intense, vivid, often contradictory set of observations, as if experiencing history as it unfolds. (Book World feature.)
‘Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy’ by Julia Ioffe
By 1920, Russia had made some of the most feminist advances of any country, including reproductive rights, no-fault divorces and free university education. Women routinely became doctors and engineers. In the riveting “Motherland,” Russian American journalist Ioffe blends history and family biography to tell the story of the 20th century in Russia by centering the stories of lesser-known but influential women, rather than famous (and infamous) men. These include Alexandra Kollontai, an ardent Bolshevik who was the first woman in the world to be appointed to a government cabinet. Ioffe examines tensions and contradictions to ask what happened to the radical ideal of the Soviet woman, the one she internalized from her own upbringing and the “extraordinary ordinary” women like those in her own family. (Book World feature.)
The post The 10 best books of 2025 appeared first on Washington Post.
