Kendra Winchester is a Contributing Editor for Book Riot where she writes about audiobooks and disability literature. She is also the Founder of Read Appalachia, which celebrates Appalachian literature and writing. Previously, Kendra co-founded and served as Executive Director for Reading Women, a podcast that gained an international following over its six-season run. In her off hours, you can find her writing on her Substack, Winchester Ave, and posting photos of her Corgis on Instagram and Twitter @kdwinchester.
This year’s nonfiction showed up in big ways, and in the case of some biographies and histories, quite literally. To help you curate your TBR, Book Riot has released our Best Books of the Year (So Far) list for 2025 and rounded some of the best true stories. Some of my favorite favorites (is that a thing? I guess now it is!) include a number of books on culture, essays, and memoirs.
All of these books blend a personal element in with their writing on bigger ideas. Without fail, each title includes well-thought out insights in stunning prose. So without further ado, here are a few titles must-read titles of 2025.
From Book Riot’s Best Books of 2025 So Far
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
There is no book more urgent than El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, and the gravity, intensity, and horror of the atrocities being hurled against Palestinians deserve an entire book written by someone with his breadth of journalistic and personal experience. This is the first text to articulate what it means to witness the mass slaughtering of innocents in Gaza and to feel complicit and powerless as it happens in a way that resonated with me and so many people. “One day, everyone will have always been against this” is an ominous phrase I’ve encountered again and again since El Akkad tweeted it and then published a book deepening that thought. It’s a phrase that, I fear, will echo across time. —S. Zainab Williams
Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry
In the “bright” blue bedroom of her grandmother’s yellow house, Perry fell in love with the color blue. The scholar and author of South to America approached this project—once called her “blue book”—by writing “toward the mystery of blue and its alchemy in the lives of Black folk.” Ruminating on Nina Simone’s music, Toni Morrison’s words, Lorna Simpson’s art, a hint of ceiling “like the sky in August,” water, ceramics, porches, and many more blues, these lyrical essays examine history, spirituality, adornment, movement, and race. Perry gorgeously narrates the audiobook, and this epigraph-rich work reverberates like a chorus of voices.—Connie Pan
True Story
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Sucker Punch by Scaachi Koul
Essayist and cultural critic Scaachi Koul knocks it out of the park with her new essay collection. Much of Sucker Punch follows Koul through her divorce, including all the ups and down of the relationship before and after its end. Koul presents readers with a complex portrait of her marriage, both the highs and the lows. Her prose is sharp, funny, and endearing all at once. She makes sincerity a supreme virtue, one we should aspire to with its blunt truths about the realities of messy relationships. Sucker Punch is a beautifully crafted collection that shines as one of the standout nonfiction titles of the year. —Kendra Winchester
My Best Nonfiction of 2025 So Far Picks
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year without Sex by Melissa Febos
As a huge Melissa Febos fan, I impatiently waited for The Dry Season, her memoir about her year of celibacy. After a horrific break up with her partner of two years, Febos felt adrift. She dated off and on for a while, but something wasn’t right. Febos realized that she had been in a relationship since she was a teenager. To better understand herself and learn how to be alone, Febos decides to spend three months celibate. But three months turned into six, and six turned into twelve. The Dry Season is her record of that time in her life, the impact it had on her, and how she learned to love herself outside of her relationships with other people.
What My Father and I Don’t Talk About: Sixteen Writers Break the Silence edited by Michele Filgate
Years ago, I read and adored Michele Filgate’s previous anthology What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About. Filgate gathered a stellar group of writers, each sharing intimate essays about their multifaceted relationships with their mothers. Now she’s back with another group of writers, but this time, they’re writing about their fathers. Every essay paints a complex portrait of the author’s dad. From involved dads to neglectful, the fathers in this collection land across the spectrum of fatherhood. But each essay presents a complex portrait of the men in their lives who impacted them in so many different ways. This book contains no true heroes or villains. What My Father and I Don’t Talk About presents fatherhood as the messy relationship it truly is.
English (US) · 