Books of the Year 2025

Some of the books we chose this year touched familiarly big themes: the place of the United States in the Americas; the weakness of democracy in the U.S. and what it would take to shore it up. And some are close-up, intimate studies of the subtlest changes in the relationships between just three people, as in Katie Kitamura’s Audition. What they all share is intellectual ambition and precision. These are books that contemplate motherhood in the digital age and motherhood amid grief, the machinations of private equity and the strange deterioration of the internet, the legacy of the 2000s and the future of democracy. Our critics didn’t always agree with the arguments of some of books below but found all of them worth arguing, and thinking, with.