To close out the year, we’re highlighting the books we published in 2025 that received starred reviews for your gift-giving needs or for building next year’s reading list!
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Confidential: A Novel
By Mikołaj Grynberg, translated by Sean Gasper Bye
Building upon one of the stories from his acclaimed story collection, I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To, Mikołaj Grynberg’s Confidential is a portrait of three generations of a Jewish family that tackles themes of memory, the trauma of WWII, as well as enduring anti-Semitism. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said, “This powerful novel is not to be missed.” Read an excerpt here.
King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South
By Jeanne Theoharis
King of the North radically reframes the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. is “a powerful must-read that sheds new light on King and the Civil Rights Movement” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). This myth-shattering book, “makes a persuasive case that Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign for racial justice has been significantly misrepresented, with his ‘lifelong challenge to Northern inequality… largely hidden in plain sight’” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Read an excerpt in Ms. Magazine.
Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
By Alec Karakatsanis
In this groundbreaking exposé, civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis introduces the concept of “copaganda,” traces its origins, and documents how modern news coverage can fuel insecurity and shift our focus away from policies that would help us improve people’s lives (like affordable housing, adequate healthcare, early childhood education, and climate-friendly city planning). “Karakatsanis’s close readings of news articles from major outlets show that journalists habitually regurgitate pro-police narratives—many of which revolve around how more funding for law enforcement is needed to bring down crime rates—and omit the perspectives of non-police experts and studies showing that law enforcement has no correlation with crime rates” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Read an excerpt in Teen Vogue.
Surviving Our Catastrophes: Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the COVID-19 Pandemic
By Robert Jay Lifton
Psychiatrist and National Book Award-winning author Robert Jay Lifton spent his career studying trauma in seminal works about the survivors of Hiroshima, Nazi death camps, climate change, and more. A “wise, chilling, enlightening, and compassionate book” (Booklist, starred review), Surviving Our Catastrophes offers a powerful and timely rumination that “cuts through the existential fog to reveal something like hope” (The Washington Post). This new paperback edition, which includes a new epilogue by the late author, shares compelling examples of “survivor power” and makes clear that we will not move forward by forcing the pandemic into the rearview mirror. Instead, we must truly reckon with COVID-19’s effects on ourselves and society—and find individual and collective forms of renewal. Read an excerpt here.
Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back
By Miranda S. Spivack
Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize, this “enraging exposé of a nationwide culture of corruption” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), provides a groundbreaking look at how ordinary people are fighting back against their local and state governments to keep their communities safe—from car crashes and dirty drinking water, to failing safety gear. Based on years of original reporting, Backroom Deals in Our Backyards tells the story of five “accidental activists”—people from across the United States who started questioning why their local and state governments didn’t protect them from issues facing their communities and why there was a frightening lack of transparency surrounding the way these issues were resolved. The secret deals, lies, and corruption they uncover shake their faith in government but move them to action.
The Great White Hoax: Two Centuries of Selling Racism in America
By Philip Kadish
This “thoughtful and timely” (Library Journal, starred review) book uncovers a centuries-long tradition of white supremacist hoaxes, perpetrated on the American public by a succession of political hucksters and opportunists, all of them willfully using racial frauds as tools for political and social advantage, drawing a direct thread to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Henry Ford’s adaptation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Madison Grant’s embrace of eugenics (which directly influenced Adolf Hitler), Alabama Governor George Wallace’s race-baiting, and Roger Ailes’s creation of Fox News. “Meticulous and captivating” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), The Great White Hoax reveals white supremacy as today’s real “fake news”—and exposes the cast of villains, past and present, who have kept American racism alive. “Kadish presents the unsparing and convincing argument that if we continue to ignore these facts, America cannot become the country it has claimed to be” (BookPage, starred review). Read an excerpt on the History News Network.
Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance
By Bronwen Everill
“In this eye-opening account, historian Everill outlines the biases, projections, misunderstandings, and irrationalities underlying Western economic intervention in Africa since the 18th century” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Everill argues that these interventions fail, and frequently cause harm, because they start from a misguided premise: that African economies just need to be more like the West. Ignoring Africa’s own traditions of economic thought, Americans and Europeans assumed a set of universal economic laws that they thought could be applied anywhere. By laying bare the myths and realities of our tangled economic history, Africonomics moves from Western ignorance to African knowledge.
Dealing with the Dead: A Novel
By Alain Mabanckou, translated by Helen Stevenson
Recognized by NPR’s Books We Love 2025, this new novel by International Booker Prize finalist Alain Mabanckou is “surrealistic and unnerving” (Foreword Reviews, starred review) and “an exhilarating tale examining the intersection of our world and the next” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). One day in the Congolese town of Pointe-Noire, Liwa Ekimakingaï wakes to find himself in a cemetery where, three days earlier, he had been buried at the age of twenty-two. Bewildered by his predicament and unwilling to relinquish his tender bond with his devoted grandmother, Liwa makes his way back home to see her one last time. With biting political satire and gallows humor, Dealing with the Dead reckons with Congolese history. Read an excerpt here.
And the Dragons Do Come: Raising a Transgender Kid in Rural America
By Sim Butler
“Informative and accessible, honest and rueful” (Booklist, starred review), Sim Butler’s memoir offers a gripping account of one family’s battle to protect their daughter against transphobia and hate. In recent years, the Butler family faced an impossible reality in their home state of Alabama, where trans rights are increasingly under attack. Butler recounts their family’s struggles and sacrifices to protect their trans child against the barrage of state-sanctioned intolerance in the legal, educational, and health arenas. Serving both as a compassionate story of one family’s struggle for acceptance and as a window onto a fraught issue that parents, family, and friends are confronting across the nation, And the Dragons Do Come provides a firsthand perspective on the human cost of anti-trans sentiment.
