🏆 The National Book Awards were announced last night in a ceremony hosted by Jeff Hiller, who brought his characteristic warmth, humor, and humility to the proceedings.

The celebration kicked off with a musical performance by Corinne Bailey Rae, followed by recognition of two titans of American literary culture. Roxane Gay received the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, and George Saunders was honored with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

The award for fiction went to The True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine, a family saga set in Lebanon after the civil war.

Omar El Akkad received the nonfiction award for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which our own Sharifah Williams describes as, “a time capsule recording the visceral horror many of us in the U.S. and Western world at large felt as we bore witness to and were complicit in genocide.”

• The award for poetry went to Patricia Smith for The Intentions of Thunder.
• Gabriela Cabezón Cámara won the prize for translated literature for We Are Green and Trembling, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers.
• Daniel Nayeri’s The Teacher of Nomad Land took top honors for young people’s literature.

And that’s a wrap on the big book awards of 2025, at least until the Pulitzers hit in May!

See all of the 2025 National Book Award nominees, and watch the ceremony to enjoy Hiller’s monologue and the winners’ moving speeches.

Book Riot’s Best Books of 2025 list is finally out in the world, and it is precisely what you might expect if you’ve been rocking with us for a while. It’s a beast at 65 titles with no “and here’s our top ten” standouts and really runs the literary gamut. You’ll find a sci-fi romance about a grad student abducted by aliens loosely inspired by The Wizard of Oz right alongside the long-awaited returns of Angela Flournoy and Kiran Desai. We do, in fact, contain multitudes. 

The process of putting the list together has evolved over the years. It was once comprised mostly of picks from our contributors, who were asked to nominate one title each and were more or less guaranteed to see their title included. Today, the list is more expansive and editorialized, with multiple submissions from our writers and more input from our editorial staff. I have the impossible task of putting the finishing touches on the thing, spending way too much time considering every last title and apologizing to the ones that don’t make the cut. This is very much a vibes-based assessment, informed as much by each book’s cultural impact as how it made us feel. 

So that’s how we end up with a list of 65 titles, whittled down from a list that started out twice as long. It is a big, beautiful representation of everything I love about Book Riot. We champion the buzzy lit fic titles and the deeply moving memoirs. We’re also evangelists for the weirdest genre published this year. We read widely, diversely, and very, very queerly. I wouldn’t have it any other way. -VD

🎧 Audiobook lovers, this club’s for you. On every episode of Earsay: The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club , hosts Ed Helms and Kal Penn invite you into the club, where iHeartPodcast hosts, celebrated authors, and very special guests get together to nerd out about the Audible titles they can’t stop listening to. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts!

Here are some recently announced books you can put in the sub-section of your TBR titled: “I might forget about these when they come out in 1-5 years, but at least I can remember that I was once excited about them.” You have that too, don’t you?

💡 A Beacon for These Days by Imani Perry focuses on how Sterling Brown mentored multiple generations of writers at Howard University, from Zora Neale Hurston to James Baldwin. Expected publication in 2027.

🧴 The Shampoo Effect is Jenny Jackson’s follow-up to her best-selling debut, Pineapple Street , and set in a seaside town where money, love, and friendship get complicated. You can plan on adding it to your beach bag in June 2026. 

🖼️ Ron Chernow’s next book, which is a biography of the painter James Whistler. It is not yet titled, but the bookmakers have the odds of it being called Whistler at a very attractive 2-1. (No they do not. You cannot bet on this.)

🐦‍⬛ Leigh Bardugo adds to Six of Crows canon with Six of Crows: A Darker Shore. Set in Bardugo’s Grishaverse, this illustrated short story allows readers to “follow along with the lead investigator as he tries to piece together how such a disaster transpired, and explore the Grishaverse like never before with new illustrations by E.K. Belsher and in-world collectible items.” You could give me 50 guesses, and I bet I still would not come close to whatever “in-world collectible items” means. 

🚂 I get excited anytime I see a New Yorker contributor in a description . Add in a really-specific framing of a family memoir and you have my monthly audio credit. I would expect to be listening to Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway, Journeys, Exile, and Survival by Jianying Zha sometime in 2027. - JO

If you are on the internet, you know that Wicked: For Good is coming out tomorrow in theaters. Pre-sales are reportedly double what part one was doing. This caps a long, 30-year journey of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West from being a (mostly) warmly reviewed novel to global, multimedia juggernaut. 

There is really no predicting what is going to sell, resonate, and endure. But sometimes an idea does seem like it has a better chance than most to be something. Both Gregory Maguire and Stephen Schwartz (who wrote the music and lyrics for the musical Wicked) had a similar reaction to the premise.

In Maguire’s case, it was a reaction to his own idea. In thinking about The Wizard of Oz, Maguire was interested in early interactions between Glinda and The Wicked Witch and how it was clear that they had history : “I thought to myself, ‘They know each other. They’ve crossed paths before. They went to school together!’” Creating this scenario in his head provoked Maguire to laugh out loud. “I thought that was so funny. Because it was such a good idea.“

Schwarz had a similar response in hearing a friend talk about the book while on vacation: “The last day we went on a snorkeling trip because we were in Hawaii, and on the boat on the way back to the mainland after our little snorkel adventure, one of the people that I was with just making idle conversation said, I’m reading this really interesting book called Wicked and it’s by this guy named Gregory Maguire. It’s the Oz story from the Wicked Witch’s point of view. As soon as I heard this, I had one of those light bulb moments where something just said this is a really great idea.”

Good calls there, fellas. - JO

Get Otterbox’s legendary protection for less. For a limited time, take 40% off the entire inventory of cases, screen protectors, and accessories. Hurry, sale ends on December 2nd!

You’re invited to join one of the world’s biggest book clubs.

For more than a decade, millions of readers have participated in OverDrive’s global reading initiative, Big Library Read, which connects book lovers around the world to read the same book at the same time. The program has just had a glow-up and is now known as Libby Reads.

Now through December 2, you can borrow the inaugural selection, The Village Beyond the Mist by Sachiko Kashiwaba, in ebook and audiobook formats through your local public library in the Libby app or through participating Sora school libraries, with no waitlists or holds. A true book nerd’s dream!

Join the conversation through a virtual discussion board, download a reading guide, and find more resources here.

Adam Cohen is the author of Captain’s Dinner: A Shipwreck, an Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History, out now from Authors Equity.

While writing my new book, I was invited to a dinner where guests were seated at two tables. When it ended, a man at the other table came over to say, “I just want you to know, all we talked about all night at our table was your book.”

Nothing like that ever happened with my previous books. As I have learned, people really want to talk about cannibalism.

Captain’s Dinner tells the story of the shipwreck of the Mignonette, which set out from England for Australia in 1884. It includes the captain’s grim decision to stave off starvation by killing the cabin boy and turning him into a meal. But there’s more to it than cannibalism. The prosecution of the captain changed the law of murder in England and America and made an important contribution to the philosophical debate between utilitarians (who think it’s right to kill one person to save three), and believers in rights-based theories of justice (who believe murder is always wrong).

Still, people seem most interested in the cannibalism. They want to know how the cabin boy was eaten (starting with his still-warm heart and liver). And what it tasted like (delicious, the eaters said). And they joke about it. A farewell to arms. The other white meat.

So, why all the interest in the cannibalism? We may be hardwired for it. Cannibalism is deeply embedded in Western civilization. It’s a staple of fairy tales. In Hansel and Gretel, the witch built the gingerbread house to lure children to eat. It’s a mainstay of Greek mythology. It’s in the Bible.

But these seem to be especially cannibalism-inclined times — think Yellowjackets , and those Jeffrey Dahmer Netflix series. Scholars suggest this reflects dark currents running through society. When we’re anxious, we’re drawn to stories of monsters, especially ones in which the monsters are vanquished. The Mignonette cannibals were brought to justice — the first time England convicted sailors for cannibalism at sea — a reassuring message for these troubled times.

The early bird gets the cup of Joe! Jumpstart your holiday shopping with Peet’s Coffee’s early Black Friday sale and get 15% off everything sitewide for a limited time with code BF2025. Snag a gift set of classic Peet’s flavors perfect for every coffee lover on your list.

🎁 Wrap up the diamond hoops Wirecutter calls one of the best gifts of the season.**

😍 Drool over Louise Penny’s book collection.

🎧 Listen to bookseller-recommended audiobooks by Indigenous authors.

🍿 Go deep with Hamnet director Chloé Zhao.

🤖 See the books that were disqualified from a competition because of their AI-generated covers.

_{**This is a product recommendation from the Book Riot team. When you buy through these links, we may earn a commission.}

Written by Rebecca Schinsky, Jeff O’Neal, and Vanessa Diaz. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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