Featuring Miriam Toews, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Yiyun Li, and More

It’s time to crown some nonfiction.

We, the dogged review sleuths at Book Marks, have spent the past 12 months ferreting out raves, pans, and everything in between from more than 150 publications. Yes, every outlet from the New York Times to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Scotsman to the Los Angeles Review of Books was combed through. Every damn book review under the sun was considered.

At the end of it all, we ran the numbers, checked ’em twice, and can now report, with near-certitude, that these are the best reviewed nonfiction titles of 2025.

Happy holidays and happy reading!

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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1. A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury)

12 Rave • 1 Positive Read an excerpt from A Truth That Is Not Peace here

“A layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated her work for nearly 30 years, providing haunting insights on how to live after tragic loss … Without the constraints of the novel—namely the need to advance a plot—Toews lets her mind loose on the page … Discursive … The reader bobs along in the author’s stream of consciousness, riding crests of despair, anger, and hilarity as Toews assembles the shards of her past to investigate her will to write, which is deeply entwined with her will to live.”

–Kristen Martin (The Atlantic)

2. Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)

16 Rave • 2 Positive

“Intensely intimate and candid … Brooks frames her book in two separate narratives; each amplifies the potency of the other … Brooks captures the striking coincidences that marked his death with a poignancy tempered by her keen ability as a storyteller … Unlike others, this memoir, delicately written but without any precious patter, frames itself as a book of days. Overwrought metaphors aside, grief is less of an ocean and more of a series of days … A book that is meant to be read slowly.”

–Lauren LeBlanc (The Los Angeles Times)

3. A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst (Riverhead)

12 Rave • 3 Positive

“When Elmhirst comes close to breaking the fourth wall, that contribute to the pleasure of this exciting book. You know as a reader that you are in very capable hands … A fascinating narrative … She doles out the adventures, such as they were, and tells them vividly … So much more than a shipwreck tale. It’s a story of love and strength, a portrait of a marriage that—for all its oddities—is a true partnership.”

–Laurie Hertzel (The Boston Globe)

4. Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt (W. W. Norton & Company)

12 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed

“The book teems with the erudition and wonder that permeates Greenblatt’s Will in the World and The Swerve … Less a straightforward biography, more an evocation of Marlowe’s milieu, swimming in lush detail, immersing us in England’s social ferment at a hinge moment.”

–Hamilton Cain (The Boston Globe)

5. The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-Of-The-Century America by David Baron (Liveright)

12 Rave • 5 Positive

“[A] romp … Baron skillfully builds tension around the house of cards Lowell creates. How and when everything will come tumbling down is a powerful narrative driver … Baron meticulously pieces all of this together … Prepare to be dazzled.”

–Maren Longbella (The Star Tribune)

6. Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

14 Rave • 6 Positive

“Li’s style, honed over decades, has never been more distilled. Appropriately for a book that purports to stenograph only her thoughts, she writes in a simple, pared-back language … Elicits many difficult feelings. I had to put it down at several places before I found myself able to return to it. Yet Li’s brutal lucidity—her refusal to burnish her thoughts and sentiments to a high sheen—is its own form of ethical commitment.”

–Rhoda Feng (The Boston Globe)

7. Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

13 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an interview with Nicholas Boggs here

“Sensational … Boggs handles all of this with a commanding, sure-footed authority and comprehensiveness, subtle and solemn at once, that dazzles and awes. The churn and swirl of Baldwin’s life is rendered emotionally rational as Boggs expertly details how Baldwin’s personal life pervades his work.”

–Charles M. Blow (The New York Times Book Review)

**8. Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday) **

14 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed

“[A] tour-de-force … Might as well be one of Atwood’s novels (with the addition of photos and illustrations). It’s a remarkable read. She makes space for everyone. Her engaging voice is populated by a large cast of beguiling characters, settings are enriched with vivid details, all of it grounded by a compelling story line.”

–Robert Allen Papinchak (The Los Angeles Times)

9. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (W. W. Norton & Company)

17 Rave • 5 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an essay by Robert Macfarlane here

“Perhaps the most moving and beautiful part of his book comes in the interludes between visits to faraway rivers in which Macfarlane tells the history of a small spring near his home … If we’re lucky, we do not have to go far to find a stream or river to sit by. The revelations in this passionate book will make that quiet, common experience even more life-giving.”

–Pamela Miller (The Star Tribune)

10. Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux (W. W. Norton & Company)

10 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Drawing as it does on both of these discoveries, Sue Prideaux’s new biography has real bite … The author does a superb job of re-examining the ways in which Gauguin ‘smashed the established Western canon’ … Gauguin’s artistic and sexual primitivism was, as Prideaux’s edgy and engrossing book shows, always both radical and deeply traditional.”

–Elizabeth Lowry (Times Literary Supplement)

**Our System: **

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points The fifteen books with the highest points totals are ranked by weighted average, and the top ten make the list