10. 'The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders' by Sarah Aziza
Sarah Aziza's "The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders" is a daring, genre-bending memoir that expands what nonfiction can do. At its surface, the book recounts Aziza's near-fatal struggle with anorexia in 2019 and her efforts to recover. However, the narrative then blossoms into something far more expansive. Interweaving her personal body story with the multigenerational history of her Palestinian family, Aziza traces displacement from Gaza to the Midwest and New York City, revealing how trauma, memory, and identity are inseparable.
What makes "The Hollow Half" remarkable is its formal invention. Aziza refuses a conventional linear narrative. Instead, she moves fluidly between first-person confession, ancestral history, and archival fragments, blending memoir with dream-like elements and lyrical invention. Her narrative, a deep meditation on how bodies carry histories they never chose, creates a tapestry where the personal and the political, the corporeal and the historical, pulse together.
The result is a memoir that feels alive, urgent, and boundary-defying -- poignant, poetic, and unafraid to challenge genre expectations while illuminating the intertwined stories of self, family, and homeland. -- Erlisa Demneri
Aspiring novelist Sonia, who recently graduated from a liberal arts college in Vermont, crosses paths with Sunny, a journalist working in NYC, on an overnight train in India. The two are immediately interested in each other but embarrassed as well, as their grandmothers once attempted to arrange a marriage between them. Referred to by Publishers Weekly as "a kind of Romeo and Juliet story for a modern, globalized age," Desai's 2025 novel is a fascinating tribute to the power of love in an increasingly isolated epoch of human history. Linking romance to class, race, history, generational conflict, and national identity, Desai has produced a literary masterpiece that has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and dominated "Best Book of the Year Lists" in publications from The New Yorker and The Washington Post to Oprah Daily. -- Laura B. Martens
8. 'We Do Not Part' by Han Kang
Han Kang's "We Do Not Part" is an elegant meditation on memory, friendship, and the long shadows cast by history. Translated from Korean, at its heart is Kyungha, a writer tormented by nightmares born of her previous work on state violence, who answers a call from her friend Inseon, a former documentarian turned carpenter, to travel with her through a snow-swept Jeju Island in winter and tend to a beloved bird. What begins as a simple, almost fable-like journey becomes a layered exploration of the Jeju Massacre and the personal and collective traumas buried beneath the silence.
Winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, Han Kang balances the historical portion of the story with prose that is at once lyrical and spare. Her poetic language evokes snowy landscapes and fractured memories with crystalline precision, folding past into present. The narrative slips between timelines, dreams, and memory fragments, mirroring the elusiveness of truth and the difficulty of mourning.
A novel that lingers long after the last page, in "We Do Not Part" Han transforms historical reckoning into a profoundly intimate experience, illuminating the cost of remembrance and the fragile bonds that endure through violence and loss. -- Erlisa Demneri
Megha Majumdar's "A Guardian and a Thief" is a gripping, near-future fable of climate catastrophe and moral erosion, set in a collapsing Kolkata where scarcity forces impossible choices. The novel follows two entwined lives: Ma, desperate to secure "climate visas" for her family before fleeing to the United States, and Boomba, a young migrant from a flooded rural village whose hope curdles into survivalist cunning. When a stolen purse containing all of Ma's immigration documents binds their fates, Majumdar crafts a taut, compassionate portrait of ordinary people pushed beyond their limits of dignity by systems far larger than themselves.
What elevates the novel is Majumdar's insistence that even in apocalyptic conditions, the smallest human details matter most. Children, especially the radiant Mishti, Ma's two-year-old daughter, and Robi, Boomba's toddler brother, are rendered with uncommon vividness, and their presence illuminates the fierce, contradictory loves that drive the story. Majumdar avoids sentimentality by grounding every emotional beat in rich, tactile observation.
Shortlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for fiction, "A Guardian and a Thief" is a reminder that the best dystopian fiction doesn't estrange us from our world. Rather, it sharpens our perception of its present crises. -- Erlisa Demneri
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Dream Count," the acclaimed Nigerian author's first novel in 12 years, follows four Nigerian-American immigrant women and beautifully illuminates the process of confronting the unknown: whether it be in the form of the pandemic, a foreign culture, a new career challenge, or life after the end of a relationship. Chiamaka, a travel writer, grapples with the uncertain as she travels to foreign countries, while Zikora, Omelogor, and Kadiatou, the three other protagonists, each struggle to outrun strife in their pasts and navigate a world that looks starkly different from the one in which they grew up. The book is refreshing in its refusal to observe typical literary tropes, in which the young woman must bravely conquer all of the challenges she faces -- Adichie's characters often shrink in the face of adversity or novelty, before gathering themselves and confronting it once again, with varying degrees of success. Her novel simply seeks to do justice to the challenges African immigrant women face, rather than burden them with acting a certain way in the face of it. -- Alexandra M. Kluzak
We reviewed "Dream Count" and gave it 5 stars.
5. 'One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This' by Omar El Akkad
Winner of the 2025 National Book Award for nonfiction, Omar El Akkad's "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This" is a visceral, urgent work of nonfiction that harnesses the full power of journalism to confront some of the most difficult truths of our era. At its core, the book responds to the ongoing war in Gaza, addressing it as a moral rupture that exposes the contradictions of Western liberalism and the limits of mediated empathy.
Drawing on his experiences as a global journalist and novelist, El Akkad stitches together essays that blend reportage, personal history, and ethical critique to ask: What happens when the very societies that claim to stand for justice look away from suffering they could acknowledge or oppose? Born in Egypt, raised in Qatar and Canada, and seasoned by decades of reporting from hotspots such as Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, El Akkad explores the collisions between lived reality and the stories we tell ourselves about freedom and power.
In documenting the horrors in Gaza and the dissonance between Western rhetoric and action, El Akkad shows how journalism can pierce through sanitized narratives, forcing readers to reexamine their own assumptions, and act with conscience and care. -- Erlisa Demneri
4. 'Bread of Angels' by Patti Smith
Listed as a Best Book of the Year by Time, NPR, and The New Yorker, "Bread of Angels" is a post-World War II memoir of Patti Smith, an influential member of New York City's punk rock movement, most famous for her 1978 song "Because the Night." The memoir begins during Smith's imaginative childhood in a condemned housing complex, where she communes with the king of tortoises and searches for sacred silver pennies. "Bread of Angels" then enters Smith's turbulent teenage years with empathy and warmth, giving readers insight into the lyrical genius that led to iconic studio albums "Horses," "Wave," and "Easter." Smith's latest memoir balances an honest depiction of a hardscrabble childhood with the magic of art and romance. -- Laura B. Martens
3. 'The Dream Hotel' by Laila Lalami
Pulitzer Prize Finalist Laila Lalami's fifth novel brings the surveillance state to speculative fiction. At the beginning of the novel, Moroccan-American Sara Hussein is taken to a women's retention center after her risk score is too high when she goes through customs at LAX. The character-driven near-future dystopia revolves around a government agency that uses dream data to find people with a high likelihood of committing a crime. As Hussein navigates wildfires, marital dynamics, and algorithmic bias, Lalami explores the ethics behind surveillance, criminal justice, and data privacy, raising important questions about the technologies that are becoming increasingly embedded in our daily lives. -- Hannah M. Wilkoff
Translated from Italian, Vincenzo Latronico's "Perfection" is a razor-sharp miniature of contemporary expat life. The novel follows Anna and Tom, two creatively employed wanderers who trade their "peripheral" southern European city for Berlin at its peak as Europe's cultural capital. Through their meticulously curated apartment, their endlessly rotating international friend group, and their online-mediated worldview, the novel sketches a class of rootless digital nomads who mistake lifestyle for identity, and cosmopolitanism for politics.
Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, what makes "Perfection" one of the year's most compelling novels is not only its sociological precision, but the way Latronico confronts the contemporary novelist's dilemma. How does one write meaningfully about a present so aestheticized and globally flattened that experience itself feels generic? His solution is a careful narration that mirrors the characters' own provisional lives, always scrolling and always shifting.
Latronico reveals both the charm and the hollowness of this world, capturing a generation suspended between aspiration and inactivity. "Perfection" stands out as an essential novel of now -- elegant, unsettling, and quietly devastating in its recognition of how hard it has become to tell a truly contemporary story. -- Erlisa Demneri
1. 'Audition' by Katie Kitamura
In New York City, a middle-aged actress meets a young man for lunch. What follows is a perplexing yet psychologically lucid exploration of the roles we play, on and off the stage. American author Katie Kitamura's Booker Prize-shortlisted "Audition" is elegantly constructed of two contradictory parts (to say more would be to deprive readers of the jarringly unexplained transition). The novel seems to integrate the mindset of a deeply committed performance, layering fictional upon real identity, into its very text. This duality does not intend to form some clever mystery or unreliable narrative to unravel, but to force readers, plainly, to sit with a paradox all the way through.
Kitamura provides an inventive and fluid challenge to the line between fiction and reality. In a landscape full of contemporary writers contending with writing itself as a sort of metafictional metaphor, she chooses something as refreshing as it is sharp in performance. The realm of "Audition" is one in which an actor's ability to mentally maintain conflicting self-histories becomes a possibility for any parent, spouse, or child. At the same time, the narrator's nuanced reads on the people around her pierce through the story's overarching ambiguity, often to destabilizing -- or even devastating -- effect. -- Isabelle A. Lu