🏆 Joint winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History
🏆 Winner of the 2024 Cundill History Prize
In this sweeping, thousand-year history, Kathleen DuVal—a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill—offers an overview of the shifting dynamics among more than 500 native peoples before and after the arrival of European colonists. The Wall Street Journal described it as "an essential American history."
Read expert recommendations
🏆 Joint winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History
The extraordinary story of the Combahee River Raid, a Civil War-era mission behind Confederate lines led by the freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, during which two regiments of Black US Army soldiers torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 slaves. Written by a descendant of one of the participants and drawing from previously unexamined documents, this account offers remarkable insight into the only female-led military operation in the American Civil War.
Read expert recommendations
🏆 Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Every Living Thing by Jason Roberts is a dual biography of the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and Georges-Louis de Buffon (1707-1788), a French aristocrat and author of a 36-volume Natural History, as they sought to categorize the natural world. Although better known today, Linnaeus does not come out of the book looking good, and it was Buffon's ideas that led more directly to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection just under a century later.
Read expert recommendations
🏆 Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause by Benjamin Nathans is the story of the Soviet citizens who took on the system from within, using the country's own laws and constitution to fight for a better future, from the 1950s onwards.
Read expert recommendations
🏆 Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls is the story of three generations of Chinese women. Like Wild Swans (1991), the personal story and China's tumultuous 20th-century history intertwine with a focus on the trauma that is passed through the generations from Sun Yi, the author's grandmother, to her mother Rose, and to her.
Read expert recommendations
Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]
Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount .