Notable Nonfiction Books of Early 2025

In recent weeks, having talked to Kate Summerscale about nonfiction books that read like thrillers, and to former MI-6 operative Charles Beaumont about spy thrillers based on real events, I’ve found the difference between fiction and nonfiction blurring in my mind. What is it that I value in a traditional nonfiction book that page-turners can’t deliver? I suppose, at the end of the day, for me, it’s about the argument. Fiction may leave me with impressions of truth, nonfiction is more concrete in its delivery and marshalling of evidence. With some books, years afterwards, I can still be thinking either about why they’re useful in approaching problems in the world or about why they’re wrong and I completely disagree with the author.

In terms of thought-provoking arguments, the book that has most struck me recently is The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism by Yanni Kotsonis, a historian at NYU. I am the product of a British boarding school education, and I studied ancient Greek at school, and read about Socrates. I’ve visited the Acropolis, Mt. Olympus, Delphi, even the roadside rock that commemorates Thermopylae. I may not be Lord Byron, but I’m certainly in the tradition of the Philhellenes, believing that there is some Greekness out there from ancient times that I can see when I visit Greece today. In this book, Kotsonis argues that this is a complete fabrication. Today’s Greece was forged in the early 19th century. He writes, “Loose references to Greece as a place around 1800 located it in any number of places…Language does not narrow the field.” The book is provocative, not only in what it argues about Greece, but what that means for nationalism generally—in particular states forged around the wholesale expulsion of an ethnic or religious group. It’s a very sad story with, as the title of the book suggests, horrible levels of violence.

Other history books out since January draw attention to aspects of history that get left out of mainstream narratives. In The Last Peasant War, Jakub Beneš, a historian at UCL, focuses on the peasant revolution that swept across eastern Europe from 1917 to 1921. These rural uprisings stretched from the Alps to the Urals, changing the course of the Russian revolution and contributing to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. A big part of the story is deserters from the army who had learned how to fight in World War I and took to the woods to fight. This a serious academic work about that fills a big gap, certainly in my knowledge of what happened between World War I and II.

It may be an upsetting subject, but a timeless one: Abortion: A History by Mary Fissell, a professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, was published this month. She starts in ancient Greece and takes it up to Roe v. Wade, telling stories of women and the potions and procedures they turned to, as well as societal attitudes to abortion. The book is a reminder that women have always had abortions, regardless of national laws and the danger to their health.

In The Far Edges of the Known World, ancient historian Owen Rees (the founder and lead editor of badancient.com) makes the case for broadening our study of ancient history further back in time and beyond Athens and Rome. He picks 13 sites—including Lake Turkana in Kenya to Co Loa in Vietnam—to whet our appetite.

Also in ancient history, there is a new biography of Cicero told by way of his legal cases: Lawless Republic by Josiah Osgood, who teaches Classics at Georgetown University. The combination of murder trials and brilliant oratory by Cicero, with rebellions and the fall of the Roman Republic as the backdrop, makes for a good read.

In biography, there’s yet another new book about Maria Theresa, the formidable Habsburg empress. For anyone wanting to celebrate female leadership in past centuries, she’s one of the most interesting exemplars. Richard Bassett’s biography is very pro-Maria Theresa (the subtitle is ‘the making of the Austrian Enlightenment’) and you find yourself rooting for her against Frederick the Great and other men of the time, including, at times, her own advisers. This is a period of history I don’t know much about but the book is highly readable, particularly as it gets going (although I did find myself having to google a few German phrases).

Also new in biography is The Brothers Grimm by Ann Schmiesing, about the two brothers who brought us fairy tales. She does a wonderful job of taking you there, to late 18th century and early 19th century Hesse-Kassel, part of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Golden Throne, the second book in a trilogy about the life of Sultan Suleyman by Christopher Bellaigue is out in the UK (the first was The Lion House). The story is told in the present tense so you feel you’re right there in the brutal 16th century.

For those more worried about 21st-century geopolitics, and want to know more about a place where Putin might try his luck against NATO, there’s Baltic: The Future of Europe by British journalist Oliver Moody. A good introduction to and review of the book by Owen Matthews can be found in the Literary Review.

If personal rather than strategic strength is your focus, there’s Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives by journalist Michael Joseph Gross, which argues that we need to revise our attitude to the tissue that makes up 30-40% of our bodies. He writes, “Think how the world could look different if every time you heard someone say muscle the first person you thought of was not some big guy who had taken steriods, but your grandmother. Making that shift is one of the best things you can do for yourself and the people you love.”

Most notable in business books, The House of Huawei by Eva Dou tells the story of the Chinese telecoms giant and its founder Ren Zhengfei. Dou describes Huawei’s emergence on the world telecoms stage as a Sputnik moment for the US. There has been much debate about whether Huawei is controlled by the government or an independent, private company (hard in China)—the book is even-handed on this. What I particularly liked about it was the long sweep of Chinese history told through the life of an extraordinary entrepreneur.

In a technical but important book, The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters, economist Diane Coyle, who previously wrote about GDP, argues that we as the economy has changed, we need to be able to measure what matters to us.  As she writes, “These big questions—are things getting better? For whom? What does ‘better’ mean?—motivate this book. It reflects over a decade’s worth of research on questions of economic statistics and measurement, particularly on the digital economy.”