The Best Books of 2025

Every year, the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards highlight the very best of recently published place writing, and select their 'travel book of the year.' We asked judge Tom Parfitt, the author and former foreign correspondent, to talk us through the six travel books that made the 2025 shortlist.

We always look forward to the shortlists for the National Book Critics Awards, on the basis that literary critics are probably the best read people out there. Here, we asked the garlanded critic Mary Ann Gwinn to talk us through the five biographies highlighted in 2025.

The last year has been one of the best for autobiography and memoir in recent memory, says May-lee Chai, chair of the judging committee for the National Book Critic Circle Prize for Autobiography. Their 2025 shortlist includes a posthumous memoir by Alexei Navalny, former leader of the opposition in Russia, and a travel memoir with a surrealist twist.

It's a nonfiction book prize that values "style, rigour, argument, meatiness, readability, freshness, oddity and individuality," says Minoo Dinshaw, author of Friends in Youth and one of this year's judges. He introduces the six brilliant books that made the shortlist of this year's Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize, from the history of post-World War II Italy to the disputes caused by the discovery of dinosaur fossils.  

We gathered together a selection of five new and noteworthy self-help and psychology books that advise us on how we might become stronger willed, more creative and better conversationalists—as well as exploring the science behind music therapy and the enduring fascination of horror movies.

Since Amazon refreshed its entire range last year—including the introduction of the first colour Kindle—it's hard to know which is the best Kindle for reading. We turned to Kindle expert Maneetpaul Singh, author of Kindle Bookworm, to talk us through the best Kindles available in 2025.

It's January and time for our annual interview with an AI chatbot. We asked ChatGPT for its latest recommendations for books on artificial intelligence.