• The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize - The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years by Sunil Amrith
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize - The Baton and the Cross: Russia's Church from Pagans to Putin by Lucy Ash
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize - The Golden Road by William Dalrymple
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize - Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance by Bronwen Everill
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize - Sick of It: The Global Fight for Women's Health by Sophie Harman
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize - Sound Tracks: A Musical Detective Story by Graeme Lawson

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize, recommended by Rebecca Earle

To be shortlisted for the annual British Academy Book Prize, books have to be both rigorously researched and highly readable. Historian Rebecca Earle, chair of the 2025 judging panel, talks us through the books that made this year’s shortlist, from an environmental history that opens with Genghis Khan and the Mongol expansion to a ‘musical detective story’ that investigates the sounds made by our ancestors down the millennia.

  • New History Books - King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Unmaking of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson
  • New History Books - The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom by David Woodman
  • New History Books - The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner
  • New History Books - The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World by Selena Wisnom
  • New History Books - The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb by Garrett Graff
  • New History Books - The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life by Sophia Rosenfeld

New History Books

It’s a golden age for historical writing, as well-researched and sometimes quite specialist books by historians are written in an engaging style for a broad audience. History books out in recent months range from ancient Assyria to the CIA in the 21st century.

  • Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies - Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts
  • Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies - Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo
  • Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies - King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
  • Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies - G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage
  • Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies - Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert
  • Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies - The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne & Tamara Payne

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies

The Pulitzer Prize for Biography is awarded annually to “a distinguished and appropriately documented” biography by an author from or based in the United States. The authors of winning books receive $15,000, and join a starry pantheon of great American writers. Here, we’ve put together a summary of all the Pulitzer-winning biographies since the turn of the millennium.

  • The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners - Peacemakers: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan
  • The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners - 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro
  • The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners - Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick
  • The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners - Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
  • The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners - Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis
  • The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners - One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown

The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners, recommended by Sophie Roell

“All the best stories are true” runs the tagline of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, the UK’s pre-eminent nonfiction book award. This year, to celebrate the prize’s 25th birthday, a panel of judges picked out books for a winner of winners award, making for an excellent collection of nonfiction books from the last quarter of a century, as Five Books editor Sophie Roell explains.

  • The Best Popular Science Books of 2025: The Royal Society Book Prize - Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist’s Patients Taught Him About the Brain by Masud Husain
  • The Best Popular Science Books of 2025: The Royal Society Book Prize - Music As Medicine: How We Can Harness Its Therapeutic Power by Daniel Levitin
  • The Best Popular Science Books of 2025: The Royal Society Book Prize - Your Life Is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters and How We Can Do It Better by Tim Minshall
  • The Best Popular Science Books of 2025: The Royal Society Book Prize - The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: A True Story of Science and Sacrifice in a City under Siege by Simon Parkin
  • The Best Popular Science Books of 2025: The Royal Society Book Prize - Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction by Sadiah Qureshi
  • The Best Popular Science Books of 2025: The Royal Society Book Prize - Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and our Future by Neil Shubin

The Best Popular Science Books of 2025: The Royal Society Book Prize, recommended by Sandra Knapp

Every year, the judges for the Royal Society Book Prize search for the most informative and most readable new books on scientific subjects. In 2025, their shortlist of the best popular science books includes a history of extinction in the colonial world, and the heartrending story of the struggle to save the world’s first seed bank during the Siege of Leningrad. We spoke to the botanist Dr Sandra Knapp, chair of the judging panel.

  • The best books on The Soviet Union - The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • The best books on The Soviet Union - Khrushchev Remembers by Nikita Khrushchev
  • The best books on The Soviet Union - The Trial Begins by Andrei Sinyavsky (published under the name Abram Tertz)
  • The best books on The Soviet Union - Twenty Letters to a Friend by Svetlana Alliluyeva
  • The best books on The Soviet Union - A Precocious Autobiography by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

The best books on The Soviet Union, recommended by Sheila Fitzpatrick

The Soviet Union was the world’s first communist country and lasted around seven decades. It played a key role in defeating Nazism in Europe and became a global superpower before collapsing unexpectedly in 1991. Sheila Fitzpatrick, a leading historian of the Soviet Union, recommends books that bring to life different aspects of it, from forced labour in Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerey (GULAG) to the heady days of the Khrushchev thaw and including the memoir of Stalin’s beloved daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva.