Five Books editors

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.

The complex history of Asia makes for a broad range of historical fiction. Here, we’ve collected the historical novels set in Asia that have been recommended in Five Books interviews, including Jing-Jing Lee’s How We Disappeared—a historical novel about the Japanese occupation of Singapore—and Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, which follows the life of the last Burmese king and his family.

When they’re done well, historical novels are a really exciting way to learn about history, because they combine the emotional involvement of fiction with the narrative of events that took place and details of how life was lived in the past. For that reason, we’re always excited when a historian chooses a work of historical fiction as one of their expert recommendations.  

“The best science fiction is heavy on science and light on fiction,” Professor Chris Mason told us in his interview on science fiction and space travel. A geneticist and computational biologist at Cornell, he is just one of several scientists who have recommended the best sci-fi books on our site. Below, we’ve collected all our sci-fi books recommended by scientists—good choices for readers who love their fiction scientific.

If you have recently discovered the work of Kristin Hannah following her recent hit The Women, a story of female nurses in the Vietnam War, then you may be excited to learn that she has an extensive back-catalogue of more than twenty books to catch up on. Here they are, in order.

Epic poems are amongst the first works of literature that survive, the earliest poems—like the Epic of Gilgamesh—likely part of oral traditions that were written down only after writing developed from the third millennium BCE. Later writers often took inspiration from earlier works and poems like Homer’s Iliad have had a huge impact on Western literature into the 21st century.

Publishers regularly bring out special edition books to entice readers to buy a copy of a book they already own. Often, these are books that are either literary classics or more recent bestsellers with a cult following. Here, we’ve collected together five special editions that have come out recently. These are books that have been recommended on Five Books and are well worth reading.

Welcome to our running list of the best mystery books of 2025, which we’ll be updating throughout the year. Our definition of mystery is broad, and can include any novel that has a crime at its heart with (ideally) an unexpected plot twist. Throughout the year, we’ll be looking out for new mystery books as they’re published and adding them whenever we think they’re worth reading.

Earlier this month, the winners of the  2025 Pulitzer Prizes, awarded annually by Columbia University in New York and founded by Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911), were announced. The prizes are awarded for a variety of categories across journalism, but also celebrate outstanding books. Below we’ve listed all the books that won in nonfiction book categories (James by Percival Everett won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction).

2024 was a solid year for mystery books, with books out from some of the best contemporary writers in the genre, including Tana French, S.A. Cosby, and Ruth Ware. The range of mood was also broad, with some wistful and nostalgic tales, and other books that are laugh-out-loud funny. Our best mystery books of 2025 list is now up and running.