2025 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists

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Here’s the list of the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. Which have you read and which are standouts? Are there any you’d like to add to your list that you haven’t already?

Autobiography/Memoir:
Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Scribner)
Paper Girl by Beth Macy (Penguin)
Shattered by Hanif Kureishi (Ecco)
A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury)

Biography:
Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star by Mayukh Sen (W.W Norton)
A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled by Alex Green (Bellevue Literary Press)
Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution by Amanda Vaill (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore by Ashley D. Farmer (Pantheon)
Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford by Carla Kaplan (Harper)

Criticism:
Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions)
Greyhound by Joanna Pocock (Soft Skull Press)
Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian (Princeton University Press)
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Knopf)
To Save and to Destroy: Writing As an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Harvard University Press)

Fiction:
The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf)
Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead)
On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (New Directions)
We Do Not Part by Han Kang, trans. from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth)
The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy (Mariner)

Nonfiction:
America, América: A New History of the New World by Greg Grandin (Penguin Press)
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins by Barbara Demick (Random House)
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao (Penguin Press)
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution, a Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson (Doubleday)
No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson by Gardiner Harris (Random House)

Poetry:
Chronicle of Drifting by Yuki Tanaka (Copper Canyon)
Death of the First Idea by Rickey Laurentiis (Knopf)
Night Watch by Kevin Young (Knopf)
The Other Love by Henri Cole (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Unravel by Tolu Oloruntoba (McClelland & Stewart)

Translation:
Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue by Yoko Tawada, trans. from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions) (Nonfiction)
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, trans. from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories) (Fiction)
Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg, trans. from the Norwegian by Wendy H. Gabrielsen (Biblioasis) (Fiction)
Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, trans. from the French by Natasha Lehrer (Seven Stories) (Nonfiction)
The Frog in the Throat by Markus Werner, trans. from the German by Michael Hofmann (NYRB) (Fiction)
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, trans. from the Danish by Martin Aitken (New Directions) (Fiction)

New Author:
Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Crown by Evanthia Bromiley (Grove)
Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, trans. from the Japanese by Polly Barton (Hogarth)
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly (Atria/One Signal)
Salvage by Hedgie Choi (University of Wisconsin Press)
The Slip by Lucas Schaefer (Simon & Schuster)

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I’ve read or own the fiction titles, and I’ own two of the New Author books (Hunchback and The Slip).

I’m a little disappointed in the nonfiction books on the list. Not a lot of history nominated (my go-to NF genre).

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I have lots of “catch-up” reading to do!

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Have only read two books within the non-fiction category - Daughters of the Bamboo Grove (Barbara Demick) and No More Tears (Gardiner Harris). Demick’s book was well-researched and an engaging and revealing story but not one of her better books as I found parts repetitive. No More Tears was well-written and horrifying - will NEVER look at J&J the same.

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I read all the fiction except The Calculation…my favorite was We Do Not Part. Roy’s memoir is on my bedside table as is Toew’s. Looking forward to both; they are both so skillful it’s a joy to read them. I don’t read much nonfiction but perhaps that’ll change this year :crossed_fingers:

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I’ve read Audition and We Do Not Part from the fiction list and both have stayed with me, especially We Do Not Part, though both are anything but straight forward and left me with a lot of questions (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.) Read Memorial Days and enjoyed it, and I’m currently reading One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This and finding it somewhat painful—because he’s railing against the liberals who might protest Gaza’s treatment and yet pay our taxes to a government supplying weapons that will further destroy them. So it’s a hypocritical government, but also kind of liberals like me…but I will read on.

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Of the fiction books that you read, did you have a favorite?

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@Holly_K, yes! It wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I absolutely loved The Antidote by Karen Russell. It was one of my top books for last year, and I was disappointed it didn’t win any of the awards for which it was nominated.

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I snagged a library copy of The Antidote, along with The Worst Hard Time.
Not sure when I will get around to reading them, but I’ve gone down the Dust Bowl rabbit hole.

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