Maureen Corrigan's 10 favorite books of 2025 — with plenty for nonfiction lovers

Maureen Corrigan's 10 favorite books of 2025 — with plenty for nonfiction lovers

Maureen Corrigan

December 08, 2025 / 9:44 am

My picks for this year's best books tilt a bit to nonfiction, but the novels that made the cut redress the imbalance by their sweep and intensity. Here are my favorites from 2025:

The Antidote by Karen Russell

The Antidote is my pick for novel of the year. An epic story of immigration, land grabs and aspiration, The Antidote is set in Nebraska and framed by two actual weather catastrophes: The "Black Sunday" dust storm on April 14, 1935 — in which people were suffocated by a moving black wall of dust — and, a month later, the Republican River flood. The central character here is a so-called "Prairie Witch" who heals her customers by holding " whatev