By Washington Post book critic Ron Charles

2025 offered a feast of great books. To help build your never-ending reading list, here are five titles we particularly enjoyed over the past 12 months:

Lucas Schaefer’s debut novel, “The Slip” (Simon & Schuster), won this year’s Kirkus Prize for Fiction. The story takes place in and around a boxing gym in Austin, Texas, where two lonely teenagers are eager to remake their identities wherever that might lead them.

This sweaty comic masterpiece tackles our most pressing social debates, and delivers a knockout.

Read an excerpt: “The Slip” by Lucas Schaefer

“The Slip” by Lucas Schaefer (Simon & Schuster), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

lucasschaefer.com

Susie Dent’s debut novel, “Guilty by Definition” (‎Sourcebooks Landmark), introduces a dictionary editor in Oxford who begins receiving strange messages about her sister’s long-ago disappearance.

As she follows these clues, she is led into literary puzzles and unresolved parts of her past. Readers who savor wordplay as much as suspense should look up this clever mystery.

Read an excerpt: “Guilty by Definition” by Susie Dent

“Guilty by Definition” by Susie Dent (‎Sourcebooks Landmark), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

Susie Dent on Instagram

“Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State” (Riverhead Books), by Caleb Gayle, traces the rise of Edward McCabe through Kansas and the Oklahoma Territory as Black migrants pursued land, safety and power in the Jim Crow era.

Confronting hostile politics and violent resistance, McCabe fought for community and self-determination, and Gayle lays out this charged landscape to reveal a crucial but long-obscured chapter in the struggle for freedom.

Read an excerpt: “Black Moses” by Caleb Gayle

“Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State” by Caleb Gayle (Riverhead Books), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

calebgayle.com (Official site)

Karen Russell’s “The Antidote” (Knopf) is a dazzlingly original novel that hovers between fable and history.

This wild tempest of a tale set in Depression-era Nebraska follows a prairie witch and a high school girl swept up into a tumultuous western epic about the tragedies and ambitions of Manifest Destiny.

Read an excerpt: “The Antidote” by Karen Russell

“The Antidote” by Karen Russell (Knopf), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

karenrussellauthor.com

Rick Atkinson’s “The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780” (Crown), the second book in his planned trilogy, delivers a chronicle of the American Revolution with irresistible narrative drive.

Moving between battles and diplomacy, he brings Washington, Franklin and their rivals to life while tracing the nation’s fight for independence. The result is an immersive work of history just in time for America’s 250th anniversary.

Read an excerpt: “The Fate of the Day” by Rick Atkinson

“The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780 (Volume Two of the Revolution Trilogy)” by Rick Atkinson (Crown), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

Historian Rick Atkinson (Official site)

Rick Atkinson on how the U.S. Army was born – and a free nation realized (“Sunday Morning”)

That’s it for the Book Report. It’s been great fun to talk to you about good books over the past year. Here’s to many more in 2026.

I’m Ron Charles. Until next time, read on!

     
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For more reading recommendations, check out our library of previous Book Report features from Ron Charles: 

Selena Gomez is treating herself to a self care routine ahead of welcoming the New Year.

The Only Murders in the Building star took a quick trip to a tanning salon over the weekend.

On Saturday, December 27, she was spotted visiting Palm Beach Tan in Beverly Hills, California.

As per photos circulating over social media, the 33-year-old singer and actress looked relaxed and low-key as she left the popular salon.

For the casual outing, the Calm Down songstress was dressed casually in a white tank top, black sweatpants, and some fuzzy slippers.

She accessorised her look with a pair of sunglasses and some plum-colored over-the-ear wireless headphones.

The Lose You to Love Me singer was also seen carrying her iPhone and a fluffy jacket.

Prior to her latest sighting, Gomez, who is married to music producer Benny Blanco, was seen out on Christmas Eve.

She was spotted in a black ensemble as she visited a dermatology office in the same area.

Earlier in December, she and her new husband celebrated decorating their first Christmas tree together as a married couple.

They decorated the festive-staple with various ornaments and recorded the process to share it with their admirers.

We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article.

Susie Dent’s debut novel, “Guilty by Definition” (‎Sourcebooks Landmark), introduces a dictionary editor at Oxford who begins receiving strange messages tied to her sister’s long-ago disappearance.

The lexicographer-turned-sleuth follows clues that draw her into literary puzzles – and unresolved parts of her past.

Read an excerpt below. 

“Guilty by Definition” by Susie Dent

Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now.

Chapter 3

eidolon, noun (seventeenth century):
a spirit, phantom, or apparition

Martha turned and fled through the crowd, down the wide flight of stone steps, and out into Beaumont Street, looking at nothing but the ground. Three corners later, she found a side road and turned into it. She put her back against the wall and tried to breathe.

She had known there would be ghosts in Oxford. She wasn’t afraid of any headless horsemen or nuns haunting the local ruins; it was Charlie, always Charlie she was afraid would find her. There had been times in the first year after her sister’s disappearance when Martha’s heart would stop as she spotted her through the crowd: the long blond hair, the shapeless cardigan draped over a thin cotton dress. She’d hear a laugh, throaty and sudden, or catch a movement, a walk, a twist in the shoulders, and she’d be certain. Just for a moment. Then the illusion would shatter, and the person she knew to be her sister would resolve into a stranger.

As the years passed, so the ghost of Charlie aged. Now it was women in their midthirties who made Martha stop dead in the streets. In Berlin, once a month perhaps, she’d felt that same flickering certainty before realizing the woman with a child on her lap as she drank a coffee at a sidewalk café was not her sister, just an echo of Martha’s own image of who Charlie might be now, thirteen years after fleeing Oxford and her family.

Martha pressed her palm against the wall behind her. She reminded herself of her therapist’s mantra for the moments when she was in danger of being overwhelmed. What can you see now? The shiny cobbles of the side street, the white brick of the wall opposite. What can you feel? The bricks under my fingers, a breeze ruffling my hair. What can you smell? Cooking oil, the Black Opium perfume I put on this morning.

Her breathing slowed.

She pulled the letter out of her bag again and stared at it. Could it be from Charlie? Impossible. What could this Chorus know? Should she burn it? Throw it in the river? Take it to the police?

Ah, the police. She heard the scrape of her mother’s chair on the kitchen floor as she leaped up at the sound of the doorbell. They had found Charlie’s bike not far from the ring road. Did she hitchhike? How was her PhD going? Martha couldn’t remember their faces, just their hands around tea mugs as they sat at the table, the low rumble of their voices as they talked about stress and pressure. Most runaways come back in time, they’d said. They left literature, helpline numbers, and world-weary sympathy behind them.

Martha realized she was at her own front door. Her body had picked her up and carried her here through the gathering dark. She looked up. All the lights were off; her father must be in bed.

Charlie had been living here when she went missing, taking advantage of the space, their mum’s cooking, and the glow of parental approval while she slogged through her PhD. Martha had just left for university and was starting to experiment with life out of Charlie’s orbit.

As she put her key in the lock, she remembered Alex’s shadow moving across the folded letter at the museum. Now it was Charlie’s. Always here: the shadows of the past thrown against the walls and floors. She pushed open the door….

She took the letter out again and laid it on the kitchen counter while the kettle boiled.

Truth will come to light. Murder cannot be hid long.

     
Excerpted from “Guilty by Definition” by Susie Dent. Copyright © 2024, 2025 by Susie Dent. Reprinted by permission of Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks.

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“Guilty by Definition” by Susie Dent

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