Amina Srna: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Amina Srna, filling in for Brian today. Joining me now is Gilbert Cruz, editor of The New York Times Book Review, here to walk us through the 10 best books of 2025. Always a big moment for readers. Gilbert, thanks for being here. Welcome back to WNYC.

Gilbert Cruz: Well, thank you for having me back on.

Amina Srna: Let's dive right in because we got 10 books to get through. First on the list is Angel Down by Daniel Kraus, which is getting a lot of buzz because the whole thing is written in one sentence?

Gilbert Cruz: It certainly is. It's somewhat experimental. It's a piece of historical fiction set during World War I. A group of American soldiers are sent into no man's land to suss out the source of a sound, a screaming that they've been hearing, and they come upon a literal fallen angel. It is sort of fantasy, sort of horror. It's written in one long sentence, almost over 300 pages. It is something that is one of the more memorable books that we have read in several years. It's certainly not for everyone. It's quite gory. It's quite gross at points because it is written by Daniel Kraus, who is a writer who writes in the horror space. If you think you can bear with it, it's just an amazing experience.

Amina Srna: All right, next up on fiction books, we've got The Director by Daniel Kehlmann. Actually, let me just throw in The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai. These are two of the next books on the fiction list. What would you like to say about either one of them?

Gilbert Cruz: Sure thing. The Director by Daniel Kehlmann is another piece of historical fiction. A little less intense than Angel Down, but it's about the Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst, who is a real person. He was a big director in the silent-film era. In America, sound comes around. He finds that he is not as much in vogue in Hollywood as he was previously. He has to go back to Austria to check on his mother. It's terrible timing because the Nazis have taken over. They have renamed Austria into Ostmark.

He finds himself stuck in Austria and in Germany when the borders close, and he is essentially forced to make movies for the Third Reich. Then he finds that even though he is working for an evil regime, he actually possibly has more freedom to do his artistic work than he did in America. It's an incredible book about making art, about moral compromise in the face of authoritarian rule. It's full of incredible characters.

Amina Srna: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Am I pronouncing that correctly?

Gilbert Cruz: That is correct. This is by Kiran Desai. This is her first novel since 2006, or thereabouts, when she won the Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss. That means that she's been working on this book for almost two decades. This is a big book. It's almost 700 pages, and yet the bulk of the editors at the Book Review, who all work over the course of a year to come up with this list of 10, everyone fell in love with this. It's just one of those sprawling, sweeping stories that you want to keep reading. It's about the two title characters: a novelist and a journalist. They're both immigrants from India. They're living in America, and the relationship that they form over a period of time in the late '90s, in the early 2000s.

Amina Srna: We got two more in the fiction section to round it out. The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri and Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. Tell me what you loved about them.

Gilbert Cruz: I'm really blazing through these here.

[laughter]

Gilbert Cruz: The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri. He's a Swedish writer. This is about three sisters. They are Swedish Tunisian. They're growing up in Stockholm. Another long book. This one's about 600 pages. These sisters are just fascinating. They're all the most unique characters. You never really confuse them with one another. Structurally, the book is fascinating.

Each section of the book depicts a smaller and smaller increment of time as the story progresses in their lives. First section's a year, six months, three months, one month, one week. Then, if I'm recalling correctly, the last section is one minute, sometime in the near future in the lives of these sisters. Because of that, even though it's not the shortest book, you find yourself propelled through the story of the sisters, this man who enters their lives, their mother. It's fantastic.

Then Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood is a very contemplative book. It came out at the beginning of this year, but it stuck with us for 12 months. It's about an unnamed woman in late life, in her 60s. That's not late life. She's in her 60s. She decides to leave her life behind to live in a Catholic convent near where she grew up in New South Wales, Australia. It's written almost as a series of diary entries, almost. For me, it was about the tension between the overstimulated world that we live in and the way that retreating to stillness can be incredibly appealing to people. It's about memory. It's about guilt. It's a very delicate book that we really adored.

Amina Srna: Gilbert, as you're talking about the fiction picks for this year, it's super interesting. There's a lot of different conceits, like different ways to write books. The one-sentence long, Angel Down by Daniel Kraus, the diary entries we see in Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. Even The Sisters, as you were just talking about, how quickly it plays with time. Excuse me. I don't know. A little bit of a thread I'm seeing here as you explain and sell these books to us.

Gilbert Cruz: Well, I think we don't put this list together to send a message of any sort. Each book has to rise on its own merits. I think, certainly, when you read as many books as we do at The New York Times Book Review, collectively, we're reading over 1,000 books over the course of a year. You are looking for the things that stand out. That can be when it comes to language. That can be when it comes to structure. That can be when it comes to character. If a book is good, but it feels familiar, it's very hard for that book to rise to the 10 best books of the year. It's nearly impossible.

Amina Srna: Moving on to non-fiction, you selected A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst. What would you like to say about this non-fiction book? It's got a really interesting premise, right?

Gilbert Cruz: Yes, so the next five books are non-fiction. This is a true story. It's a story of a couple, an English married couple in the early 1970s. They decided to leave England and moved to New Zealand, but they decided to sail to New Zealand, and they got most of the way there. They were in the Pacific Ocean. A whale hit their boat, puts a hole in it. The boat sinks, and they are stuck in a life raft and a dinghy for 118 days. I'm not ruining the book here by saying they survive. They make it.

Amina Srna: [chuckles] It's a true story.

Gilbert Cruz: It's a story about what happens to them while they're in that life raft and dinghy. They took notes and wrote their own contemporaneous accounts in the '70s. It's also about their relationship and about their marriage and how that is put to the test when they're stuck on the high seas for all this time.

Amina Srna: What about Mother Emanuel by Kevin Sack?

Gilbert Cruz: This is a story of the terrible tragedy that happened in 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina. A young white supremacist walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and started shooting, shot a bunch of people there, killed, I believe, nine people. It's about that tragedy, but it's also about the history of this church, which proves to be a very important church in the American South. It's about the history of race and religion in America. The author, Kevin Sack, worked on it, I believe, for a decade or so. It's a sad story, but it's one that, once you start to read it, it illuminates so much about the nation which we live.

Amina Srna: Just a few more here. We've got Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy. It's a novelist's memoir. What made it notable?

Gilbert Cruz: Arundhati Roy is just an amazing writer. There are so many memoirs that come out every year. Celebrities write memoirs, and regular people write memoirs. Arundhati Roy has had a fascinating life. It's a story of her life, but it's also a story about her mother, Mary Roy. Growing up in India as the daughter of a woman who was incredibly impactful and amazing, also unstable and unpredictable. Not the best mother to her kids at certain points, but also someone who is unforgettable. She has this amazing relationship with her mother. She describes her so vividly over the course of this memoir. Arundhati Roy is just a writer who has an unsentimental but very spiky sense of humor. It's an amazing portrait of her mother and her own life.

Amina Srna: Next up, you've got There Is No Place for Us by Brian Goldstone. This one's pretty topical, given how much the affordability crisis has been on top of mind for so many Americans. This one is about the "working homeless," that is, people with full-time jobs who can't afford to pay rent. Why did you find it so gripping?

Gilbert Cruz: When we first read this book, I think it was in the spring, the late spring, the affordability conversation that's been happening in New York hadn't reached full bloom the way it did during the latter half of the mayoral race. This is set in Atlanta. Brian Goldstone follows five families, who he categorizes as the working homeless. These are people who have jobs and still, because of the cost of rent or other circumstances, you're not able to afford a full-time place. They have to live in a family member's living room or crash on a friend's sofa, or sometimes sleep in their car or stay in a rodent-infested motel for weeks and weeks and weeks.

It is in New York. I grew up in New York. We see the unhoused all the time on the subway walking the streets. That is a picture that we have of what it means to be homeless. Goldstone says that if you actually take into account the working homeless, which government does not count, the number of "homeless people" in America would be just vastly larger than it is now. The level of detail that he goes into in these families' lives is incredible. It's an infuriating book, it's a sad book, and it's a very important book.

Amina Srna: Last up, we've got Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux, which is a biography of the late 19th-century French painter Gauguin. Tell our listeners, why do we want to learn about him?

Gilbert Cruz: I think we've all heard about the bad things that Paul Gauguin did, particularly in his later life when he moved to Tahiti and had relationships with very young women there. Sue Prideaux used the occasion of some new primary research, a new manuscript, a memoir manuscript that Gauguin wrote, some other things to recontextualize his life. We've had a conversation in the past many years about bad men, both present and past.

Paul Gauguin is someone who has gained this reputation of being a scoundrel, being a columnist. A colonialist, not a columnist. What she does, which is really impressive, is she makes room for all of that to be true, but also explain to us why his art is still worth talking about, why his art is still worth looking at, and why his art is actually beautiful and meaningful. She's trying to do this job of explaining how both of those things can be true at the same time.

Amina Srna: All right, we made it through the list with a minute to spare, which is incredible.

Gilbert Cruz: Whew.

Amina Srna: The reason why we asked you to come on today, Gilbert, is because books make such great holiday gifts. Before I let you go, in just 30 seconds if you can, what makes like a-- I mean, books are so hard to buy for gifts, but I don't know. Any advice as The New York Times Book Review editor?

Gilbert Cruz: Yes, I think you should keep in mind that any book that you buy for someone is not necessarily a book that they're going to read, but it is the thought that counts. Think about the person that you are buying a gift for. The question I always like to ask is, what is the last book that you have liked? It's not about what the great books are out there because there are many great books. All the books on our list are great. Is about what is great for the person that you are buying a book for. Hopefully, you know the person you're buying a gift for. Have a good sense of what they might like to see on their shelves. Whether or not they actually open it is not your problem. All you're responsible for is getting the book for them.

Amina Srna: Amazing piece of advice. We leave it there for today. The 10 best books of the year, per The New York Times. Gilbert Cruz is editor of The New York Times Book Review. Thank you so much for the wild ride.

Gilbert Cruz: Thank you.

Amina Srna: I'm Amina Srna. This is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Stay tuned for All Of It.

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