The Hindu’s 10 best books of 2025 | Non-fiction

The year ends with the sad news that people aren’t reading enough. While feverish work continues to examine how artificial intelligence is affecting the world of books, authors are also exploring ideas suitable for these troubled times. As equality was threatened, books across genres and themes (memoir, history, environment, caste studies, technology, medicine) sought to provide an understanding of contemporary society.

Historian Audrey Truschke, for example, offers a panoramic view. India: 5000 Years of History of the Subcontinent; Sam Dalrymple (Shattered Lands) sheds light on the period from 1928 to 1971 in the subcontinent and Asia to explain why the legacy of partition persists; and in Caste Con CountAnand Teltumbde opposes caste counting and says that it will not eliminate caste but will perpetuate it.

Many books, such as a collection edited by Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro, examine the plight of Palestinians against Israeli power in Gaza (Gaza: A Story of Genocide). In a year filled with war and unimaginable loss, here are the 10 best nonfiction books of 2025; Some people give hope despite everything.

‘Is a River Alive?’ by Robert Macfarlane

Macfarlane imagines rivers not as resources but as a living entity with rights. It examines three rivers – the Rio Los Cedros in the cloud forest of Ecuador, the “wounded streams, lagoons and estuaries” of the Adyar in Chennai, and the Mutehekau Shipu in Nitassinan, the homeland of the Innu people in Canada – and the threats they face. But although rivers are “easily injured,” Macfarlane shows that they heal themselves with remarkable rapidity when given the chance. “Hope is a matter of rivers,” he insists.

‘Tamils: Portrait of a Community’ by Nirmala Lakshman

This is a deeply researched account of the Tamils ​​and their history. Lakshman writes that Tamils ​​are the inheritors of a segregated culture and history resulting from different caste and community experiences. “But they converge broadly across the emotional bandwidth of language and specific emotions.” Calling it a “genre bender” Hindu review said: “One of the thinnest sections of the book is devoted to exploring the concept of tinaisFive distinct natural regions of ancient Tamilakam reflect distinct cultural ecosystems while simultaneously defining distinctive lifestyles. One way to read this to see tinais as a framework for both separation and interconnection, tamils.”

Ravikant Kisana’s ‘Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Ordinariness Is Breaking Everything’

The author combines memoirs, social observations, ethnographic insights and cultural exposition to hold a mirror to savarna supremacy. “Think of South Asia, especially India, as full of people sitting in a cramped, dirty basement… staring at what for them is a glass ceiling but is actually a floor inhabited by a very small group of people.” The group above are the savarnas, who “have access to all the switches in all rooms of the house, including the basement, and can turn the lights on and off whenever they want.”

‘One Day Everyone Will Be Against This’ by Omar El Akkad

The book follows a viral tweet by the Egyptian-born US journalist in October 2023, days after a Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s violent response to Palestinians in Gaza. “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal disadvantage in calling something out for what it is, when it’s too late to hold someone accountable, everyone will always be against it,” he said on social media. As an immigrant living in the West, he soon began to question everything, especially why the vast majority of the political power centers of the Western world were waging a “campaign of active genocide” against the Palestinian people. El Akkad’s first non-fiction book, which won this year’s National Book Award, is a “letter of departure” to the West and its ideas of freedom and justice.

‘The Virgin Mary Comes to Me’ by Arundhati Roy

Roy, who won the 1997 Booker Prize with his novel God of Small ThingsHe wrote this memoir after losing his mother, Mary Roy. She was 89 and had lived a tumultuous life, building a school from scratch in Kerala’s Kottayam, fighting for equal rights for women under Christian inheritance laws, and also being someone who “couldn’t be neatly compartmentalised”. The author and his brother had to deal with their mother’s asthma attacks and violent tempers. It says Roy left home at 18 to continue loving his mother. In an interview he says: “…if the danger is your own mother. Then you don’t trust anything.” Has she experienced some kind of closure in her complicated relationship with her mother? Yes and no – that’s why the memoir.

‘Careless People: The Story of Where I Used to Work’ by Sarah Wynn-Williams

This is a devastating portrait of Meta (Facebook) and the reckless leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg in particular. Wynn-Williams, the company’s former Director of Global Public Policy, describes Facebook’s role in global events, including the 2016 US presidential election and the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, as chilling. As noted in a review in The Hindu, his book is an important starting point for understanding how social media platforms can shape not just individual lives but entire nations and global movements.

‘Dapaan: Stories from the Kashmir Conflict’ by Ipsita Chakravarty

The writer-journalist collects stories from places in Kashmir, “from walls, parks, marketplaces, news pages, web pages” before they are deleted. In a year when there were many books on Kashmir, including those by Mehak Jamal Lōal Kashmir: Love and Longing in a Torn Land And Kashmir City: Srinagar, A Popular History Written by Sameer Hamdani, Chakravarty’s effort to keep the stories of erasure alive after the government banned 25 books on Kashmir is poignant and important. As Jamal says in his review: In a country where official narratives attempt to overwrite lived reality, every retelling is a claim of presence, of existence.

‘Call of the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya’ by Anuradha Roy

The author brings to life the mountains and the joys and dangers of living close to the wilderness. The scenery is spectacular and Roy’s beautiful watercolors adorn the pages. This is his first non-fiction book after five works of fiction. He draws on journal articles and diary notes from his early years in Ranikhet in the mountains of Uttarakhand. In an interview with HinduRoy says he thinks of the book as “a travelogue of someone who stopped traveling and stayed in the place he wrote about.”

‘Artificial Intelligence Empire’ by Karen Hao

This book is a cautionary tale about the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, one of Silicon Valley’s greatest success stories. Hao had been exploring the world of artificial intelligence for years, and soon approached the newly formed OpenAI and its “make-it-all” Sam Altman, who routinely touts its product slate. In the forums, Altman emphasizes the “transformative and beneficial” aspects of the technology. In his author’s note, Hao writes that the book tells the inside story of OpenAI: “The profile of a scientific ambition morphed into an aggressive, ideological, money-fueled pursuit;…a meditation on power.”

‘The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson’ by Gardiner Harris

Harris uncovers dangerous practices across the company’s repertoire of drugs and products, from baby powder to metal-on-metal hip implants; All of these negatively affect users’ health. The company continued to market them in a chilling way, fully aware of their harmful effects. In an interview with HinduHarris explains his modus operandi: “J&J would realize early on that its product was dangerous and hide those dangers not only from the public but also from the FDA. [Food and Drug Administration] and other regulatory agencies knew this could result in large numbers of deaths.”

sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in