The year ends with grim tidings that people aren’t reading enough. As feverish studies are on to examine how artificial intelligence is impacting the world of books, writers are exploring ideas that resonate with these fraught times. With equality under threat, books across genres and themes — memoir, history, environment, caste studies, tech, medicine — have tried to provide an understanding of contemporary society.
For instance, historian Audrey Truschke offers a panoramic view in India: 5000 Years of History on the Subcontinent; Sam Dalrymple (Shattered Lands) puts the spotlight on the period from 1928 to 1971 in the subcontinent and Asia, to explain why the legacy of partitions lingers; and in The Caste Con Census, Anand Teltumbde argues against a caste count, saying it will not annihilate caste but keep it going.
Several books examine the plight of Palestinians against the might of Israel in Gaza, like a collection edited by Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro (Gaza: The Story of a Genocide). In a year of war and unimaginable loss, here are the top 10 non-fiction books of 2025, some holding out hope against all odds.
‘Is a River Alive?’ by Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane imagines rivers not as resources, but as a living entity with rights. He studies three rivers — the Rio Los Cedros in an Ecuadorian cloud-forest, the “wounded creeks, lagoons and estuaries” of Adyar in Chennai, and the Mutehekau Shipu at Nitassinan, homeland of the Innu people, in Canada — and the threats they face. But though rivers “are easily wounded”, Macfarlane shows that if given a chance, they heal themselves with remarkable speed. “Hope is the thing with rivers,” he insists.
‘The Tamils: A Portrait of a Community’ by Nirmala Lakshman
This is a deeply researched account of the Tamils and their history. The Tamils, writes Lakshman, are inheritors of a disaggregated culture and history, stemming from diverse historical experiences of caste and community. “But they unite broadly in the emotional bandwidth of language and particular sentiments.” Calling it a “genre-bender”, The Hindu review said: “One of the finer sections in the book is devoted to exploring the concept of the tinais, the five distinct natural regions of ancient Tamilakam that, at once, determined idiosyncratic lifestyles while reflecting diverse cultural ecosystems. One way to read it is to see tinais as a framework for both separateness and interconnection, a running theme in The Tamils.”
‘Meet The Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything’ by Ravikant Kisana
The author combines memoir, social observation, ethnographic insights and cultural exposition to hold a mirror to savarna supremacy. “Think of south Asia — India especially — as full of people sitting in a cramped and dirty basement… looking up at what is a glass ceiling for them but is, in fact, a floor above in which lives a very small group of people.” The group above are the savarnas, who “have access to all the switches in all the rooms of the house, including the basement. They switch on the lights and switch them off at will”.
‘One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This’ by Omar El Akkad
The book follows a viral tweet put out by the Egypt-born, U.S.-based journalist in October 2023, days after the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s violent response against Palestinians in Gaza. “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this,” he posted on social media. As an immigrant in the West, he was soon questioning everything, particularly why a vast majority of the Western world’s political power centres were enacting a “campaign of active genocide” against the Palestinian people. El Akkad’s non-fiction debut, which won the National Book Award this year, is a “break-up letter” to the West and its ideas of freedom and justice.
‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ by Arundhati Roy
Roy, who won the 1997 Booker Prize for her novel, The God of Small Things, wrote this memoir after she lost her mother, Mary Roy. She was 89, and had lived a life of tumult, building a school from scratch in Kerala’s Kottayam, fighting for women’s equal rights under Christian inheritance laws, and also being someone who could not be “put under neat divisions”. The author and her brother had to contend with their mother’s bouts of asthma and violent rage. Roy left home at 18, she writes, to continue loving her mother. In an interview, she says, “…if your own mother is the danger. Then you don’t trust anything.” Did she get some sort of closure in her complicated relationship with her mother? Yes and no — and that’s why the memoir.
‘Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work’ by Sarah Wynn-Williams
This is a devastating portrait of Meta (Facebook) and the reckless ways of its leadership, particularly Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. A former Director of Global Public Policy at the company, Wynn-Williams’s account of Facebook’s role in global events, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, is chilling. As a review in The Hindu notes, her book is an essential starting point to understand the way social media platforms can shape not only individual lives but entire nations and global movements.
‘Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict’ by Ipsita Chakravarty
The author-journalist gathers stories from places in Kashmir, “walls, parks, marketplaces, news pages, web pages”, before they are erased. In a year when there were several books on Kashmir, including Mehak Jamal’s Lōal Kashmir: Love and Longing in a Torn Land and City of Kashmir: Srinagar, a Popular History by Sameer Hamdani, and after the government banned 25 books written on Kashmir, Chakravarty’s endeavour to keep alive stories of erasure is poignant and important. As Jamal says in her review: In a land where official narratives try to overwrite lived truth, every retelling is an assertion of presence, of existing.
‘Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya’ by Anuradha Roy
The author brings alive the mountains, and the joys — and perils — of living in close proximity to the wild. The landscape is stunning, and Roy’s beautiful water colours embellish the pages. It’s her first non-fiction book after five fiction titles. It draws from magazine articles, and jottings in diaries of her initial years in Ranikhet in the Uttarakhand mountains. In a conversation with The Hindu, Roy says she thinks of the book as a “travelogue by someone who stopped travelling, and stayed in the place she was writing about”.
‘Empire of AI’ by Karen Hao
This book is a cautionary tale about one of Silicon Valley’s most spectacular success stories, the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. Hao had been investigating the world of AI for years and soon she turned to the startup OpenAI and Sam Altman, the man who “made it all happen” and routinely announced its slate of products. At forums, Altman harps on the “transformative and beneficial” aspects of the technology. In her author’s note, Hao writes that the book tells the inside story of OpenAI, “a profile of a scientific ambition turned into an aggressive, ideological money-fuelled quest;… a meditation on power.”
‘The Dark Secrets of Johnson&Johnson’ by Gardiner Harris
Harris uncovers the dangerous practices across the company’s repertoire of drugs and products, from baby powder to metal-on-metal hip implants, all adversely impacting the health of users. Chillingly, the company continued to market them, fully cognisant of the harmful effects. In a conversation with The Hindu, Harris explains the modus operandi: “J&J, early on, would find out that its product was dangerous, would hide those dangers not only from the public, but from the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] and other regulatory agencies, knowing that it could result in a number of deaths.”
sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in
Published – December 19, 2025 06:26 am IST
