The Book Report: Ron Charles’ picks from 2025

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: