The Fall 2025 Nonfiction Preview

Elizabeth Gilbert, who has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award, returns with her first nonfiction work in a decade. In this enlightening new memoir, the Eat, Pray, Love author writes candidly about her relationship with musician Rayya Elias, whose struggles with addiction and illness forced Gilbert to confront the limits of love and the dangers of losing oneself to another. The book offers a portrait of a bond that was at once destructive and transformative.

Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, Jill Lepore, offers a landmark history of the US Constitution just in time for the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding. Lapore takes on the Supreme Court’s monopoly on constitutional interpretation and challenges the theory of “originalism” which dominates the court’s conservative majority. Given the threats posed by the Trump administration to longstanding constitutional interpretations and the Supreme Court’s willingness to oblige many of its requests, this is an urgent and timely read,

Punk rock's beloved poet laureate and National Book Award winner is back with a sparkling new memoir which takes us through her teenage years. Smith details the inspiration she took from artists like Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan as she begins to merge poetry and music into the form that she has become celebrated for.

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis deliver a sobering account of the Trump administration’s full fledged assault on the Justice Department and the rule of law, making this a work of urgent relevance. Drawing on years of reporting experience for the Washington Post, they expose the erosion of independence inside one of America’s most important institutions.

In her first memoir, the author made famous by her extraordinarily crafted dystopian stories, turns her gaze inward. Book of Lives traces her unconventional childhood in the Canadian wilderness, her formative years spent abroad, and the intellectual and political battles that shaped novels like The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood is now 85, a two-time Booker Prize winner and cultural icon whose work has shaped how entire generations think about power and gender. Her memoir promises both sharp-eyed wit and the sense that she’s still very much in conversation with the world she helped to reimagine.

International human rights lawyer Philippe Sands has built a career unraveling the legal and moral aftermath of war crimes. In his new book, he investigates the strange intersections between Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Nazi war criminal Walther Rauff, and the tangled politics of exile and the search for justice. Part courtroom drama, part historical detective story, 38 Londres Street shows how shadows of the 20th century still haunt the present. Sands, whose East West Street won the Baillie Gifford Prize, brings both legal expertise and narrative verve to one of the darkest corners of modern history.

In this posthumously published collection of essays from David McCullough, who twice received the Pulitzer Prize and twice received the National Book Award, the legendary historian muses on the importance of history to understanding the past, present, and future. Featuring a foreword by Jon Meacham, this collection is a tribute to one of the great historians of our time and a timely exploration of the subject he was so passionate about.

An Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Grammy Award winner, who also started writing for Rolling Stone as a teenager, it would be hard to argue that Cameron Crowe has had anything besides an extremely cool life. In this long awaited memoir, the iconic multi hyphenate provides an inside look at the golden age of rock music and the formative years that shaped his career. The memoir is part coming-of-age story, part love letter to the artists and scenes that defined an era.

Journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, who wrote one of the definitive stories of the 2008 financial crisis, now turns his attention to the financial catastrophe that defined the previous century: the stock market crash of 1929. Drawing on archives and dramatizing the panic of Wall Street’s biggest players, Sorkin portrays the greed and optimism that preceded the fall and the chaos that followed. Best known for Too Big to Fail and as co-creator of the series Billions, Sorkin knows how to make complex financial systems come alive on the page, transforming economic history into riveting human drama.

This collection of essays from the acclaimed, award-winning author, Zadie Smith, touches on a wide range of ideas, art, people, and politics. Blending cultural critique with personal rumination, Smith delivers a compelling commentary on living through this tumultuous moment.