As FP’s books editor, it is always a treat to see what our columnists and staff writers consider holiday reading. For some, lighter fare fits the bill, from a detective novel in colonial-era Calcutta (now Kolkata) to a sun-drenched excursion through Corsica. Other contributors gravitate toward, for instance, a fictionalized account of an Austrian director’s work with Nazi propagandists. No matter where you fall on this spectrum, the reading list below is sure to have a book that strikes your fancy.—Chloe Hadavas
The Burning Grounds: A Novel
Abir Mukherjee (Pegasus Crime, 384 pp., $28.95, November 2025)
This holiday season, I am reading The Burning Grounds, the latest detective novel by the British Indian writer Abir Mukherjee. It features the return of Surendranath Banerjee, a former Bengali police officer, and Captain Sam Wyndham, a world-weary detective, to colonial-era Calcutta. Reunited after several years, the duo, despite their vastly different backgrounds, remain passionately committed to delivering justice.
The novel deftly depicts the social mores of the British and Indians of the era, carefully weaves in social and political commentary, and does not shy away from confronting the ingrained class and ethnic prejudices of the time. This is easily Mukherjee’s best book in the Wyndham and Banerjee series.
—Sumit Ganguly, FP columnist
Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood
Adam Nicolson (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 448 pp., $32, September 2025)
A new book by Adam Nicolson, one of Britain’s finest historians and naturalists, is always a treat, whether it’s on Homer or rock pools. The latest, Bird School, sees Nicolson suddenly enraptured by birds after handling a raven’s corpse by the side of the road and taking himself to a hide on his family farm to observe avians both mundane and magnificent.
Nicolson is scholarly without being pretentious and aristocratic without being snobbish. (One of his books opens, “For the last twenty years I have owned some islands.”) His deep love of land and birds alike sustains a lovely style—one that, in this case, is tinged by melancholy as he notes the sharp declines in British nature even within his own lifetime.
—James Palmer, deputy editor and FP’s China Brief writer
If Russia Wins: A Scenario
Carlo Masala, trans. Olena Ebel and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (Atlantic Monthly Press, 101 pp., $20, November 2025, e-book)
I’m recommending If Russia Wins, a slim volume of speculative political science by German academic Carlo Masala. It answers the question of what might happen next should Russia “win” in Ukraine, a scenario that Masala defines as similar to that proposed in the United States’ 28-point peace plan.
It’s not a pretty picture—without revealing too much, Russia does not stop with Ukraine. Just a year ago, this book would probably have been dismissed as alarmist. However, in just the last few months alone, the Trump administration has withdrawn troops from Europe, floated a Russia-friendly peace plan for Ukraine, and emphasized immigration, not Russia, as the greatest threat to Europe. Now, the book reads more like prophecy than fiction.
—Sam Skove, staff writer
The Bombshell: A Novel
Darrow Farr (Pamela Dorman Books, 416 pp., $30, May 2025)
Let me clarify up front for all the CIA agents who read FP: I did not join the Corsican liberation struggle this year. But The Bombshell had me very briefly considering it.
Set in the summer of 1993, Darrow Farr’s debut novel follows Séverine, the entitled teenage daughter of the French prefect of Corsica, after she is kidnapped by a three-man cell of separatists who aim to use her as leverage in negotiations with Paris. The longer Séverine stays with her captors (and reads the Frantz Fanon books they’ve annotated), the more she realizes that French colonialism is, well, bad. Eventually, she becomes the most radicalized of them all.
While The Bombshell is full of explosive militant antics (literally), a large part of the book’s appeal is that the characters are young and hot and live near the beach. In fact, one reason that Séverine becomes such a guerilla princess is that she gets a lot of sex out of the whole ordeal. It will disappoint Corsican nationalists for me to write this but: how very French.
—Allison Meakem, associate editor
The Virtue of Nationalism: Revised Edition
Yoram Hazony (Basic Books, 336 pp., $19.99, June 2025, paperback)
It was fortuitous for me that the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) was published in early December because I have been reading the revised edition of Israeli American conservative thinker Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism. The new edition, which was published to coincide with U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, seems to have made an impression on the NSS drafters, particularly those responsible for the section on Europe.
The book is a challenging, even jarring, read because it turns everything I learned in college and graduate school on its head. Hazony makes the case that the liberal order the United States constructed after World War II—and has nurtured ever since under the guise of international law and globalization—is a cover for a less-than-benign U.S. imperium. Hazony’s radical intellectual project is to challenge the ideas that have guided generations of policymakers, contending that an international order of traditional nation-states—contrary to the European Union, which he considers to be a supra-national tyranny—is the best way to ensure peace and prosperity.
The Virtue of Nationalism is fascinating and provides insight not necessarily into Trump’s worldview, which is far less important than his gut, but those around him, including, I suspect, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance.
—Steven A. Cook, FP columnist
The Pretender: A Novel
Jo Harkin (Knopf, 496 pp., $30, April 2025)
At the start of The Pretender, two strange men arrive on a farmer’s doorstep and whisk away his youngest son. It is 1484, and Richard III rules England. The men tell 10-year-old John Collan that he is actually Edward, earl of Warwick, who has a claim to the throne.
Jo Harkin’s second novel takes the reader from Oxfordshire to Flanders to Ireland, and finally to the royal court in London. At its heart is the curious spirit of the young protagonist who might be king and whose uncertainty about his identity deepens as the plot rushes on. Not much solid information is known about Lambert Simnel, the novel’s inspiration.
The Pretender is immediately more engaging than most fiction on the Tudor period, moving in its universality, and is quite funny at turns. (Its punchlines often rely on a sprinkling of medieval language.) The result is an original meditation on the folly of power and the ridiculous lengths that elite puppeteers might go to reach it.
—Audrey Wilson, managing editor
The Director: A Novel
Daniel Kehlmann, trans. Ross Benjamin (S&S/Summit Books, 352 pp., $28.99, May 2025)
This year, I enjoyed reading The Director, a historical novel by Daniel Kehlmann about the famous Austrian filmmaker Georg Wilhelm Pabst. The book follows Pabst, who had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s for the United States, as he returns to Austria to see his ailing mother. There, he promptly gets trapped in the Anschluss, unable to return to Hollywood. He ends up making films for Nazi propagandists Joseph Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl while also trying to carve out some freedom for himself.
The book explores the moral struggles of artists and others in a dictatorship, a theme that unfortunately is timely today in many parts of the world. The characters embody all possible approaches to this dilemma, which may feel a little wooden at times but also highlights the fact that easy solutions are hard to come by. The book is well written and, especially toward the end, impossible to put down.
—Caroline de Gruyter, FP columnist
Vulture: A Novel
Phoebe Greenwood (Europa Editions, 288 pp., $27, August 2025)
For more than two decades, the Al Deira Hotel was an institution in the Gaza Strip—a storied old haunt for foreign journalists and aid workers alike, famed for its elegant seaside views. Time magazine once dubbed it a “diamond in the rough.”
The hotel—built in 2000 during the brief spell of optimism following the Oslo Accords and destroyed by Israel last year—serves as the inspiration for the setting of Phoebe Greenwood’s debut novel, Vulture, which follows a reckless reporter as she covers the eight-day Gaza War in 2012. Greenwood, who worked as a foreign correspondent in Israel-Palestine in the early 2010s, is scathing in her portrayal of the global news industry and the absurdity of building a career partly by mining others’ suffering.
If you’re hoping to step away (but not too far) from the news cycle, look no further than this bold and breathless novel of contradictions, which is flippant yet serious, detached yet moving, and, at times—despite the horror of the subject matter—dreadfully funny.
—Chloe Hadavas, senior editor