As FP’s books editor, it’s at all times a deal with to see what our columnists and workers writers think about vacation studying. For some, lighter fare matches the invoice, from a detective novel in colonial-era Calcutta (now Kolkata) to a sun-drenched tour via Corsica. Different contributors gravitate towards, for example, a fictionalized account of an Austrian director’s work with Nazi propagandists. Regardless of the place you fall on this spectrum, the studying record beneath is certain to have a ebook that strikes your fancy.—Chloe Hadavas
The Burning Grounds: A Novel
Abir Mukherjee (Pegasus Crime, 384 pp., $28.95, November 2025)
This vacation season, I’m studying The Burning Grounds, the most recent detective novel by the British Indian author Abir Mukherjee. It options the return of Surendranath Banerjee, a former Bengali police officer, and Captain Sam Wyndham, a world-weary detective, to colonial-era Calcutta. Reunited after a number of years, the duo, regardless of their vastly totally different backgrounds, stay passionately dedicated to delivering justice.
The novel deftly depicts the social mores of the British and Indians of the period, rigorously weaves in social and political commentary, and doesn’t shrink back from confronting the ingrained class and ethnic prejudices of the time. That is simply Mukherjee’s greatest ebook within the Wyndham and Banerjee collection.
—Sumit Ganguly, FP columnist
Chicken College: A Newbie within the Wooden
Adam Nicolson (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 448 pp., $32, September 2025)
A brand new ebook by Adam Nicolson, one in every of Britain’s most interesting historians and naturalists, is at all times a deal with, whether or not it’s on Homer or rock swimming pools. The most recent, Chicken College, sees Nicolson all of a sudden enraptured by birds after dealing with a raven’s corpse by the aspect of the street and taking himself to a disguise on his household farm to watch avians each mundane and sumptuous.
Nicolson is scholarly with out being pretentious and aristocratic with out being snobbish. (Certainly one of his books opens, “For the final twenty years I’ve owned some islands.”) His deep love of land and birds alike sustains a stunning type—one which, on this case, is tinged by melancholy as he notes the sharp declines in British nature even inside his personal lifetime.
—James Palmer, deputy editor and FP’s China Transient author
If Russia Wins: A State of affairs
Carlo Masala, trans. Olena Ebel and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (Atlantic Month-to-month Press, 101 pp., $20, November 2025, e-book)
I’m recommending If Russia Wins, a slim quantity of speculative political science by German tutorial Carlo Masala. It solutions the query of what would possibly occur subsequent ought to Russia “win” in Ukraine, a state of affairs that Masala defines as just like that proposed in america’ 28-point peace plan.
It’s not a reasonably image—with out revealing an excessive amount of, Russia doesn’t cease with Ukraine. Only a yr in the past, this ebook would in all probability have been dismissed as alarmist. Nonetheless, in simply the previous couple of months alone, the Trump administration has withdrawn troops from Europe, floated a Russia-friendly peace plan for Ukraine, and emphasised immigration, not Russia, as the best risk to Europe. Now, the ebook reads extra like prophecy than fiction.
—Sam Skove, workers author
The Bombshell: A Novel
Darrow Farr (Pamela Dorman Books, 416 pp., $30, Could 2025)
Let me make clear up entrance for all of the CIA brokers who learn FP: I didn’t be a part of the Corsican liberation battle this yr. However The Bombshell had me very briefly contemplating it.
Set in the summertime 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 goal to make use of her as leverage in negotiations with Paris. The longer Séverine stays together with her captors (and reads the Frantz Fanon books they’ve annotated), the extra she realizes that French colonialism is, nicely, unhealthy. Ultimately, she turns into probably the most radicalized of all of them.
Whereas The Bombshell is filled with explosive militant antics (actually), a big a part of the ebook’s enchantment is that the characters are younger and sizzling and dwell close to the seashore. In truth, one purpose that Séverine turns into such a guerilla princess is that she will get loads of intercourse out of the entire ordeal. It would disappoint Corsican nationalists for me to write down this however: how very French.
—Allison Meakem, affiliate editor
The Advantage of Nationalism: Revised Version
Yoram Hazony (Primary Books, 336 pp., $19.99, June 2025, paperback)
It was fortuitous for me that the Trump administration’s Nationwide Safety Technique (NSS) was printed in early December as a result of I’ve been studying the revised version of Israeli American conservative thinker Yoram Hazony’s The Advantage of Nationalism. The brand new version, which was printed to coincide with U.S. President Donald Trump’s second time period, appears to have made an impression on the NSS drafters, significantly these liable for the part on Europe.
The ebook is a difficult, even jarring, learn as a result of it turns all the pieces I discovered in faculty and graduate college on its head. Hazony makes the case that the liberal order america constructed after World Struggle II—and has nurtured ever since beneath the guise of worldwide regulation and globalization—is a canopy for a less-than-benign U.S. imperium. Hazony’s radical mental venture is to problem the concepts which have guided generations of policymakers, contending that a world order of conventional nation-states—opposite to the European Union, which he considers to be a supra-national tyranny—is one of the simplest ways to make sure peace and prosperity.
The Advantage of Nationalism is fascinating and supplies perception not essentially into Trump’s worldview, which is much much less essential than his intestine, however these round him, together with, I believe, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance.
—Steven A. Prepare dinner, FP columnist
The Pretender: A Novel
Jo Harkin (Knopf, 496 pp., $30, April 2025)
At first of The Pretender, two unusual males arrive on a farmer’s doorstep and whisk away his youngest son. It’s 1484, and Richard III guidelines England. The lads inform 10-year-old John Collan that he’s truly Edward, earl of Warwick, who has a declare to the throne.
Jo Harkin’s second novel takes the reader from Oxfordshire to Flanders to Eire, and eventually to the royal courtroom in London. At its coronary heart is the curious spirit of the younger protagonist who may be king and whose uncertainty about his identification deepens because the plot rushes on. Not a lot strong data is thought about Lambert Simnel, the novel’s inspiration.
The Pretender is instantly extra partaking than most fiction on the Tudor interval, shifting in its universality, and is sort of humorous at turns. (Its punchlines usually depend on a sprinkling of medieval language.) The result’s an authentic meditation on the folly of energy and the ridiculous lengths that elite puppeteers would possibly go to achieve it.
—Audrey Wilson, managing editor
The Director: A Novel
Daniel Kehlmann, trans. Ross Benjamin (S&S/Summit Books, 352 pp., $28.99, Could 2025)
This yr, I loved studying The Director, a historic novel by Daniel Kehlmann concerning the well-known Austrian filmmaker Georg Wilhelm Pabst. The ebook follows Pabst, who had fled Nazi Germany within the Nineteen Thirties for america, as he returns to Austria to see his ailing mom. There, he promptly will get trapped within the Anschluss, unable to return to Hollywood. He finally ends up making movies for Nazi propagandists Joseph Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl whereas additionally attempting to carve out some freedom for himself.
The ebook explores the ethical struggles of artists and others in a dictatorship, a theme that sadly is well timed in the present day in lots of components of the world. The characters embody all doable approaches to this dilemma, which can really feel slightly picket at instances but additionally highlights the truth that simple options are arduous to come back by. The ebook is nicely written and, particularly towards the tip, inconceivable to place down.
—Caroline de Gruyter, FP columnist
Vulture: A Novel
Phoebe Greenwood (Europa Editions, 288 pp., $27, August 2025)
For greater than 20 years, the Al Deira Resort was an establishment within the Gaza Strip—a storied outdated hang-out for international journalists and support staff alike, famed for its elegant seaside views. Time journal as soon as dubbed it a “diamond within the tough.”
The resort—inbuilt 2000 throughout the transient spell of optimism following the Oslo Accords and destroyed by Israel final yr—serves because the inspiration for the setting of Phoebe Greenwood’s debut novel, Vulture, which follows a reckless reporter as she covers the eight-day Gaza Struggle in 2012. Greenwood, who labored as a international correspondent in Israel-Palestine within the early 2010s, is scathing in her portrayal of the worldwide information trade and the absurdity of constructing a profession partly by mining others’ struggling.
When you’re hoping to step away (however not too far) from the information cycle, look no additional than this daring and breathless novel of contradictions, which is flippant but critical, indifferent but shifting, and, at instances—regardless of the horror of the subject material—dreadfully humorous.
—Chloe Hadavas, senior editor
