Books – Detail

An essential, universally resonant new memoir from the #1 bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and Big Magic.

Time: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

An Almost Impossible Thing follows six hitherto little-known women gardeners in the years before the First World War, and examines their lives in the context of suffragism, collectivism and Empire.

In candid, surprisingly funny vignettes spanning forty years of girlhood, marriage, and parenting, Jen lays bare the disorienting upheaval of midlife--the implosion of a marriage, the unraveling of religious and cultural systems, and the grief that accompanies change you didn't ask for. And, drawing on all her resources--from without and from within--Jen dares to question the systems beneath the whole house of cards, and to reckon with the myths, half-truths, and lies that brought her to this point.

The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025

Baldwin: A Love Story tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin's most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac.

The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025

Time: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

In her long-awaited memoir, celebrated author Margaret Atwood--creator of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments--turns her storytelling brilliance on her own life.

The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025

As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life, and, finally, writing again-the one constant on a path driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.

In the tradition of The Yellow House and Half Broke Horses, a memoir of the Cuban diaspora that follows one family's exile from the island, through a lyrical exploration of memory, cultural mythology, and the history of Cuban-American relations.

Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate and New York Times bestselling author of I Am Malala, shares the most private journey of her young life--a story of friendship and first love, of mental illness and self-discovery, and of trying to stay true to yourself when everyone wants to tell you who you are.

Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a bold, innovative examination of the nature of legacy and memory itself, in which Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing and reveals new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible.

Joyride is a magic carpet ride through Orlean's life and career, where every day is an opportunity for discovery and every moment holds the potential for wonder. Throughout her storied career, her curiosity draws her to explore the most ordinary and extraordinary of places, from going deep inside the head of a regular ten-year-old boy for a legendary profile ("The American Man Age Ten") to reporting on a woman who owns twenty-seven tigers, from capturing the routine magic of Saturday night to climbing Mt. Fuji. Not only does Orlean's account of a writing life offer a trove of indispensable gleanings for writers, it's also an essential and practical guide to embracing any creative path.

Time: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

Behold, the story of Sophie Blanchard, an extraordinary woman who is largely forgotten despite her claim to being the very first female pilot in history. In eighteenth-century France, "balloonomania" has fiercely gripped the nation, but all of the pioneering aeronauts are men. The job of breaking that barrier falls to a most unlikely figure: a shy girl from a seaside village who is entirely devoted to her dream of flight. (Youth title)

Stay tuned as the Athenaeum celebrates ballooning history in January 2026 as part of  52 Weeks of Firsts

Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests. Although they could run away from the world, they can’t run away from themselves.

Taut, propulsive, and dazzling, A Marriage at Sea pairs an adrenaline-fueled high seas adventure with a gutting love story that asks why we love difficult people, and who we become under the most extreme conditions imaginable.--From the Publisher

The New York Times: 10 Best Books of 2025

The unforgettable memoir by the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the woman who dared to take on Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

One Aladdin Two Lamps ingeniously explores stories and their vital role in our lives. Weaving together fiction, magic, and memoir, Winterson's newest is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future-an invitation to look closer at our stories, and thereby ourselves, to imagine the world anew

From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values. On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: '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.' This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human--not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

National Book Award Winner

Annie Ernaux's profound investigation into the life of her mysterious older sister, who died at six, two years before Annie was born.

A deeply personal and eye-opening memoir from journalist Beth Macy, exploring how her once-thriving Ohio hometown unraveled over four decades. Blending family history, reporting, and social insight, Macy traces the loss of community, the rise of anger and division, and the human cost of economic and cultural decline in small-town America.

In The Philosopher in the Valley journalist Michael Steinberger explores the world of Alex Karp, Palantir, and the future that they are leading us toward. It is an urgent and illuminating work about one of Silicon Valley's most secretive and powerful companies, whose technology is at the leading edge of the surveillance state.

At twenty-four, Betsy Cornwell runs away to Ireland. Leaving behind a painful past and chasing her lifelong dream of becoming a novelist, she finds a fresh start on the misty shores of the Aran Islands. Amid the beauty of the Irish countryside, her life takes on the glow of a fairy tale when she meets a charming horse trainer and elopes to Gretna Green. Five years later, her happy ending has twisted into a nightmare and Betsy finds herself trapped in an abusive marriage, isolated and afraid with a newborn baby. On her son's first birthday, she runs away, turning to the women around her--her local domestic violence group, a trusted family friend, and an online Smith College alumnae network--for help she'd never known she could ask for.

"Why do you write?" the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews -- all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer -- surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory.

Time: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

A warm and witty memoir about the ever-changing relationships between mothers, mothers-in-law, and daughters that traverses two continents and multiple generations of two disparate yet connected families.