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The Best Books of 2025 (So Far)
Including a vampire story that’s the closest thing we have to horror’s Moby-Dick.
Meanwhile, a previously published South Korean novel from last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature winner has finally been translated into English, and the author of 2021’s buzziest fiction debut hasn’t missed a step with her follow-up, a confident and imaginative collection. Bazterrica nods to other texts — the apocalyptic horror of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the entrenched misogyny of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the violent erotic charge of Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus — but she synthesizes it all into something wholly strange, timeless yet frighteningly timely. Though the book largely revolves around spurious media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, El Akkad’s great talent is in showing how, over the past few decades, corporate journalism and western powers have undermined our ability to confront global atrocities.
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