PBS NewsHour
5.06M subscribers
Dec 10, 2025
It’s that time of the year when PBS News Hour invites two of our regular literary critics, Ann Patchett and Maureen Corrigan, to highlight their favorite books of the year. Jeffrey Brown picks up the conversation for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Follow along using the transcript.
Show transcript
AMNA NAWAZ: Well, it's that time of year when "PBS News Hour" invites two of our regular literary critics to highlight their favorite books of the year.
Jeffrey Brown picks up that conversation for our arts and culture series, Canvas.
JEFFREY BROWN: 2025 was another year of great releases across an array of genres.
For a look at which books you should be reading and gifting this holiday season, we're joined by two of our favorite readers and recommenders, Maureen Corrigan, a professor at Georgetown University and book critic for NPR's "Fresh Air," and acclaimed author Ann Patchett,
who's also the owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, where she joins us.
Nice to see both of you again.
So let's start with fiction, as we often do.
Ann Patchett, I'm going to start with you and give you two picks.
ANN PATCHETT, Owner, Parnassus Books: OK. I'm only going to take one of the two picks because my other pick is going to be my best book of the year.
This is very close to my best book of the year. This is "The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny" by Kiran Desai. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize. It is a sweeping epic about two young people who are both from the same small town in India. They are living in the states.
And when they're in the states, they feel too Indian. And when they go home to India, they feel too American. And this is the story of how they slowly wind their way to one another and maybe cure their loneliness. Kiran Desai is a brilliant, all-encompassing writer, and I love this book.
JEFFREY BROWN: OK, and I love Ann Patchett. She makes her own rules. When I give her two, she takes one, and she will take her other one later.
(LAUGHTER) JEFFREY BROWN: Maureen, do you want to take two?
MAUREEN CORRIGAN, NPR Book Critic: My first pick is "The Antidote" by Karen Russell. Nobody does the old, weird America better than Karen Russell.
This novel is bookended by two real events, an epic Dust Bowl storm and an epic flood in 1935 in Nebraska. And in the middle is our main character, a prairie witch called the Antidote, who holds people's memories that they otherwise can't contain.
My other one is by Lily King, "Heart the Lover." And Lily King...
JEFFREY BROWN: Which is sort of a follow-up to an earlier one, right?
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: It's a follow-up to "Writers & Lovers."
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: But Lily King is such a brilliant designer of narrative that you
don't have to have read the first novel to really fall in love with this one.
It's about a love triangle at a college campus in the 1980s, and it follows our main character,
a woman nicknamed Jordan, as she tries to pull her life together and the decades afterwards.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right, let's move to nonfiction.
Ann Patchett, you can start this one again.
ANN PATCHETT: Arundhati Roy, "Mother Mary Comes to Me."
Arundhati Roy burst into the literary scene in 1996 with her international bestselling Booker Prize-winning "The God of Small Things," which sold over six million copies.
This is the story about her relationship with her brilliant and difficult mother, Mary Roy, but that's really only about 15 percent of the book.
The rest of it is about Arundhati Roy's life. She was an architect.
She was an actress. She was a screenwriter, but more than anything, she was a political activist. But let me throw in one small book that I also love that just came out.
And this is called "A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction" by Elizabeth McCracken.
There are so many people on your holiday list who want to be writers, and she has wonderful, wonderful, tough love, direct, and very funny advice on how to be the writer you want to be.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Maureen Corrigan, two in the nonfiction category.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: Yes, "Last Seen" by Judith Giesberg. Judith Giesberg is a historian. In 2017, with a lot of her research grad students, she constructed a Web site, the Last Seen Web site, that gathered together every ad they could find placed by formerly enslaved people looking for their family members who were sold away. This book
focuses on 10 of those ads. It really deepens our understanding of the lived experience of slavery.
So that's one. And then switching gears, Patti Smith's "Bread of Angels."
JEFFREY BROWN: Oh, her latest memoir.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: Her latest memoir in this year which celebrates the 50th anniversary of her landmark album, "Horses."
Patti Smith is such an American original. And her prose is both filled with poetry, but also this rough authenticity and I love her.
JEFFREY BROWN: As do many.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: Yes, yes.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right, now, Ann, I have been to your great bookstore in Nashville.
I know you have a wonderful children's book section. So this one's just for you.
ANN PATCHETT: All right, let's start off with my favorite picture book this year, "If We Were Dogs" by Sophie Blackall.
This is about two people who are having a conversation. Hey, what would we be like if we were dogs? What would our relationship be like? This is the answer. It turns out one of the people doesn't want to be a dog. We cannot keep this book in the store. And not
only do parents love reading it to children. The children are going crazy for this book.
So, Sophie Blackall, writer and illustrator.
And then, coincidentally, Sophie Blackall is also the illustrator
for the "Norendy" series. These are three very tiny little books by Kate DiCamillo, three very short novels put together in a box set. They are a little bit fairy tale, very imaginative, very beautiful. They all have a full arc.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Maureen Corrigan,
I have got a special category for you. We're going to call this surprise or a hidden gem.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: Yes, yes.
JEFFREY BROWN: Something that took you unawares.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: "Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife." I didn't think there was a lot left to learn about Gertrude Stein.
JEFFREY BROWN: This is a new biography.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: A new biography. Somehow, Gertrude Stein inspires, I think, almost an
obsessive investigatory zeal in her biographers. And I read this at night before I went to sleep,
like a detective novel. It goes deep into Stein's life in Paris and of course, her relationship with
Alice B. Toklas, but also the afterlife, how her reputation has been constructed, reconstructed. It's fascinating.
JEFFREY BROWN: And, Ann, your favorite book of the year that you could not live without?
ANN PATCHETT: "Buckeye by Patrick Ryan.
This is just such a terrific novel. It goes from the First World War through Vietnam, showing the effects of war and love, war and peace, shall we say, on a small Ohio town.
This is a book that women will love, that men will love, that if you have
someone on your list who says, oh, I only read nonfiction, they still will love this book.
It really meets everyone's needs and everyone who comes to this store has loved it.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Maureen Corrigan, a favorite.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: Oh, gosh. Don't make me.
JEFFREY BROWN: I am making you.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: "The Antidote." I would come back to Karen Russell. It's -- that's the book I'm going to keep thinking about
long after Christmas and the holidays and everything. It's an amazing book.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right, as always, you both have given us a great list.
Maureen Corrigan, Ann Patchett, thank you so much.
ANN PATCHETT: Thank you.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: Thank you.
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