From Michelle Obama to Kiran Desai: Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2025

Rather than cataloguing outfits, Obama treats clothing as civic language. The careful neutrality of her White House wardrobe gives way to bolder post-presidency choices, mirroring a life less bound by institutional expectation. Contributions from stylist Meredith Koop and longtime collaborators add texture, but the voice remains unmistakably Obama’s.

In a list dominated by history and systems, The Look stands apart by insisting that presentation itself—when chosen deliberately—can be a form of agency.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny — Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai’s long-awaited novel, shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, is set largely between 1996 and 2002. It follows two Indian immigrants whose chance meeting on a train in India opens into a relationship shaped by migration, family pressure, and inherited history.

Desai’s ambition lies not in plot but in accumulation. Minor characters, domestic scenes, and generational backstories are given full moral weight. Loneliness emerges not as absence, but as a condition through which dignity and selfhood are slowly claimed.

The novel’s scale and patience feel almost defiant in an era of compression, and deeply aligned with Obama’s long-standing interest in diasporic narratives.

Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America — Beth Macy

Beth Macy’s Paper Girl returns to Urbana, Ohio, the town where she once delivered newspapers and where civic life, she argues, has eroded. Part memoir, part reported social history, the book examines how economic decline, mental health crises, and political radicalisation reshape communities from the inside. Macy refuses caricature. Former friends who now embrace conspiracy theories are rendered with empathy as well as alarm. By focusing intently on one place, Paper Girl illuminates national fracture without abstraction.

Flashlight — Susan Choi

Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, Susan Choi’s Flashlight explores the limits of memory in the aftermath of trauma. The novel opens with a father’s disappearance on a beach in Japan and traces the reverberations of loss across generations and continents.

Choi treats memory as fragmentary—brief illuminations rather than complete narratives. History enters obliquely, through the life of a Korean-born academic rendered stateless by war, and through geopolitical forces that rupture families without spectacle.

The novel’s power lies in its restraint. Forgetting, Choi suggests, may be less a failure than a mercy.

5. We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution — Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore’s We the People reframes the US Constitution as a living argument rather than a fixed artifact. Challenging originalism and judicial monopoly over interpretation, Lepore argues that amendment, not preservation, lies at the heart of American constitutionalism.

Lavishly illustrated and sweeping in scope, the book restores ordinary citizens to the story of constitutional change, from abolitionist movements to contemporary fights over voting and environmental rights.

It is the institutional anchor of Obama’s list: a reminder that democracy survives through participation, pressure, and revision.

The Wilderness — Angela Flournoy

Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness follows five Black women over two decades, tracing the evolution of friendship from early adulthood into midlife. Set against political upheaval and economic volatility, the novel focuses on the quieter labor of sustaining relationships.

Flournoy writes with humor and intimacy, capturing how class, ambition, and family obligation complicate loyalty. Friendship here is neither idealised nor abandoned—it is provisional, demanding, and deeply human.

The book offers a necessary counterweight to the list’s institutional concerns.

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America — Brian Goldstone

Brian Goldstone’s deeply reported work exposes the rise of the working homeless in American cities. Focusing on five families in Atlanta, the book reveals how full-time employment no longer guarantees stability in an economy shaped by soaring rents and weak tenant protections.

Goldstone’s reporting is intimate and unsentimental, following families as instability compounds through illness, eviction, and bureaucratic indifference.

The book sharpens the list’s social conscience, arguing that homelessness is not a marginal failure but a systemic one.

North Sun: Or, The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther — Ethan Rutherford

Set in 1878, North Sun follows a whaleship chasing profit into the ice-bound Chukchi Sea. Rooted in maritime tradition but infused with mythic unease, the novel examines the costs of environmental extraction at the edge of industrial ambition.

Rutherford’s historical setting feels unmistakably contemporary. Human dominion over nature erodes into obsession and ruin, with consequences that echo forward.

The novel extends the list’s concern with legacy, what progress consumes, and what it leaves behind.

1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History — Andrew Ross Sorkin

Andrew Ross Sorkin revisits the Wall Street crash through people rather than abstractions. Drawing on archival material, 1929 reconstructs how ambition, rivalry, and unchecked credit produced catastrophe.

Sorkin avoids simple villains, instead revealing a culture of normalized risk and incremental failure. Parallels to contemporary debates—over speculation, regulation, and “democratizing finance”—remain implicit but unavoidable.

The book underscores how crises unfold slowly, then all at once.

Dead and Alive — Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith’s essay collection ranges across art, politics, popular culture, and mourning. Writing with characteristic clarity, Smith reflects on figures from Joan Didion to Stormzy, and on spaces like Kilburn High Road as sites of cultural meaning.

Loss threads through the collection, but nostalgia is resisted. Attention itself becomes a civic act.

On Obama’s list, Dead and Alive functions as a critical conscience.

What We Can Know — Ian McEwan

Set in 2119, Ian McEwan’s novel uses speculative distance to examine the moral limits of liberalism. A future scholar reconstructs our era through fragments, archives, and a lost poem, revealing how catastrophe is remembered—and misremembered.

The disaster remains largely offstage. What matters is omission: what liberal nostalgia chooses not to see.

The book closes the list on an unsettled note, suggesting that history’s verdict is partial, and that moral clarity often arrives only by inference.