Non-fiction you must read in 2025

Mother Mary Comes to Me (Penguin) by Arundhati Roy is the Booker winner’s first memoir is the acclaimed writer’s account of visiting the Himalayas with her publisher-husband, where the duo discover an abandoned cottage, cultivate a garden and Roy describes what the life, away from the city and its wreckage, feels like. Said Roy in a statement, “I have been writing this book all my life. Perhaps a mother like mine deserved a writer like me as a daughter. Equally, perhaps a writer like me deserved a mother like her. Even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject.”

Wild Fiction: Essays (HarperCollins) by Amitav Ghosh is a return to “the subjects that have obsessed him over the last 25 years”, namely climate change, literature, language and the way we inhabit, ruin and regenerate the places we walk on, on Earth. He tackles topics as diverse as the mangrove forests of Bengal, the commodification of clove and the role imperialism plays in it all.

Farmers Protest! A Movement for our Times (Yoda Press) by Namita Waikar draws a link from 1917’s Satyagraha movement led by Gandhi alongside Bihari farmers, one that evolved into one of the largest anti-colonial struggles in history, to the 2020 farmer’s movement that began in Punjab and Haryana against the central government’s new farm laws. It also explores the city’s aloofness from the village, and how it contributes to complacency when protests to preserve the farm are not linked to food scarcity and climate change.