A spare and eerie — and eerily peaceful — Austrian novel from the 1960s about a woman who wakes one day to discover herself seemingly the last human alive on earth, encased within the bounds of a glasslike wall that has come down overnight to separate her from a suddenly deadened world. The Wall cycles with the seasons of the unnamed narrator’s first years in isolation, as she settles into the rhythms of survival and reckons with the unavoidable anguish of caring deeply for mortal creatures. It crushed me utterly.
-Aurora, Reference
Another year has ended, another year in which I drafted a miles-long list of the new books I hoped to read and then failed spectacularly to read more than a meager handful of them. As meager handfuls go, though, it was thoroughly satisfying. Below are my favorite nonfiction releases of 2025, in no particular order.
Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress by Roy Scranton
An earlier book by Roy Scranton bears what may be the most perfect title ever: Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. (Note: Not only is this book an essential read, but if the cover is kept visible it makes for highly effective small talk repellent during extended stays in public settings, i.e., airport layovers.) Impasse builds on the thesis that Scranton sketched out in Learning to Die, namely, that any honest assessment of our contemporary ecological predicament – marked by climate change, yes, but also air and water pollution, soil degradation, deforestation, and the biodiversity loss incurred by mass extinction – is bound to land on the conclusion that we are unlikely to MacGyver our way out of this one. Scranton challenges the Western “myth of progress” that holds that our human future must be bright, because mankind is brilliant, judging this storyline a gateway drug into delusional optimism. Optimism can be positive and productive, but when unmoored from reality, it rapidly deteriorates into denial, paralysis, escapism, and that vague, prickling anxiety we feel wafting up from the plaques of repressed dread gradually congealed to sludge within our collective nervous system. Rose-colored glasses are out, Scranton declares. Instead he advocates for the cultivation of “ethical pessimism,” a philosophy based in the acceptance of suffering, loss, and limitation as realities to meet with lucidity and grace, rather than glitches to correct. In the tradition of writers like Simone Weil and James Baldwin, Scranton views this acceptance as a portal into the deeply felt compassion at the heart of moral living, integral to altruism and solidarity. Impasse asks us to decide what kind of creatures we will be when our world ends. It is a painful question, but an urgent one.
The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies are Reinventing Misogyny by Laura Bates
Key to the “myth of progress” discussed above is the conviction that technological innovation will solve all our problems, that once technology is sufficiently advanced, every lofty social ambition will roll smoothly towards realization: justice and equity, prosperity, happiness for all. Underlying this confidence is the presumption that badness is some primordial element, a brutish anachronism destined for purging by the purifying blaze of modernity’s forward march. The more one reads of Laura Bates’ The New Age of Sexism, the harder it becomes to cling to this belief. Bates exposes the sexist ideology programmed into the most vaunted new tech, hardwired biases that have given rise to cutting-edge methods of abuse and exploitation. Meanwhile, the utopian future remains elusive. What we are witnessing instead is the dawn of a brave new world custom-built almost wholly by and for men, populated with all the cyber-brothels and uncomfortably youthful chatbot girlfriends one would expect of such a realm. This virtual reality we’re being shepherded into promises to be no haven for female inhabitants, if the Metaverse sexual assaults that Bates describes are any indication. Of course, the author is eager to reassure readers that she is not anti-tech; she calls for regulation as the remedy rather than a cease-and-desist. This is a reasonable, moderate, judicious, entirely predictable stance for her to take. For myself, though, faith in such safeguards is difficult to muster, and the implication that there could be a chatbot worth celebrating infinitely perplexing. Why can’t we chat with real live people? Or dogs, or plants? Why not just go outside?
The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life by Rob Dunn
The honeyguide, biologist Rob Dunn tells us, is an African bird whose taste for beeswax is stymied by its inability to infiltrate the hive. But the honeyguide is no quitter: long ago it learned that if it sang out to signal the location of a beehive, humans would come along and break open the hive in pursuit of honey—thereby granting the bird access to the coveted wax. Today, this mutualism – the scientific term for a beneficial relationship between species – has lapsed. “The birds no longer call because the humans no longer listen,” Dunn writes. Within industrialized societies, humans have grown isolated from the natural world, an ever-larger slice of our days spent indoors and online, logged in but disconnected, and ultimately alone. We hear a lot of lamenting about the loneliness epidemic, but what if, even more than our estrangement from one another, it is our alienation from the rest of creation that immiserates us? Dunn reminds readers that as one species among many we are not, and never have been, outside the weave of interdependence that defines life on earth. Even as individual organisms we are not discrete but composite beings, comprised of swarms of microbes in continuous interplay with the cells we call our own. The vision Dunn paints, of the biosphere flourishing through multi-species mutual aid, is not the naïve daydream of some wistful tree hugger. Dunn is a scientist and his vision reflects the real world. The trouble is that we have lost sight of it, because we have been turned away from it. Yet return is possible, if only we can salvage our species from systemic desolation.
Other Contenders:
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad
Perfect Victims: and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd
Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime by Sarah Weinman
The Age of Diagnosis: How Our Obsession with Medical Labels is Making Us Sicker by Suzanne O’Sullivan
It’s been an amazing year of reading! Here are some of the things PFL staff have enjoyed the most during 2025.
In a Distant Valley by Shannon Bowring
The Elements by John Boyne
Flooded: Requiem for Johnstown by Ann E. Burg
The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens
The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia by Juliet Grames
Matrix by Lauren Groff
The Everlasting by Alix Harrow
Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Feast by Margaret Kennedy
Fairy Tale by Stephen King
North Woods by Daniel Mason
The Lieutenant of Inishmore by Martin McDonagh
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
We Solve Murders by Richard Osman
Endling by Maria Reva
Hibakusha: Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki translated by Gyanor Sekimori
The History of Sound: Stories by Ben Shattuck
More Weight: A Salem Story by Ben Wickey
Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century by W. David Marx
Critic and historian W. David Marx has taken the pulse of mass culture and declared it moribund—not quite dead, but nearly so, its complexion bluing as torpor thins the rhythm of its wilted heart. In Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, Marx sifts through a quarter-century of popular music, fashion, movies and memes, as well as those half-breeds unleashed from the irrepressibly fecund hatcheries of Content Creation, searching out the bottom of what he sees as culture’s steady decline into a NeverEnding-Story-style Swamp of Sadness, in which Instagram-faced influencers strike spiritless poses amidst the slimy reeds of a thousand reality TV spinoffs. Culture, he laments, has beached itself on the shores of a terminal banality, where it festers spewing from all its pores a relentless spillage of Marvel Universe metastases and retro-chic reboots, impenetrable brainrot dreck, TikTok trends and rebranded reheated remixes and the treacle strains of Taylor Swift echoing to the sunken horizon.
Although I’m not as close as Marx seems to be to donning my widow’s weeds for processing behind culture’s hearse, having witnessed faint stirrings of life at the margins, I have also seen the slackening of a tween’s jaw as she was looping for the zillionth time through some jittery video of a cartoon fork gyrating to the B-52’s “Rock Lobster” and hummed a mute, internal dirge. Of course, declaring culture a cadaverous husk is a straight shot to an Insufferable Snob of the Year nomination, but Marx takes the risk, in the hope that sounding the alarm might kindle resistance, even revival. Marx, for one, is not yet ready to slouch into the oubliette of stuporous eternal return eroded into our century by what he identifies as a confluence of forces philosophical, political, and economic: the Panglossian “poptimism” that ranks popularity over originality or substance as the ruling measure of excellence; risk-averse funders’ distaste for any but the most market-tested hot commodities; the apparently unshakeable postmodern infatuation with pastiche; algorithmic tyranny and, most recently, the AI art-pocalypse. If we are to exhume ourselves from the sludge of cultural stagnation, Marx writes, it will require a tipping of collective creative vision to some north star slightly upward of the bottom-line.
For fans of cultural criticism and long-form polemic, as well as recusant non-Swifties, creative malcontents, and everyone gagging at the idea of another Superman remake.
Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First Century Life by Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita
Escapist nostalgia tops the list for most obvious of all possible reactions to an underwhelming present and the vertigo induced by a future that looks, from where one reels queasily on the precipice, less promising with each new and inhospitable day. I am as guilty of this very unimaginative retreat from hard reality as anyone, though for years I could pretend otherwise, absolving myself on the grounds that my own old-timey psychic haven of choice was no red-and-white gingham midcentury American Heartland kitchenscape nor PBS romance Edwardian manor, but an age usually diligently avoided by the daydream set, smirched as it is by the stigma of bubo-ridden mass death. Yes, my nostalgia time-warps me right back to the Middle Ages, though I’ll make do with the Baroque period if pressed. To be more specific: the cloister beckons. It has nothing to do with religious vocation, I confess; what attracts me is the quietude, the slow candlelit cycling of a contemplative life, equally appealing whether spent in devotional solitude or enveloped in the company of self-sufficient women. (This is pure fantasy and I know it, so feel no need to shatter my illusions. I would make a terrible anchoress and a truly disastrous Mother Superior, were I among the blessed who survived past toddlerhood.)
Whereas I’ve long had the place to myself, my own fringe borderland of nostalgic reverie, now, apparently, I’ll have to make room in the stone-walled cell, since, as the authors of Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First Century Life point out, the nunnery has become an It destination in armchair time travel. Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita met while PhD students at Brown University, where both were researching the Spanish Carmelite nun St. Teresa of Avila, of Interior Castle fame. By some miracle the pair triumphed over academic competitiveness to become best friends, and the book they’ve co-authored is a paean to Renaissance-era nuns that cheekily masquerades itself as a self-help manual. Whether it’s friendship friction, body image woes, despotic bosses, financial turmoil, or the pangs of unreciprocated sapphic love that plague you – alas, no counsel is offered for those plagued by actual plague – as Garriga and Urbita write, “Anything you may be going through now already happened to a nun.” And so too did any number of things weirder than you might expect. For example: have you ever had demons frame you for stealing from the communal pantry, when in fact you were subsisting entirely on spiderwebs and thorns? Have you levitated to the rafters of your local chapel? Or been graced with visions depicting the universe in shapes and hues that would make Georgia O’Keefe blush? All these and more abbey antics feature in Convent Wisdom, making it a high-spirited primer for those whose retrograde glances have initiated them into the new Cult of the Nun. Welcome, Sister.
For fans of St. Teresa of Avila, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the Beguines, Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, and vows of silence.
Over the past few years, Maine authors have been churning out a high volume of popular and critically acclaimed fiction, and 2025 has been another banner year. In case you didn’t catch wind of all of these new releases, check out our recap of the year below. Many of these novels, mysteries, and short stories are also set in Maine, and those releases are marked by an asterisk. Click on any title to place a hold in our Minerva catalog. Congratulations to our homegrown and imported Maine talent!
In a Distant Valley (#3 in Dalton, Maine trilogy) by Shannon Bowring*
Departure 37 by Scott Carson (pen name for Michael Koryta)*
Crimson Thaw by Bruce Robert Coffin*
The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie*
Skin and Bones: and other Mike Bowditch Stories (#12.5 in the Mike Bowditch series) by Paul Doiron*
Shaw Connolly Lives to Tell by Gillian French*
The Frequency of Living Things by Nick Fuller Googins
Hazel Says No by Jessica Berger Gross*
The Whyte Python World Tour by Travis Kennedy
Heart the Lover by Lily King
Never Flinch (#4 in Holly Gibney series) by Stephen King
Maine Characters by Hannah Orenstein*
We Can’t Save You by (#2 in Ryan Tapia mystery series) by Thomas Ricks*
Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor
The Glass Eel by J.J. Viertel*
*Designates books that are also set in Maine.
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And here are a few bonus reads which are set in Maine, but are not written by authors living in Maine!
Heartwood by Amity Gaige
Etiquette for Lovers & Killers by Anna Fitzgerald Healy (author grew up in Maine, but now lives in Los Angeles)
You Are Fatally Invited by Ande Pliego
Little Great Island by Kate Woodworth
I love a good time loop story, and The Everlasting is one of the best I’ve read. Written in an alternating second person and featuring gorgeous illustrations both within the story and on and inside the cover, this book is a thoughtful experience that will linger in your bones as if you are in your very own time loop.
Historian Owen Mallory has been obsessed with the legendary knight Una Everlasting his whole life. When he is sent back in time to aid her in her quest for the grail to save the ailing queen, he discovers that the great Una is not just a powerful warrior, but a whole fascinating, familiar person. As he begins to fall in love with her bits of memory arise. They have done this journey before, many, many times, and it always ends in tragedy. What is the real story behind this endless tale? How many more times must Una Everlasting die in his arms before their story can be complete?
A beautifully written story of love, war, power, and the stories we tell. Author Alix E. Harrow takes some familiar elements of myth and heroism and presents a story both familiar and fresh, absolutely stunning in its complexity and grace.
-Hannah, Programs and Outreach
Yeva, a scientist who has devoted her life to rescuing endangered snails, funds her research by joining a romance tour, where wealthy bachelors from other countries come to Ukraine looking for a wife. Nastiya and Solomiya are sisters also involved in the marriage industry for non-marriage reasons; they are trying to find their activist mother who disappeared from their lives years ago. Nastiya convinces Yeva to kidnap some of the bachelors in her snail habitat van in a stunt that will surely get her mother’s attention, just as a potential mate for Lefty, the last snail of his kind, is discovered across the country, and Russia bombs Ukraine. As the characters race to save themselves, Lefty, and possibly the bachelors trapped in their van, author Maria Reva suddenly writes herself into the story, turning what was already a fascinating read into an ambitious and experimental piece of meta fiction.
Will Lefty find his mate and save the species? Will the bachelors ever be convinced the war is real and not just a publicity stunt? Will writing a novel while in Canada watching her childhood home crumble still feel useless to Maria? Will her grandfather ever leave Ukraine? Endling is a fascinating and often deeply (and darkly) funny read that explores war, love, home, family, science, art, and, of course, snails. A timely but timeless tale that blew my mind in the best way possible. Definitely in the running for my favorite book of the year!
Halloween is, in my estimation, the reigning queen of all holidays. It has the best snacks – gummy bats! pumpkin whoopie pies! Oreo spiders with pretzel legs! popcorn balls! …ok, so let’s forget about popcorn balls – as well as the best movies, the best decorations, the best commingling of folk tradition and modern-day consumerist excess, and by far the best dress code, as evidenced by Halloween’s leading ladies, who are themselves quite plainly the best: Elvira, Morticia and Wednesday Addams, Vampira, Siouxsie Sioux. Halloween even has the best parties, though these, being parties, are a mite too fearsome for scaredy-cats like myself.
But lucky for me, Halloween also has the best books—so while braver souls are out testing their mettle with prolonged public socializing, I can stalk off to my lair’s dusky recesses for lone hours spent nursing fretful dreams with the season’s literary offerings. This year has spawned a particular wealth of eerie and eldritch nonfiction to satisfy – or sharpen, if you please – the ol’ spooky tooth.
Alice Vernon’s Ghosted: A History of Ghost Hunting, and Why We Keep Looking is an empathetic study of the deeply human yearning to sneak glimpses beyond the veil, as manifested in paranormal prying from Victorian séances to the reality TV ghost chasers of the present day. You know the type: that peculiar breed of buff men in skull t-shirts who go barging into derelict hotels, armed with night-vision goggles and EMF readers, to verbally harass the denizens of the spirit world.
Leila Taylor takes up the ghostly thread with similar thoughtfulness in Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread, though her focus is less on the apparitions than on the dwellings they infest. Theorizing why hauntings close to home feel so singularly sinister, Taylor likens the haunted house to the possessed body: both represent violations of an individual’s innermost sanctuary, incursions that can mean permanent exile from any sense of safety.
For those who prefer to keep their creepiness strictly out of doors, Roger Luckhurst leads readers on a tour through the cultural life of the grave in Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead. Luckhurst is an adept and eloquent guide for this excursion, as he winds through Neolithic burial sites, sprawling necropolises, tenebrous ossuaries, and the eco-conscious “green cemeteries” that have gained popularity in recent years, the fruit of our growing squeamishness about returning to the earth as toxic sludge.
Meanwhile, Eleanor Johnson’s Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980) disinters much for film buffs to contemplate, a perfect pairing with scary movie marathons and heaping bowls of candy corn. Building on the work of feminist film scholars like Laura Mulvey, conceptualizer of the oft-cited “male gaze,” Johnson analyzes infamous horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist for their reverberations with the burgeoning women’s movement of the 1970s. For Johnson, the true nightmares these films expose are not supernatural, but sociopolitical: the dreadful realities of women’s lives under patriarchy.
And if you’re unnerved that anyone should delight in such ghoulish reading material, please permit me to direct you to Coltran Scrivner’s Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away. According to Scrivner, a psychologist and researcher, our cultural mania for the macabre is not as depraved as it would on first glance appear. Rather, he offers reassurance to my my mother (among others) that an appetite for darkness is, in fact, surprisingly wholesome, helpfully preparing us mere mortals for a world seemingly mined with deathtraps.
But horrifying though it may be out there, I do hope that this Halloween, at least, is only as spine-tingling as suits your tastes, with no unwonted terrors, and a perfectly delectable balance of tricks and treats.
Adam Nevill, author of the uniquely disturbing The House of Small Shadows has written many horror stories, of which I have enjoyed almost all (mostly his older ones), A couple have been made into movies, but as I find most of the time, the books were much better, The Ritual being one example. I actually traded emails with him several years ago, as I wanted to know why certain elements repeatedly occurred in his stories, seemingly innocuous things that obviously frightened him. I also berated him for making goats evil in a few of his novels, as I had two cute ones at the time. In response to my relaying to him how much I loved The House of Small Shadows, he expressed gratitude, due to one critic writing that the book was only good for using as toilet paper. It has its flaws and is not for everyone, but I’ve read it twice, and probably will again, when I want to have nightmares. I’m not even going to try to explain the plot, it’s hard to accomplish without spoilers. I will just say there are creepy puppets, a creepy house, and a very creepy family.
-Meredith, Children’s Room
Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology is the perfect read for spooky season! This chilling collection is haunting, eerie, and unsettling in all the best ways. More than once, I had to put it down just to catch my breath—and a few times I even caught myself covering my mouth to keep from squealing with fear. Featuring Indigenous writers from across North America, including Maine’s own Morgan Talty, this anthology blends horror with rich cultural lore and history. I highly recommend it for anyone ready to white-knuckle their way through a truly unforgettable read.
-Samantha, Development Director
