Best Books 2025: Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly

Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance

Ben Passmore (Pantheon)

Passmore’s breakout book is a daring hybrid of social history, sci-fi, and memoir that spotlights Black resistance movements from the Reformation to the present day. Shot through with caustic wit and time travel shenanigans, the narrative upends sanitized histories of the fight for civil rights, calling out omissions and refusing to pull punches about the hypocrisies of radical heroes. It’s rallying and rollicking.

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Black Cohosh

Eagle Valiant Brosi (Drawn & Quarterly)

Casually brutal, in the manner of a child’s perfectly unsentimental gaze, Brosi’s gem of a debut captures his fractured upbringing and struggle to be heard through a speech impediment in the Appalachian back-to-the-land commune where he was raised in the 1970s and ’80s. The bittersweetness of this graphic memoir’s hard truths makes a lasting impression.

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Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me

Mimi Pond (Drawn & Quarterly)

Pond revives Mitford-mania brilliantly in this dazzling chronicle of the soapy and scandalous lives of the eccentric British siblings who hobnobbed with fascists, communists, and royals in the 1930s. The acrobatic artwork makes every page a playful delight, and Pond’s nimble mix of history, gossip, and quotes from the sisters’ letters and diaries brings her subjects and their extravagant era to fabulous life.

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The Once and Future Riot

Joe Sacco (Metropolitan)

Comics journalist Sacco is at the height of his powers in this muscularly drawn, sharply analyzed account of a 2013 riot in India and its aftermath. He unpacks not only the complex specifics of that bloody clash, but the reasons why violent uprisings are cyclical, exploring how the flames of sectarian violence are fanned by politicians and issuing an urgent warning about the fault lines of democracy in a divided America.

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Spent

Alison Bechdel (Mariner)

The BDE (big dyke energy) of this hilarious autofiction allows for all the in-jokes Bechdel fans revel in, while also making room for those new to her oeuvre. Chronicling the travails of an anti-capitalist cartoonist named Alison as she navigates the queer subculture of middle-aged hippie, polyamorous Vermont, this tour de force pokes spiky fun at fame and progressive politics.

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Tongues, Vol. 1

Anders Nilsen (Pantheon)

Nilsen’s mind-bending epic spans millennia in acutely told moments: Prometheus remains chained but plays chess with his eagle torturer; gods threaten to be outdone by the iPhone; a young girl and a naive wanderer with a teddy bear strapped to his backpack traverse a war-torn landscape populated by armed mercenaries and mythical creatures. Every gorgeous, puzzle-like page is a masterpiece.

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