Aatish Taseer, author: Best of Books 2025: My Choice

Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar Straus & Giroux)

I was dying to read Nicholas Bogg’s biography, and it didn’t disappoint. I took it to the beach and read it obses­sively. The parts that I found most moving had to do with his long relationship to Istanbul. I first learnt of it through Magdalena J Zaborowska’s ground­breaking research. Quoting Baldwin’s biographer Fern Marja Eckman, Zaborowska writes in James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Ex­ile (2009), “whenever closer hideaways fail to immunize him against his own social susceptibility,” he came to Istanbul, adding that the city served him “as a neither-here-nor-there liminal space.” Boggs deepens the story yet, and he is a wonder­ful writer to boot.

When the Going Was Good by Graydon Carter (Penguin)

Graydon offered me my first job in journalism as an editorial assistant at Vanity Fair. He still remembers that I turned him down for TIME Magazine. “Biggest mistake of your life,” he told me the other day. I inhaled his book, and it filled me with longing for a time I had never known.

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Olivier Guez (Verso)

I’m fairly late to this extraordinary 2017 novel, of which a film adaptation is out this year. The non-fiction novel at its most sly and inventive, leading us into the mind of one of the most diabolical narcissistic figures of the 20^th century.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton)

Arundhati used to be my mother’s aerobics instruc­tress, but I knew nothing of her deep banjarapan. This book caught me unawares, and I wept my heart out reading it. I love that she describes her mother as an airport with no runways. Felt a little familiar.