Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Political scientist and columnist: Best of Books 2025: My Choice

 Here are some original and engag­ing books picked from a vast ocean of excellent books. The stand­out novel was Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records (Granta), a powerful, lyri­cal, and brilliantly original novel that leaps across centuries, connecting Spinoza, Hannah Arendt, and the Tang poet Du Fu in a subtle story of displace­ment, persecution, and the meaning of life itself.

This was a great year for biographies. Joseph Torigian’s The Party’s Inter­ests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (Stanford), is deeply researched. Xi Zhongxun, Chinese Presi­dent Xi Jinping’s father, was a major figure in the Com­munist Party of China (CCP). Through an account of his highs and lows, the book also serves as an extraordinary introduction to the CCP, its capacity for ruthlessness, but also evoking loyalty.

Two biographies by friends were superb. ZBIG: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Cold War Prophet (Bloomsbury) by Edward Luce, a scintillat­ing biography of Brzezinski, is a model of good historical judgment. Thant Myint-U’s biography of his grandfather U Thant, Peacemaker: U Thant, the United Nations and the Untold Story of the 1960s (Juggernaut), is an elegiac telling of U Thant’s life and an acute analytical window into the possibilities and dashed hopes for the United Nations.

Jonathan Levy’s The Real Economy: History and Theory (Princeton) is a riveting account of how the ‘economy’ as an idea was constructed before neoclas­sical economics, and a re­minder of how understand­ing the contingency of the concepts we use, like capital, value, risk, and uncertainty, can help us get a better grip on the economy.

Two Hindi books were unusual reads. The great P Vidyaniwas Mishra’s Sanchayita (Rajkamal) is a remarkable series of essays on India’s intellectual tradi­tions, full of erudition and sparkling insight. Jyotish Joshi’s Swadharma, Swaraj aur Ramrajya (Setu) is a sensitive and original read­ing of Tulsidas and Gandhi, and the unexpected con­nections between them, but more successful with the metaphysics of swaraj than its politics.