The National Book Critics Circle awarded their prizes for the “finest books published in English” in 2025 last week.

Book Riot house favorites Han Kang and Arundhati Roy both took home trophies, Kang for the novel We Do Not Part and Roy for her autobiography Mother Mary Comes to Me. Other winners included:

🏆 See the full list of winners here.

You probably know Jenny Lawson’s work even if you don’t know her name. After several successful memoirs, Lawson, who writes online as The Bloggess, returns this week with her first book of advice.

You know who could probably use Lawson’s advice? The woman at the center of Kirsten King’s A Good Person, whose “ex-situationship” turns up dead after she puts a hex on him.

Also hitting shelves:

🔓 Unlock our New Release Index to track the most exciting upcoming books when you join All Access. – RJS

Cozy YA fantasy has a new destination.

Calisa came to her great-aunt’s B&B to mend a broken heart. She expected charming and quaint. She got run-down and strange, and the guests are, well, not entirely of this world.

In The Faraway Inn, her first cozy YA fantasy, Sarah Beth Durst delivers a portal fantasy with a twist: the inn sits at a magical crossroads, hosting mythical creatures from dimensions you didn’t know existed. Between winning over her grumpy great-aunt, fixing up a crumbling inn, and spending time with the groundskeeper’s son, Calisa starts to find something she wasn’t looking for: a place to breathe.

Warm, weird, and full of heart, The Faraway Inn is the summer escape for readers who need a reprieve from the chaos.

Before Harry and Sally, before Hepburn and Tracy, before Scarlett and Rhett, and yes, before Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, there was Benedick and Beatrice.

One of Shakespeare’s best–and best-known–comedies, Much Ado About Nothing‘s “merry war” of wits has been inspiring rom-com shenanigans for more than 400 years. While the play is technically a tale of two love stories, it’s the enemies-to-lovers vibe between Benedick and Beatrice that steals the show.

🎧 Join us for a deep dive into the OG romantic comedy.

Every now and then, the internet gives us something good.

Roxane Gay has made no secret of her crush on Channing Tatum. After years of tweeting about her desire to work with the actor, Gay is making her dream come true, and we all get to go along for the, uh, ride.

🔥 If that’s not enough to get you fired up, you can learn more at InStyle.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Life of Pi

Yann Martel returns with Son of Nobody, and he brought a poem with him.

At the heart of the novel is The Psoad, an original free-verse epic poem Martel wrote for the book, anchoring a story that asks the question Life of Pi fans know him for asking: what are you willing to sacrifice for something greater than yourself?

🎨 Create a t-shirt design that celebrates your love of reading, and you could win $5k to share with your local library. Pretty sweet gift for National Library Week (April 19-25)!

Entries are open through April 8 in the Book Look contest from Syndicate X Library, the brand behind popular YouTube series “Books That Changed My Life.

See contest details and find out how to enter here.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a poet and nonfiction author (World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments). Her newest book is Night Owl: Poems, out today from Ecco. Below, she shares the connection between poetry and cultivating wonder.

For me, poetry doesn’t happen without attention. Turns out, being an observer, or a noticer, from being the new (brown) girl in (mostly white) schools most all my K-12 days paved the way for a lifetime of taking stock of the world around me. Noticing. Being curious about the planet and its various inhabitants. Honestly? I don’t know how else to be in this world.

The beginnings of a poem start with an image, like say, a nectarine in June—the first stonefruit of the season chomped outdoors to unofficially herald in summer, or a skitter of a blue-tailed skink across my back porch, or even a tiny scream of Eastern bluebird babies from their nest box. The poet’s job is simply to stay with the moment a little longer than usual—to really look and notice until something unlocks or leaps in your memory or attention.

Night deepens this kind of attention. When the day’s noise fades, my senses prick awake, my heart beats a little closer to the surface of my skin. For my writing, darkness becomes a kind of invitation. It asks us to listen differently, sometimes even (and especially) when it makes us a little uncomfortable. I revise and revise. And I revise even more because I feel more layers to the writing get revealed especially after dusk.

The nighttime world keeps offering small gifts, even in the face of so much injustice and destruction. My poems hope to gather those moments (while not ignoring the very real pain and suffering of so many lives) and set them gently before the reader. In this way—when I have my writing hat on—I feel like a crow, offering up a collection of tinsel, buttons, or a bit of a calico scallop shell on a gentle person’s windowsill. . . .

👉 Read the rest of Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s essay on Book Riot.

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Author, poet, and activist Marge Piercy was born on this day in 1936. William Gibson credits her 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time as the origin of cyberpunk.

🔪 Housewives fight back in these revenge thrillers.

🏆 Check out these great sports books by women, trans, and nonbinary authors.

🤔 Ponder the Seinfeld theory of fiction: do annoying characters help us admit we’re annoying too?

💪 Break out of your reading rut.

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Written by Rebecca Schinsky and Danika Ellis. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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