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Books can be a refuge from (waves arms) all this, even when they take you deeper into the darkness of 2025. There is a grace in the relationship between book and reader, with nothing but your eyes and brain and the words on the page. Thank goodness for the hearts and minds of the authors who imagine and construct these worlds, who ask these rigorous questions, who spend their lives with words. It’s a pleasure to join with a couple of my fellow book critics in selecting some of our favorite books of the year. — Carolyn Kellogg

Our picks for this year’s best in arts and entertainment.

“Audition: A Novel” by Katie Kitamura

(Riverhead)

“Audition”
By Katie Kitamura
Riverhead: 208 pages, $28

This is one of those books the less explained the better. Kitamura is one of our most exacting novelists, with never a careless word. On its surface, “Audition” is about an actress, her husband and a young man in New York City. As you’d expect with this setup, the ideas of self, performance and identity are in the mix. Every observation, theater visit and glimpse into their apartment becomes quietly important. The marriage’s past spools out with such clarity that what they have for breakfast becomes ominous. Every relationship has secrets, but this one’s are transformative. Elements of this book that cannot be prized apart also cannot cohere. It’s an astonishing accomplishment of form and narrative. It’s a rare book that can surprise like this one does. And it’s a delight to read. — C.K.

“Flesh: A Novel” by David Szalay

(Scribner)

“Flesh”
By David Szalay
Scribner: 368 pages, $28.99

Emotionally stunted men aren’t particularly hard to find in fiction. But Istvan, the antihero of Szalay’s fifth novel, is an extreme and engrossing case. Born in poverty and surviving an adolescence of sexual violation, wartime PTSD and drug abuse, he enters early adulthood destined to be a casualty if not a menace. But a lucky chance gives him money and a relationship, until his failure to deal with past traumas catches up with him. This novel, winner of the Booker Prize, uses a blunt, clipped style to advantage, exposing Istvan as an exemplar of both toxic masculinity and hinting at what’s required to escape it. — Mark Athitakis

“Flashlight” by Susan Choi

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

“Flashlight”
By Susan Choi
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 464 pages, $30
Should anyone think controlling metaphors are so 20th century, please pick up Choi’s new novel about family, exile and the different ways the titular humble tool works on literal, figurative, allegorical and visceral levels. When Louisa is 10, she and her Korean-born father go for a walk by the ocean; he’s carrying a flashlight to guide their footsteps. That night he disappears and Louisa is found half-dead in the surf; she has to shine a light onto her past in an effort to heal this loss. However, it’s her father’s past that signals this expansive book’s great theme of loneliness, even in the midst of other human beings. — Bethanne Patrick

“Shadow Ticket” by Thomas Pynchon

(Penguin Press)

“Shadow Ticket”
By Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Press: 304 pages, $30

That in this his 88th year Thomas Pynchon has published another novel, beginning in 1930s Milwaukee, of all places, packed full of punny names per usual, featuring a lug of a detective, successful with women who flirt as exquisitely as they dance or sing or grift, then shifting to Europe where it can be hard to sort out, from moment to moment, who’s in power, is more than anyone could have hoped for. “Shadow Ticket” is a detective novel that is also an anti-Nazi romp, with improbable motorcycles and flying machines. In The Times, critic David Kipen hailed Pynchon’s classic style as “Olympian, polymathic, erudite, antically funny, often beautiful, at times gross, at others incredibly romantic, never afraid to challenge or even confound.” This book is more accessible than “Gravity’s Rainbow,” more cheerful than “The Crying of Lot 49” and more political than “Inherent Vice.” It’s also still Pynchon, in all his goofy paranoiac glory. Rejoice. — C.K.

“The Director: A Novel” by Daniel Kehlmann

(S&S/Summit Books)

“The Director”
By Daniel Kehlmann
S&S/Summit Books: 352 pages, $28.99

Kehlmann’s stunning novel about Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst makes every reader a collaborator, at least about their level of comfort with fascism. The real-life Pabst, who returned to Europe after a disappointing sojourn in Hollywood, fell in readily with Hitler’s propaganda machine, to include directing “The White Hell of Pitz Palu” starring none other than future Third Reich filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. History may never know precisely why Pabst played along, and Kehlmann uses this uncertainty to great effect, inventing scenes juxtaposing art versus propaganda, sleekly privileged Nazis against frail prisoners, and historical truth with the chaos of dementia. — B.P.

“The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s” by Paul Elie

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

“The Last Supper: Art Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s”
By Paul Elie
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 496 pages, $33

Today’s culture wars didn’t start in the ‘80s, but Elie’s rich cultural history shows how the decade ushered them into the mainstream. Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of the pope on live network TV, Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” sparked protests, Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” made him a literal target, and legislators fumed about public art. Religion sat at the center of all of these donnybrooks, and questions of culture and faith had real-world consequences: AIDS victims, especially in the demonized LGBTQ community, took their pleas to religious leaders on the streets and in the pews. It was a vibrant and dispiriting time, and Elie’s history is a sharp cross-cultural study that speaks to the present as well. — M.A.

“One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” by Omar El Akkad

(Knopf)

“One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”
By Omar El Akkad
Knopf: 208 pages, $28

Novelist Omar El Akkad’s despair at the unfolding genocide in Palestine drove him to write this, his first nonfiction book. It’s part cry of anguish, part memoir that examines how the systems we enjoy in the western world are allowing Israel to perpetrate violence in Gaza in real time. The book poured out of El Akkad, though normally a slow writer: “I was writing quite furiously for months on end,” he told Dan Sheehan of Lithub. On Nov. 19, that furious outpouring won the National Book award in nonfiction. “It’s very difficult to think in celebratory terms about a book that was written in response to a genocide,” El Akkad said in his acceptance speech, refusing to let the reason for his book go unspoken. “It’s difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have spent two years seeing what shrapnel does to a child’s body. It is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I know that my tax money is doing this and that many of my elected representatives happily support it.” The book provides a vital moral questioning and point of connection. — C.K.

“Bad Bad Girl” by Gish Jen

(Knopf)

“Bad Bad Girl”
By Gish Jen
Knopf: 352 pages, $30

Perhaps this novel is really a thinly disguised memoir about the author’s mother — but what a brilliant disguise Gish Jen has concocted to give her Chinese-born mother, posthumously, a full voice that speaks to the pain of intergenerational misogyny and abuse. After the mother’s, Loo Shu-hsin’s, childhood story is told, her statements (in the U.S. she was known as Agnes) appear in boldface as stark counterpoint to her daughter’s searching questions. “Bad bad girl! Who says you can write a book like that? I laugh. That’s more like it.” Ultimately this novel-plus-memoir morphs into an artist’s origin story, one in which the artist understands that there is no creative work without origins, no matter how twisted their roots. — B.P.

“Minor Black Figures: A Novel” by Brandon Taylor

(Riverhead)

“Minor Black Figures”
By Brandon Taylor
Riverhead: 400 pages, $29

Taylor is one of the most emotionally perceptive fiction writers working today, and his third novel, set in the New York art world, is his best. Its hero, Wyeth, is a Black painter anxious about being pegged as simply a Black painter; he’s exhausted with what he considers the easy pandering (and bad art) surrounding identity politics. But a budding romance and unusual restoration project prompts him to question his certainties. Covering high and low, the sexual and the intellectual, Taylor’s book is a New York social novel distinct from the swagger of “The Bonfire of the Vanities” or the fevered melodramas of “A Little Life.” — M.A.

“Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson” by Claire Hoffman

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

“Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson”
by Claire Hoffman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 384 pages, $32

This marvelous biography of Aimee Semple McPherson reasserts her vital place in Los Angeles’ history. She was a celebrity, a brilliant performer, an inspiring preacher with a nationwide flock devoted to her writings and radio programs. She was, too, genuinely called to her Pentecostal Christianity, at least at first, which author Claire Hoffman writes about with great sensitivity. Her climb was slow and earned; she spent many years on the road, pitching tents and preaching to diverse audiences. Then to Los Angeles, where her grand church, the Angelus Temple, was built in Echo Park. In 1926, she vanished at Venice Beach and was thought to have drowned. She reappeared — after a memorial service attended by thousands — with stories of a dramatic kidnapping. It was a sensation. Reporters raced to find the kidnappers and, instead, turned up evidence of a tryst. Hoffman unspools the scandal, which included headline-grabbing trials, in page-turning detail. What she shows us is a woman whose spiritualism, stage presence and charisma propelled her into a place of celebrity and fame that became a trap. — C.K.

“What We Can Know” by Ian McEwan

(Knopf)

“What We Can Know”
By Ian McEwan
Knopf: 320 pages, $30

It’s 2119 when scholar Thomas Metcalfe sets out to find the sole copy of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” written by one Francis Blundy in 2014. Much of the speculation about the poem’s whereabouts centers on a dinner party that allows McEwan to flash his tail feathers in describing a late-capitalist tableau of quail and ceps, anchovies and red wine, high-minded conversation and low lamplight. Is it a spoiler to share that a tsunami has wiped out most of Europe, leaving scattered archipelagos as repositories of things once known? Definitely not, in light of who narrates the book’s second half. Don’t miss this, among the author’s best. — B.P.

“Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers” by Caroline Fraser

(Penguin Press)

“Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers”
By Caroline Fraser
Penguin Press: 480 pages, $32

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, America was overpopulated with notorious serial killers like John Wayne Gacy, BTK and Ted Bundy. By the ‘90s, though, evidence of that brand of savagery declined. What happened? In “Murderland,” Pulitzer winner Caroline Fraser considers the theory that the derangement was tied to smelters that released mind-warping levels of arsenic and lead into the atmosphere until regulations kicked in. Braiding memoir, pop science and true crime, Fraser delivers a remarkable, persuasive narrative about how good-old-fashioned American values — manufacturing might, westward expansion, cheap leaded gas — turned into a literally toxic combination. — M.A.

“Stone Yard Devotional: A Novel” by Charlotte Wood

(Riverhead)

“Stone Yard Devotional”
By Charlotte Wood
Riverhead: 304 pages, $28

An atheist walks into a convent. … That’s not the start to a joke but the premise of this 2024 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel. The unnamed narrator leaves Sydney (husband, house, grievances) to live with a rural religious order. Even as she works alongside the nuns, worldly troubles rush in: The bones of a murdered nun are accompanied by famed climate activist Sister Helen Parry, disrupting the quiet. The narrator knows Sister Helen from schooldays and wonders whether our past actions affect our present circumstances, all while the women battle a rodent infestation that might not be out of place in a horror story. In other words, it’s riveting prose about how humans beat back despair. —B.P.

“Cece” by by Emmelie Prophete

(Archipelago)

“Cécé”
By Emmelie Prophète
Translated from French by Aidan Rooney
Archipelago: 224 pages, $18

Prophète’s blunt, bracing novel concerns Cécé, a young Haitian woman whose world has fallen out from under her — she’s endured an absent, drug-addicted mother, a recently dead grandmother, and a slum life that leaves her with few options beyond prostitution. An unlikely escape hatch arrives in the form of Instagram, and as her posts about her Haitian life gain traction, she becomes a prize — and a target — for rival gangs. Cécé can be read as a portrait of contemporary Haiti, a parable about influencer culture or a distressing study of exploitation. However it’s read, Prophète’s vision is piercing and memorable. — M.A.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 12th Edition

(Merriam-Webster)

“Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary: 12th Edition”
By Merriam-Webster.
Merriam-Webster: 1,856 pages, $34.95

Take your AI-hallucinated definitions and send them in a rocket ship to Mars, baby! The Merriam-Webster dictionary is back in print in a new edition. In its first update since 2003, it’s added 5,000 new words, 20,000 new usage examples, and 1,000 new idioms and phrases (hello, “dad bod”). But that’s not the most important part, which is that this is a beautiful, solid, immutable printed book. It will never randomly serve up some flaky incorrect definition or reference. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary captures language in a moment, with the full history and understanding of the way it evolves. It was crafted by researchers and etymologists who love words (“comes from the Greek word etymon, meaning ‘literal meaning of a word according to its origin’ ”). The Merriam-Webster website is hugely popular — keep using it! — but an actual printed dictionary will never let you down, and be good for another 20 years. — C.K.

Singapore has reported a growing number of “rogue” or “shadow fleet” tankers operating off its shores in and around one of the world’s busiest maritime corridors.

According to Lloyd’s List Intelligence data cited by international maritime authorities, at least 27 such ships transited the Singapore Strait in early December, with another 130 clustered nearby around Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago.

While traffic through the strait remains dense and appears outwardly routine – more than 80,000 vessels pass through it each year – ship-spotters and analysts say the profile of some of the ships using these waters has recently changed.

Why are so many ‘rogue’ tankers appearing near Singapore?

Conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East has sparked a surge in Western sanctions on oil exports from countries such as Russia and Iran. The European Commission and the United States Trump administration have both recently renewed or extended sanctions against Venezuelan oil, as well.

As a result, a parallel, unofficial maritime network has emerged to keep sanctioned oil moving.

The Singapore Strait is a vital artery for global maritime trade, carrying about one-third of the world’s traded goods at some point along their journeys. For tankers at sea, it is almost unavoidable – the strait is a natural gateway between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, also a busy trade artery.

The Maritime and Port Authority monitors vessel movements within Singaporean waters. But international law limits what action it can take once ships move into the high seas – in effect, international waters – allowing shadow fleets to thrive in regulatory grey zones.

In recent weeks, suspect shipping activity has been noted just beyond Singapore’s territorial waters – roughly 22.2 kilometres from its coast – in international waters, just outside of the city state’s law enforcement reach.

What are ‘shadow fleets’ and how do they avoid sanctions?

As a result of record sanctions by Western governments in recent years over Russia’s war in Ukraine, Iran’s nuclear programme and, most recently, United States President Donald Trump’s campaign against Venezuela, the number of falsely flagged ships globally has more than doubled this year to more than 450, most of them tankers, according to the International Maritime Organization database.

All vessels at sea are required to fly a flag showing the legal jurisdiction governing their operations in international waters. The body which grants ship nationalities is the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

A shadow ship, or “ghost” ship, is typically an ageing vessel with obscure ownership. These vessels frequently change flags – for instance, when the US seized the tanker, Skipper, off the coast of Venezuela earlier this month, the government of Guyana, Venezuela’s neighbour, said it was “falsely flying the Guyana flag”, and clarified that it was not registered in the country.

Operators of shadow ships also falsify registration details, broadcast false geo-location codes, or even switch off tracking systems altogether to evade detection and skirt UNCLOS laws.

These vessels typically carry sanctioned oil and other restricted goods such as military equipment. They often conduct risky ship-to-ship transfers of cargo under the cover of night to avoid detection. This can create serious safety and environmental risks.

Additionally, most of the tankers are owned by shell companies in jurisdictions such as Dubai, where rapid buying and selling by anonymous or newly formed firms can take place, making it even harder to trace their origins.

Jennifer Parker, a specialist in maritime law at Australia’s University of New South Wales, said the increasing number of shadow fleets presents a “real challenge”.

Parker told Al Jazeera that “finding out who owns them and who insures them has been incredibly difficult because of the [murky] paper trail around them”.

She added that “often they would do what is called bunkering, which is the process of transferring fuel at sea between ships. So that makes it hard to track where that ship has actually come from and where that oil has come from.”

She added: “Sometimes, what they do is actually mix oil, so you will have a legitimate ship that will do a ship-to-ship transfer at sea with a shadow fleet and they will mix the oil so it becomes hard to really trace where that oil has come from … to avoid sanctions.”

What sort of problems do these tankers cause?

When ageing, uninsured vessels are involved in accidents, it can lead to environmental disasters like oil spills.

According to Bunkerspot, a specialist maritime publication, a shadow tanker spill, which can cause enormous damage to water, wildlife and local coastlines, can cost up to $1.6bn in response and cleanup alone.

Last December, Russian authorities scrambled to contain an oil spill in the Kerch Strait caused by two 50-year-old tankers which had been damaged during a heavy weekend storm. The scale of the environmental damage and the associated cleanup costs remain unclear.

In addition to vessel collisions, they can cause environmental damage through chemical leaks and illegal waste dumping.

Who uses shadow fleets the most?

Russia is the primary beneficiary of ghost fleet trading. Moscow has largely maintained its oil exports despite Western sanctions, ensuring steady revenue for its war in Ukraine. Though not to the same extent, Iran and Venezuela also sell fossil fuels using ghost fleets.

China and India, currently the largest buyers of Russian crude, benefit from steep discounts, often purchasing oil well below the Western-imposed $60 per barrel price cap, which was imposed in December 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Tracking by S&P Global and Ukrainian intelligence shows that Russia relied heavily on its shadow tanker fleet in 2025. India has been the main destination, importing about 5.4 million tonnes (or 55 percent of Russian crude oil sales via shadow tankers) between January and September.

China has taken a smaller but still significant share of about 15 percent. Overall, most Russian seaborne crude now moves outside Group of Seven (G7)-compliant shipping, underscoring the shadow fleet’s central role in this trade.

What actions have governments taken against shadow fleets?

To avoid enforcement of sanctions, many shadow tankers have moved out of major shipping lanes. In part, this is down to European authorities now requiring physical inspections during ship-to-ship transfers, making it riskier for these vessels to operate on conventional routes.

For instance, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Finland and Estonia recently began carrying out insurance checks on tankers transiting the Gulf of Finland and the waters between Sweden and Denmark. This is aimed at ensuring compliance with 2022 sanctions on Russian oil.

Meanwhile, in July 2025, the United Kingdom imposed measures – such as restrictions on access to UK ports, insurance and financial services – on 135 shadow fleet vessels and two linked firms, aiming to reduce Russia’s shipping capacity and cut its energy earnings.

In the US, President Donald Trump has warned that comparable measures will follow if Russia refuses to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine, raising the prospect of closer transatlantic coordination with the UK and Europe against shadow fleets.