Books to read in March 2025

Bethanne Patrick review recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and non-fiction, to consider for your March reading list.

Winds of change appear this month. An author examines why our brains take sides and how they can also change the sides. A new set during the Dust Bowl sends urgent messages on how the climate affects the community. Meanwhile, a woman said she would never write a haunting recovery memory again.

Wonder also shone, with a billionaire accident landing in a swimming pool, a first fabulous novel about femininity and a magnificent kitchen book that celebrates the Bounty of California. Happy reading!

FICTION

Wood work: a novel
By Emily St. James
Zando: 368 pages, $ 28
(March 4)

Erica, an English teacher in high school, has something in common with his student Abigail – but in 2016, as a new presidential administration is looming, none of them knows how to break the ideas of their small town in southern Dakota to support each other. As they slowly and cautiously develop a friendship, their different modes of identity challenge a conservative community to talk about difference instead of trying to have people hide in the woodwork.

Antidote: a novel
By Karen Russell
Knopf: 432 pages, $ 30
(March 11)

Although the second novel by the winner of Pulitzer takes place in the Dust Bowl, his messages for the United States of the 21st century are manifested loud and clear. For Uz foreigners, Neb., On April 14, 1935, the “Black Sunday” blizzard of “Black Sunday” of not only their lives and their livelihoods, it offers the author the opportunity to ruminate how the flight and exploitation of European settlers have resulted in a territory that cannot support life according to this.

Hot air: a novel
By Marcy Dermansky
Knopf: 208 pages, $ 27
(March 18)

How can a simple mechanism like a hot air balloon bring so much joy and wonder? How can Dermansky wrap so much incisive humor in 200 pages? Some things prove to be ineffable, such as this multi-personal story of a woman, her daughter, her personal assistant, her pretender, her Crush camp, a long time ago and his wife-who all spend a weekend together. Not only does he take off, he climbs, he climbs, alternately fed by de -prone and the bomb.

Flight: a novel
By Abdulrazak Gurnah
Riverhead Books: 304 pages, $ 30
(March 18)

Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature while his novel “Afterlives” was published. With “flight”, he continues to put the history of his country of origin, Tanzania, with the fear of a geologist examining a rare, imperfect and inimitable specimen. Karim, returned home after years, married Fauzia; The two admire Badar, young like them but on a different socioeconomic path. What man will kiss his nationality and who will abandon him?

Twist: a novel
By colum McCann
Random house: 256 pages, $ 28
(March 25)

Join, fans of McCann's novel in 2008, “Let the Great World Spin”. “Twist” tells a completely different story, but unusual control of the author on his prose and elegant rates remain an Irish Irish writer named Anthony Fennel is embarking on an assignment to cover the submarine-fiber-fiber cables on the African coast. If you think these cables bear echoes of Joseph Conrad and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you are on the right wavelength.

Non-fiction

Parts that you will never come back: a memory of an improbable survival
By Samina Ali
Catapult: 272 pages, $ 27
(March 4)

Most of us understand that the stories go through many sketches. But the writer Ali had to go through several sketches of his self while she recovered from a stroke suffered as she delivered her first child. When Ali woke up on a coma, she could no longer speak English, only her first language, L'Ourdou. She has not recognized her husband or does not remember having given birth. Doctors thought she would never write again. She proven them absolutely wrong.

Coastal: 130 recipes for a California road trip
By Betsy Andrews and Scott Clark
Chronicle Books: 384 pages, $ 35
(March 11)

Follow the award-winning food writer Andrews and the head-owner Clark while they are starting to lunch the dad of the latter in Half Moon Bay and find themselves in the county of Ventura, missing in Nary a delicious stop along the way. Between lush photos of Cheyenne Ellis, magnificent descriptions of Andrews and recipes that benefit as much as possible from local generosity (think of the perfect Meyer lemonade and the Crabe Dengeness rice), it is a treat for all the senses.

Magic books: a story of enchantment in 20 medieval manuscripts
By Anne Lawrence-Mathers
Yale University Press: 368 pages, $ 38
(March 11)

Our medieval ancestors saw nothing incoherent between the devout Christian faith and the deep belief in magic. The groups of the writings and natal existed in tandem, as well as palm reading diagrams, potions recipes and instructions for alchemical reactions. Lawrence-Mathers shows not only the links between religion and witchcraft, but examines the beauty of the manuscripts involved, from illumination to illustration.

We are raking up stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine
By Alissa Wilkinson
Book: 272 pages, $ 30
(March 11)

Did you know that the emblematic writer Joan Didion wrote a script for “A Star is Born”, the tour of Barbra Streisand in 1976? The film critic of the New York Times, Wilkinson, explores the creation of myths and the link between Didion – a native of Sacramento and a graduate of the UC Berkeley – and Hollywood.

The ideological brain: the radical science of flexible thought
By Leor Zigmigrod
Henry Holt & Co:. 304 pages, $ 30
(March 25)

How do human brains negotiate the difference? Dr. Leor Zmigrod, a scientist winner of the price in the field of neurology, explains how ideologies give people individual shortcuts that make things easier to understand. Of course, this can also mean the purchase in compliance and intolerance. Zmigrod suggests that we can change our neural networks and become more open to the difference simply by observing our inclinations to accompany or resist the authority.