“Before you become a writer you must first become a reader. Every hour spent reading is an hour spent learning to write.”
Spring 2025 is bringing a wave of new non-fiction books that are sure to captivate readers of all interests. Whether you love thought-provoking memoirs, gripping true crime, insightful history, or life-changing self-help, this season’s releases have something for everyone. If you’re looking for the best new non-fiction books to read this spring, you’re in the right place. Today at What We Reading, we’re rounding up the must-read non-fiction books for spring 2025, covering a mix of seasoned bestsellers and fresh voices with compelling new perspectives. From fascinating deep dives into history to powerful personal stories, these books guarantee to inform, inspire and entertain. If you’re keen to spruce up your spring reading list with the latest non-fiction books, be sure to check out these new releases!
Raising Hare: A Memoir – Chloe Dalton
Kicking off our list of the best spring 2025 non-fiction books is Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare, a moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world. The story opens in February 2021 when Dalton happens upon a newborn hare that has been chased by a dog. Fearing for its life, she brings the hare inside, only to discover that the vast majority of wild hares die in captivity due to shock or starvation. However, through trial and error, the hare soon becomes her constant companion, wandering the fields during the night and returning to Dalton’s home in the daytime.
Raising Hare charts the two’s journey together, whilst also taking a deep dive into the lives and natures of hares, and the ways in which they have been depicted in art, history and folklore. Through Dalton’s lens, readers see the extraordinary relationship between humans and animals, which serves as a poignant reminder of how the best and most beautiful experiences turn up when we least expect them.
Release Date: 4 March 2025
Sucker Punch: Essays – Scaachi Koul
In her evocative debut novel, One Day We’ll Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi Koul delivered an array of raw, perceptive and hilarious essays that grappled with race, body image, friendship and growing up as the daughter of immigrants. When the time came to pen her new non-fiction book for spring 2025, she found herself wrestling with the global pandemic, her marriage falling apart, losing her job and her mother being diagnosed with cancer.
Sucker Punch is an exploration of what happens when the life you thought you would be living radically changes its course, everything you thought you knew has been upended, and you are forced to forge a new path. Scaachi once again wields her signature humour and fierce intelligence to reckon with her previous belief that fighting is the most effective tool to progress. She takes aim at the fights she has had in an effort to understand when a fight is worth having, and when it is better to walk away.
Release Date: 4 March 2025
Mark Twain – Ron Chernow
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow won acclaim for his works on figures ranging from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant but turned his attention to one of the US’ first major celebrities in his spring 2025 biography, Mark Twain.
Taking advantage of Twain’s personal archives, including fifty notebooks, thousands of letters and hundreds of previously unpublished manuscripts, Chernow expertly brings to life a man whose life reflected America’s expansion westward, industrialisation and conflicts overseas. Over a hundred years after his death, Twain continues to be one of the most hotly-discussed individuals in the history of the continent. Through his vivid portrait of the man, Chernow reveals the enigmatic and maddening life of a supremely fascinating character.
Release Date: 13 May 2025
Check Out The Best Non-Fiction Books From 2025
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History And Persistence Of Our Deadliest Infection – John Green
Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Previously romanticised as a malady of poets, in contemporary society tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that thrives in the inequality and inequity we have fashioned. John Green’s new book, Everything is Tuberculosis, began in 2019 when Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone.
In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become one of the most vocal campaigners for increased access to treatments and wider awareness of the healthcare inequalities that allow this curable, treatable disease to claim over 1.5 million lives every year. Everything is Tuberculosis is both Henry’s story and an examination of the scientific and social histories of how the disease has shaped our world, and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.
Release Date: 18 March 2025
Bad Friend: How Women Revolutionised Modern Friendship – Tiffany Watt Smith
Today’s culture is flooded with narratives about the strength of female friendships, whether through infamous slogans about girl power, work wives or BFFs. Yet, cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith has always found her own life much messier. She has experienced dramatic friend breakups, friendships that either feel like too much or not enough, friendships that drift toward silence and friendships that are built around convenience rather than anything in common. And then there are older cultural scripts such as the jealous backstabber, the competitive rival or the fair-weathered friend to grapple with.
It is impossible to be a perfect friend. In her new non-fiction book for spring 2025, Watt Smith explores how women’s friendships have long been magnified, scrutinised, praised and admonished, establishing a legacy of impossible ideals. In Bad Friend, Watt Smith reflects on her own experience and thoroughly mines the rich cultural history of female friendships to look for a new paradigm that might encompass the struggles along with the joys.
Release Date: 6 May 2025
Ocean: Earth’s Last Wilderness – David Attenborough And Colin Butfield
Through personal stories, history and cutting-edge science, David Attenborough and Colin Butfield’s 2025 non-fiction nature book uncovers the wonder and mystery of the most unexplored habitat on our planet – the one in which shapes the land we live, regulates our climate and conjures the air we breathe. The book illuminates the ocean’s incredible resilience: they are the part of our world that can, and often has, recover the fastest, when we have given them the chance.
Drawing a course across Attenborough’s own incredible lifetime, Ocean whisks readers on a tour through eight unique ocean habitats, countless intriguing species, the most astounding discoveries over the previous century, and a future vision of a fully restored marine world, even richer and more spectacular than we could possibly hope. Ocean reveals the past, present and future of our blue planet.
Release Date: 24 April 2025
John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs – Ian Leslie
The Beatles remain one of the most successful bands of all time, defining the culture of the swinging sixties. At the heart of Beatlemania was the enduring dynamic between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Few other musical relationships have been rooted in such a deep, intense and complex personal relationship. The pair’s dynamic was compulsive, tender, full of longing, riven by jealousy. Ian Leslie’s John and Paul traces its many twists and turns and reveals how these shifts manifested themselves in the music.
This new music biography hitting shelves in spring 2025 traces the shared journey of these two remarkable men before, during and after The Beatles, offering readers both a new look at two of the greatest icons in music history and rich insights into the nature of creativity, collaboration and human intimacy.
Release Date: 8 April 2025
Who Is Government?: The Untold Story Of Public Service – Michael Lewis
The US government is a vast, complicated system that Americans pay for, rebel against, depend upon, dismiss and laud. It’s a shared resource for confronting the biggest issues in society. It is made up of people, mostly unrecognised and uncelebrated, doing work that can be life-changing for everyone. In his new spring 2025 non-fiction book, Michael Lewis invites his favourite writers to find someone doing an interesting job in government and write about them.
The stories these writers uncover are unexpected, riveting and inspiring. Each essay shines a spotlight on some of the fundamental behind-the-scenes work of exemplary federal employees. Whether they are digitalising archives, rooting our cybercriminals or discovering new planets, Who Is Government? is an eye-opening demonstration of how essential government business makes our lives possible, and how much it matters.
Release Date: 18 March 2025
Matriarch: A Memoir – Tina Knowles
Tina Knowles, the mother of Beyonce Knowles-Carter, Solange Knowles and bonus daughter Kelly Rowland, is known throughout the world as a Matriarch with a capital, bolded ‘M’. A determined, self-possessed, self-aware, and wise woman who raised and inspired some of the most influential and successful artists of our time. Yet her 2025 memoir releasing in spring 2025 begins with an unruly little girl growing up in 1950s Glaveston, the youngest of seven.
Despite her love for the sounds of Motown and the lapping beach always within earshot, the realities of race and gender soon set in. Through grief, tragedy, creative and romantic risks, the nurturing of superstar offspring and her own unique gifts, Tina Knowles her complete story with readers in Matriarch. It is one incredible woman’s intimate and revealing story, and a multigenerational family saga that brings with it a wider look at the story of America – and the wisdom that women pass to one another, mothers to daughters, across generations.
Release Date: 22 April 2025
Is A River Alive? – Robert MacFarlane
In Is a River Alive? Robert MacFarlane brings a glittering style to a poignant work of travel writing, reporting and natural history. This new book for spring 2025 presents an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings and should be recognised as such in imagination and law. MacFarlane takes readers on a voyage down three journeys brimming with unforgettable characters and locations.
From miraculous cloud forests and mountain streams of Ecuador to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and the extraordinary wild rivers of Canada, imperiled by mining, pollution and dams. Fuelled by MacFarlane’s infectious enthusiasm and dazzling prose, Is a River Alive? promises to open hearts, challenge perspectives and remind us that our fate does, and always has, depend on the flow of these rivers.
Release Date: 1 May 2025
Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
