Well, it's that time of year when PBS News Hour invites two of our regular literary critics to highlight their favorite books of the year.

Jeffrey Brown picks up that conversation for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

2025 was another year of great releases across an array of genres.

For a look at which books you should be reading

and gifting this holiday season, we're joined by two of our favorite readers and recommenders.

Maureen Corrigan, a professor at Georgetown University, and book critic for NPR's Fresh Air.

And acclaimed author Anne Patchett, who's also the owner of Parnasse's books in Nashville,

where she joins us.

Nice to see both of you again. So let's start with fiction, as we often do.

Anne Patchett, I'm going to start with you and give you two picks.

Okay, I'm only going to take one of the two picks because my other pick is going to be my best

book of the year. This is very to be my best book of the year.

This is very close to my best book of the year. This is the loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by

Kieran Desai. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is a sweeping epic about two young

people who are both from the same small town in India. They are living in the States.

And when they're in the States, they feel too Indian. And when they go home to India,

they feel too American. And this is the story of how they slowly wind their way to one another

and maybe cure their loneliness. Kieran Desai is a brilliant, all-encompassing writer,

and I love this book. Okay, and I love Aunt Patrick. She makes her own rules. When I give her two,

she takes one, and she'll take her other one later. Lorraine, do you want to take two?

My first pick is the antidote by Karen Russell. Nobody does the old, weird America better than Karen Russell.

This novel is bookended by two real events, an epic dust bowl storm and an epic flood in 1935 in Nebraska.

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