11 Of The Best Creative Nonfiction Books To Read In 2025

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“Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.”

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If you love stories that are both true and unforgettable, creative nonfiction books need to be added to your TBR pile. From intimate memoirs to gripping true stories that read like novels, this list rounds up the best creative nonfiction books to read in 2025. Whether you’re drawn to inspiring life stories, narrative journalism, or lyrical essays that explore the human experience, these titles blend fact with artistry in the most captivating ways. Creative nonfiction continues to be one of the most exciting genres for readers who crave authenticity and emotional depth. Today at What We Reading, we’re gathering the top creative nonfiction books that promise to move, challenge, and inspire you – perfect for anyone looking to expand their reading list with the most compelling nonfiction books. 

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What Is Creative Nonfiction?

Creative nonfiction is a genre that combines the accuracy of factual writing with the narrative techniques of fiction. Unlike traditional nonfiction, which often prioritises straightforward information or analysis, creative nonfiction focuses on telling real stories in a compelling, immersive way. Writers use elements like character development, dialogue, vivid settings, and narrative structure to bring true events to life, making the reader feel as if they were experiencing the story firsthand. 

This genre can take many forms, including memoirs, personal essays, narrative journalism, and lyrical essays. What sets creative nonfiction apart is its ability to convey both truth and emotional resonance. While the events and facts remain accurate, the storytelling is crafted with artistry – pacing, perspective, and reflection are carefully shaped to engage the reader. 

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Looking to learn more about creative nonfiction? Check out our full guide to writing creative nonfiction on our sister site, What We Writing

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Crying In H Mart – Michelle Zauner

First up on our list of the best creative nonfiction books is Michelle Zauner’s global bestseller, Crying in H Mart. In this exquisite story of food, family, grief, and endurance, Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells the story of growing up as the only Asian-American kid at her school in Oregon, struggling with her mother’s lofty expectations, and of the times spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, bonding over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. 

It was her mother’s cancer diagnosis when Michelle was twenty-five that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history. Vivacious, lyrical, and honest, Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes, Crying in H Mart is a book to be cherished, shared, and retold. 

Trick Mirror – Jia Tolentino

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just underneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly in a culture that revolves around the self. 

In each essay of this creative nonfiction work, Tolentino writes about the cultural prisms that have personally shaped her: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the American scammer as millennial hero; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the mandate that everything, including our bodies, should always be getting more efficient and more beautiful until we die. 

Hidden Valley Road – Robert Kolker

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don’s work took them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins, and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family? 

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Told with clarity and compassion, Robert Kolker uncovers one family’s unforgettable legacy of suffering,  love, and hope in his creative nonfiction biography, Hidden Valley Road. 

Educated – Tara Westover

One of the most iconic creative nonfiction books of all time, Educated by Tara Westover, opens with a survivalist family living in the mountains of Idaho. Tara was seventeen the first time she stepped foot in a classroom. Her family were so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s brothers became violent. 

Then, lacking any education, Tara began to educate herself.  Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her across oceans and over continents, to Harvard and then Cambridge. Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. Westover’s book is a universal coming-of-age tale that gets to the heart of what education and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes, and the will to change it. 

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Check Out The Best Books Like Educated 

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In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were murdered by blasts from a shotgun. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. 

As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigations that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerising suspense and astonishing empathy, the perfect formula for a true crime creative nonfiction classic. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again – David Foster Wallace

In this acclaimed book – a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theroy to the supposed fun of travelling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner – David Foster Wallce brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his equally famous fictitious works. 

I’m Glad My Mom Died – Jenette McCurdy

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jenette McCurdy recounts her complicated relationship with her overbearing mother – and how she retook control of her life. When she is cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly, McCurdy is thrust into fame. Her mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators, and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi. Meanwhile, McCurdy spirals with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. 

Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, McCurdy sets out on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants. Told with refreshing candour and plenty of dark humour, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joys of shampooing your own hair. 

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Check Out The Best Books Like I’m Glad My Mom Died 

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This Is The Story Of A Happy Marriage – Ann Patchett

Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett examines her deepest commitments – to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband – creating a resonant painting of a life in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. 

Taken into the very real world of Ann Patchett’s life, readers are whisked from her childhood to the present day, from a disastrous early marriage to a later happy one. It covers a multitude of different topics, including relationships with family and friends, and charts the hard work and joys of writing, as well as the unexpected thrill of opening a bookshop. As she shares stories of the people, places, ideals, and art to which she has remained indelibly committed, Patchett brings into focus the large experiences and small moments that have shaped her. 

Empire Of Pain – Patrick Radden Keefe

The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions: Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, and the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferciously compelling. 

The Body Keeps The Score – Bessel Van Der Kolk

Dr Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s most renowned experts on trauma, has spent the past three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to demonstrate how trauma literally reshapes both the body and the brain, compromising the sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. 

He explores innovative treatments – from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga – that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr Van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score is a fascinating exploration of the power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal – and offers new hope for reclaiming our lives. 

The Glass Castle – Jeannette Walls

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a remarkable creative nonfiction memoir about resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette’s father was brilliant and charismatic, capturing his children’s imaginations, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn’t want the responsibility of raising a family. 

The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, eventually finding their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children flourished. The Glass Castle is astonishing – a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar, but loyal family. 

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Check Out The Best Books Like The Glass Castle 

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