The ball has dropped in New York’s Times Square, and the nation’s largest city has a new mayor as of Jan. 1. Whatever you make of him, Zohran Mamdani represents a new beginning. As you might have heard (maybe more than once), the come-from-behind candidate is New York’s youngest mayor in more than a century. He’s also the city’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor. It seems a perfect time, then, to showcase a handful of 2025 books that focus on the City That Never Sleeps or—give the nickname time to catch on—the City That Has Been Home to Kirkus Since 1933.

First, let’s travel back in time a bit. One realizes just how groundbreaking Mamdani’s election is when considering that New York—the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—elected its first mayor with Asian roots four centuries after the Dutch and English began trading in Asia and what is now New York City. An excellent book that examines this early history is Russell Shorto’s Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America (Norton, March 4).

Mike Wallace has been chronicling New York’s history for decades—Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1998) won the Pulitzer Prize, followed by Greater Gotham: A History of New York City From 1898 to 1919 (2017)—and the final book in his trilogy is Gotham at War: A History of New York City From 1933 to 1945 (Oxford Univ., Oct. 1). Of this “historical tour de force,” our reviewer wrote, “Calling a nearly 1,000-page volume a wild ride is no exaggeration, because few of the 168 short chapters fail to deliver.”

Of course, New York has long been a global beacon as a cultural capital, and a lively book that sheds light on a sliver of that history is Alice T. Friedman’s Queer Moderns: Max Ewing’s Jazz Age New York (Princeton Univ., May 27), centered on the titular artist and bon vivant’s circle of friends. “Friedman’s appreciative biography,” our reviewer wrote, “vividly conveys the spirited ambience of the interracial, international community of queer outsiders and intellectuals among whom, for his short life, Ewing thrived.”

In David Brown Morris’ Ten Thousand Central Parks: A Climate-Change Parable (Empire State Editions/Fordham Univ., Oct. 7), readers are encouraged to see the world-famous urban park with new eyes: “A workforce of immigrants sometimes numbering as high as four thousand created almost all the features that we recognize today as a natural landscape—soil, hills, trees, lakes, meadows, woods.”

Brandon Stanton, too, brings out the humanity of the city in his latest collection of interviews and photographs, Dear New York (St. Martin’s, Oct. 7), continuing work that he began in the bestselling Humans of New York (2013). “This city cannot be captured,” he writes. “Not with a pen, not with a paintbrush, not with poetry, and not with a camera.…There is no frame large enough. You can never say: ‘This is New York.’” That may be true, but Stanton, with his many oral histories, nevertheless paints indelible portraits. All of them say, “These are New Yorkers.” 

John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.