Kobo in Conversation

Following our last episode all about the best books we read in 2025, host and producer Nathan Maharaj connected over Zoom with even more Kobo staffers—as well as Kobo in Conversation co-host Michael Tamblyn—to talk about the books that have stuck with them over the past 12 months. So welcome back once more, to our year in books.  The best books we read in 2025 We'll be back in your feed soon with more amazing author interviews.

It's no spoiler to say that Kobo is full of avid readers. So every year we get together to share the best books we read in the past year. Some of the books are new. Some are very old. All were beloved to a Kobo staffer. So across 2 whole episodes (follow to make sure you don't miss the second one!), join us as we hear from the staff of Kobo about the best books they read in 2025. The best books we read in 2025

Michael Tamblyn spoke with Miriam Toews, author of many novels including A Complicated Kindness, All My Puny Sorrows, and Women Talking, to name just a few. Her latest book is a memoir called, A Truce That Is Not Peace. Spurred by the question "why do you write?", posed by a distressingly persistent literary festival organizer, it's a work of nonfiction that delves into the author's feelings around the deaths by suicide of both her father and her sister. Miriam Toews on her new memoir, and the surprising truth of good comedy

Nathan Maharaj spoke with the novelist Charlotte McConaghy. Her latest book is Wild Dark Shore. It's the story of the Salt family, the stewards of a vast seed bank on a remote island that's in danger of being washed over by rising sea levels. As they're making the hard decisions about what can be saved in the course of their evacuation, a vicious storm tears across the island and leaves a woman washed up on the shore—and she's alive. Charlotte McConaghy found fear on the Wild Dark Shore

Nathan Maharaj spoke with the Oscar-nominated filmmaker and journalist Julian Brave NoiseCat. He co-directed the 2024 documentary Sugarcane which investigated abuses at a residential school in western Canada. He is also the author of a new book called We Survived the Night: An Indigenous Reckoning. It's about his dad, and also his upbringing, and a mythical character named Coyote. Julian Brave Noisecat set out to tell a story in the trickster tradition