Books published in 2025 for your TBR pile
Below is a list of books published in 2025. I’m drawing from the LitHub aggregate best books of the year as well as the Goodreads Readers’ Choice Awards and Bookmarks’ best-reviewed books of the year. I’ve kept this list to fiction (short and long) and memoir. No nonfiction or poetry. There’s some YA and MG here, but nothing younger than MG. I’m including POV, viewpoint, and synopses.
I realize this list is huge, so I tried to prioritize the first 20 or so, based on critical reception, popularity, and diversity of offerings. If you see a number next to a title, that is marking the number of best-of-the-year lists the work made, according to the Lit Hub article.
I haven’t read all of these, so there may be some flaws in some of the labels. I like to note POV trends, but it’s tricky to accurately assess without reading extensively into every book. I read a lot of samples, but POVs sometimes diverge from what they establish in the first chapter or two. So I expect a lot of errors in those labels. Think of this as guidance rather than definitive fact. If you note anything being off, let me know and I’ll make the correcton.
This list is meant merely as a launchpad for those looking to keep up with some current hits in publishing, and it’s a bit of a shotgun approach, supplying a diverse array. As I tell my students, be a selfish learner; cater to your writing needs. Be familiar with work coming out in your particular genre, but also, you’ll make your writing more interesting if you have diverse influences. And remain open to learning from writing that is very different from yours.
You can see the 2025 TBR list here (books published in 2024), the 2024 TBR list here (books published in 2023), and the 2023 TBR list here (books published in 2022).
| Title | Author | Genre | POV | Viewpt | Synopsis |
| The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (21) | Kiran Desai | Literary Fiction | Third person, contemporary omniscient | Multiple | A sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. |
| Audition (20) | Katie Kitamura | Literary Fiction | First person | Single | A middle-aged actress juggles rehearsals, motherhood, and a quietly unraveling marriage as the line between performance and private life dissolves. |
| Heart the Lover (19) | Lily King | Literary Fiction | First person | Single | In her senior year, a student enters the intoxicating world of two brilliant friends, Sam and Yash. A complex love triangle ensues, leading to a decades-long legacy of secrets she must finally confront as a middle-aged novelist.T |
| A Guardian and a Thief (18) | Megha Majumdar | Political Literary Fiction | Third person | Multiple | A disgraced journalist, a radicalized student, and a corrupt police officer collide after a political scandal ignites violence in contemporary India. |
| What We Can Know (16) | Ian McEwan | LiterarySpeculative Fiction | Third person | Limited, dual timeline | In a future Britain, a historian reconstructs the erased life of a woman whose past was deliberately scrubbed from public records. |
| Flesh (16) | David Szalay | Composite novel (linked stories) | Third person limited | Multiple | Linked portraits of men—from adolescence to old age—each facing a moment where desire, power, or bodily failure forces reckoning. |
| Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (10) | V.E. Schwab | Literary Fantasy | First person | Multiple | Three women across centuries—linked by vampirism—grapple with immortality, power, and the cost of survival. |
| The Emperor of Gladness (13) | Ocean Vuong | Literary Fiction | First person | Single | A young Vietnamese American man forms a makeshift family through precarious work, care, and shared survival. |
| King of Ashes (12) | S.A. Cosby | Crime | Third person limited | Multiple | After his father’s death, a man returns to his Southern hometown and is drawn into a violent feud rooted in family loyalty and criminal debt. |
| The Wayfinder (8) | Adam Johnson | Literary Fiction | Third person | Single | A reclusive American living abroad becomes entangled in a morally ambiguous relationship that forces him to confront complicity, power, and the stories he tells himself to survive. |
| Wild Dark Shore (8) | Charlotte McConaghy | Literary Fiction | First and third person | Multiple | Isolated researchers on a remote island confront environmental disaster, secrecy, and moral collapse. |
| Atmosphere (8) | Taylor Jenkins Reid | Historical/ Romance | First person | Dual | In 1980, physicist Joan and pilot Vanessa fall in love while training for NASA’s astronaut program. Decades later, as a shuttle mission faces catastrophe, they must navigate a high-stakes crisis and the secrets of their hidden past. |
| Minor Black Figures (5) | Brandon Taylor | Short stories | Mixed | Stories about Black artists and professionals negotiating intimacy, ambition, and marginality. | |
| My Friends | Fredrik Backman | Literary Fiction | First person (retrospective) | Single | A lonely, grieving man reflects on the unlikely friendships that shaped his life, tracing how small acts of kindness ripple outward across decades and quietly save him from isolation. |
| Broken Country | Claire Leslie Hall | Literary Fiction | Third person | Multiple | In a drought-stricken rural community, generational tensions and buried resentments surface as one family’s land becomes the battleground for survival, loyalty, and moral compromise. |
| Not Quite Dead Yet | Holly Jackson | YA Thriller | First person | Single | A teen declared legally dead after a violent attack secretly returns to uncover who tried to kill her, racing against time as her would-be murderer realizes she’s still alive. |
| The Compound | Aisling Rawle | Science Fiction | Third person limited | Multiple | Residents of a newly built housing development confront the quiet violence of domestic life, class pressure, and social surveillance beneath suburban normalcy. |
| Alchemised | Sen Lin Yu | Dark Fantasy Romance | Third person limited | Dual | A morally complex romance unfolds between enemies bound by forbidden magic, political intrigue, and a shared hunger for power and freedom. |
| Witchcraft for Wayward Girls | Grady Hendrix | Horror | Third person | Single | Set in Florida circa 1970, Grady Hendrix’s old-school horror novel centers on a sinister group home for pregnant teens where shame has been weaponized. But when a friendly(?) librarian introduces the girls to witchcraft, the power balance shifts violently. |
| Good and Evil | Samanta Schweblin | Literary Short Stories | Mixed | A collection of unsettling, psychologically taut stories in which ordinary domestic situations tilt toward menace, obsession, and moral fracture, often blurring the boundary between internal fear and external threat. | |
| A Truce That Is Not Peace (10) | Miriam Toews | Memoir | First person | Single | Reflections on grief, faith, writing, and emotional exhaustion in the aftermath of personal loss. |
| The South (5) | Tash Aw | Literary Fiction | Third person | Multiple | Interconnected characters across Southeast Asia navigate class mobility, family obligation, and emotional alienation as economic change reshapes both personal identity and regional culture. |
| Flashlight (15) | Susan Choi | Literary Fiction | Third person limited | Single | A woman revisits her childhood and her parents’ marriage when a long-buried family incident resurfaces and destabilizes her sense of loyalty. |
| Endling | Maria Reva | Literary Fiction | Mixed | Multiple | Three women navigating the Russian invasion of Ukraine find themselves in a van with Western bachelors. The narrative eventually breaks the fourth wall, as the author interjects to question the ethics of writing fiction during an active war. |
| The Mars House | Natasha Pulley | Science Fiction | Third person | Single | A refugee from flooded Earth faces discrimination on Mars due to his superior “Earthstrong” physical power. To avoid forced surgery, he enters a political marriage of convenience, uncovering a conspiracy that threatens the survival of the Martian colony. |
| Bad Bad Girl | Gish Jen | Literary Fiction | First person | Single | In this fictionalized memoir, a daughter processes her mother’s death from COVID-19. She reconstructs her mother’s journey from Japanese-occupied Shanghai to America, exploring the generational trauma and fierce, “bad girl” defiance that defined their complicated relationship. |
| Theory and Practice | Michelle de Kretser | Literary Fiction | Third person | Single | In 1980s Melbourne, a student researching Virginia Woolf falls into a bohemian love affair. As she immerses herself in radical feminist theory, she struggles to reconcile her intellectual ideals with the messy realities of jealousy, desire, and betrayal. |
| Mothers and Sons | Adam Haslett | Literary Fiction | First and third person | Dual | An asylum lawyer haunted by past violence and his estranged mother, who runs a spiritual retreat, live in separate emotional worlds. A new legal case forces a confrontation, finally unearthing the secret that fractured their family twenty years ago. |
| So Far Gone | Jess Walter | Literary Fiction | Third person | Single | After seven years in self-imposed isolation, a journalist is forced back into a fractured, conspiracy-laden America. When his daughter vanishes and his grandchildren arrive on his doorstep, he must rescue his family from a dangerous, radicalized militia. |
| The Wilderness (14) | Angela Flournoy | Literary Fiction | Third person | Multiple | A multigenerational Detroit family navigates migration, fractured kinship, and economic pressure as ideas of home evolve. |
| The Director (13) | Daniel Kehlmann | Historical Literary Fiction | Third person | Shifting limited | A celebrated filmmaker rises under a totalitarian regime, slowly sacrificing artistic integrity to political survival. |
| Katabasis (13) | R.F. Kuang | Fantasy/Dark Academia | First person | Single | A graduate student descends—literally and metaphorically—into an underworld shaped by academic rivalry, obsession, and classical myth. |
| Things in Nature Merely Grow (13) | Yiyun Li | Short stories | Mixed | Story-dependent | Stories of grief and emotional restraint, often centered on immigrants and exiles navigating loss and isolation. |
| The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (12) | Stephen Graham Jones | Experimental Historical Fiction | Mixed | Layered | A metafictional confrontation with Indigenous history, blending archival fragments and modern narration to interrogate violence and mythmaking. |
| We Do Not Part (12) | Han Kang | Literary Fiction | Third person | Intimate limited | A woman revisits a traumatic political episode from her past, confronting grief, complicity, and memory through quiet, devastating reflection. |
| The Antidote (11) | Karen Russell | Literary Speculative Fiction | First person | Multiple | In a drought-ravaged future America, communities cling to memory and storytelling as ecological collapse reshapes daily life. |
| Careless People (10) | Sarrah Wynn-Williams | Memoir | First person | Single | A young professional recounts her experiences inside Facebook, where abuse and silence are normalized. |
| Isola (9) | Allegra Goodman | Historical Literary Fiction | Third person limited | Single | A 16th-century woman survives marooning on a remote island, relying on belief, ingenuity, and endurance. |
| The Dream Hotel (9) | Laila Lalami | Speculative Literary Fiction | Third person limited | Single | A woman is detained after an algorithm predicts she may commit a crime, forcing her into a system of preventive incarceration. |
| Shadow Ticket (9) | Thomas Pynchon | Literary Mystery | Third person (contemporary omniscient)Tell me the POV of Geraldine Brooks is. | Multiple | In 1932 Milwaukee, P.I. Hicks McTaggart’s simple missing-person case spirals into a surreal international conspiracy. Amidst the Great Depression, he navigates dairy-industry sabotage and looming global fascism in a world where nothing—especially the cheese—is quite what it seems. |
| Memorial Days (8) | Geraldine Brooks | Memoir | First person | Single | After her husband Tony Horwitz dies suddenly, Geraldine Brooks retreats to a remote Australian island. Through a dual-timeline narrative, she confronts raw grief, navigates a stifling bureaucracy, and finds healing in solitude and his private journals. |
| Perfection (8) | Vincenzo Latronico | Literary Fiction | Third person | Single | A young expatriate couple drifts through Berlin, curating beautiful lives while emotional emptiness deepens beneath the surface. |
| Stag Dance (8) | Torrey Peters | Short stories | Mixed | Multiple | Stories and novellas exploring gender transformation, performance, and desire across speculative and realist frames. |
| Stone Yard Devotional (8) | Charlotte Wood | Literary Fiction | Third person limited | Single | After personal crisis, a woman retreats into a religious community, confronting silence, faith, and unresolved guilt. |
| Death of the Author (7) | Nnedi Okorafor | Speculative Literary Fiction | Mixed | Metafictional | A novelist’s fictional world begins to intrude on reality, collapsing the boundary between creator and creation. |
| Dream Count (6) | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | Literary Fiction | Third person | Multiple | Four women’s lives intersect across continents as they navigate love, ambition, and political upheaval. |
| Book of Lives (6) | Margaret Atwood | Memoir | First person | Single | Atwood reflects on pivotal moments, books, and encounters that shaped her intellectual and creative life, blending autobiography with literary reflection. |
| Sunrise on the Reaping (6) | Suzanne Collins | YA Fantasy | First person | Single | A young Haymitch Abernathy is forced to compete in a brutal Hunger Games designed to punish past rebellion. |
| The Dry Season (6) | Melissa Febos | Memoir | First person | Single | A personal account of sobriety, discipline, and reclaiming agency over desire. |
| Theft (6) | Abdulrazak Gurnah | Literary Fiction | Third person | Multiple | Interconnected lives confront displacement, ownership, and moral compromise in East Africa. |
| Clown Town (6) | Mick Herron | Spy Fiction | Third person | Multiple | Intelligence agents navigate bureaucratic dysfunction and personal failure while attempting to avert political disaster. |
| The Sisters (6) | Jonas Hassen Khemiri | Literary Fiction | Mixed | Multiple | A fragmented portrait of sisters whose shared history fractures under secrets and competing memories. |
| An Oral History of Atlantis(6) | Ed Park | Short stories | Mixed | A vanished cultural moment is reconstructed through fictional interviews that reveal how memory becomes myth. | |
| The Hounding (6) | Xenobe Purvis | Historical Literary Fiction | Third person | Multiple | A rural community descends into paranoia and persecution during a historical moral panic. |
| The Slip (6) | Lucas Schaefer | Literary Fiction | Third person limited | Single | A working-class teenager trains as a boxer while navigating loyalty, ambition, and class pressure. |
| Bread of Angels (6) | Patti Smith | Memoir | First person | Single | Meditative reflections on childhood, art, loss, and spiritual inheritance. |
| Spent (5) | Alison Bechdel | Graphic memoir | First person | Single | A graphic examination of money, labor, and artistic identity across adulthood. |
| The Harder I Fight the More I Love You (5) | Neko Case | Memoir | First person | Single | A turbulent childhood and early adulthood shaped by neglect, resilience, and creative survival. |
| The Correspondent (5) | Virginia Evans | Literary Fiction | Epistolary (1st) | Multiple | A political scandal unfolds through letters exchanged among diplomats, lovers, and officials. |
| Sky Daddy (5) | Kate Folk | Short stories | Mixed | Story-dependent | Stories of obsession, control, and longing in contemporary relationships. |
| Heartwood (5) | Amity Gaige | Literary Mystery | Third person limited | Single | A gripping mystery about a woman returning to her childhood home in the Pennsylvania woods after a disappearance raises suspicions about her family’s buried secrets. |
| Helm (5) | Sarah Hall | Literary Fiction | Third person | Single | In a mythic landscape, a woman unexpectedly assumes authority, challenging entrenched gendered power. |
| Great Big Beautiful Life (5) | Emily Henry | Contemporary Romance | First person | Single | After profound loss, a woman rebuilds her life and love story with humor and emotional candor. |
| The Names (5) | Florence Knapp | Literary Fiction | Third person | Multiple | A family’s past is refracted through the evolving meanings of names, inheritance, and identity. |
| Paper Girl (5) | Beth Macy | Memoir | First person | Single | A coming-of-age memoir tracing Macy’s adolescence, early reporting career, and the gendered constraints of ambition in small-town America. |
| I Regret Almost Everything (5) | Keith McNally | Memoir | First person | Single | The restaurateur recounts decades of excess, creativity, and self-sabotage in New York’s cultural scene, offering sharp self-critique alongside industry gossip. |
| The Wax Child (5) | Olga Ravn | Historical Literary Fiction | Third person | Single | In early modern Europe, a woman accused of witchcraft becomes entangled in superstition, fear, and bodily control. |
| Playworld (5) | Adam Ross | Literary Fiction | First person | Single | A child actor navigates fame, manipulation, and moral confusion while working in adult-dominated spaces. |
| Hostage (5) | Eli Sharabi | Memoir | First person | Single | A firsthand account of captivity and survival under prolonged confinement. |
| Lonely Crowds (5) | Stephanie Wambugu | Literary Fiction | Third person | Multiple | A set of interlinked narratives following young professionals navigating intimacy, ambition, and alienation within contemporary urban life. |
| Palaver (5) | Bryan Washington | Literary Fiction | Limited / dialogic | Multiple | Friends and partners talk—often past one another—about race, belonging, and miscommunication. |
| Good Dirt (5) | Charmaine Wilkerson | Literary Fiction | Third person | Multiple | When a family heirloom tied to slavery resurfaces, a woman confronts her lineage and a long-suppressed historical crime. |
| Fundamentally (5) | Nussaibah Younis | Memoir | First person | Single | A memoir about working in deradicalization programs and confronting ideological complexity firsthand. |
| The Academy | Elin Hilderbrand | Contemporary Fiction | Third person | Multiple | Set at a prestigious New England boarding school, the novel follows students, parents, and faculty as secrets, rivalries, and scandals erupt over the course of a single transformative academic year. |
| The Summer Storm | Sarah MacLean | Romance | Third person limited | Dual | A powerful storm traps two estranged lovers together at a coastal estate, forcing them to confront unresolved betrayal, lingering desire, and the cost of walking away from love. |
| We All Live Here | Jojo Moyes | Contemporary Fiction | Third person limited | Multiple | After a sudden family upheaval, a woman navigating divorce, parenting, and career upheaval finds her carefully compartmentalized life collapsing into messy, shared emotional space. |
| The River Is Waiting | Wally Lamb | Literary Fiction | Third person limited | Single | An incarcerated man serving time for a tragic accident forms an unlikely bond with a prison therapy dog, forcing him to reckon with guilt, grief, and the possibility of redemption. |
| The First Witch of Boston | Andrea Catalano | Historical Fiction | First person | Single | Reimagining the Salem-era witch trials, the novel follows a young woman accused of witchcraft as she navigates paranoia, power, and resistance in Puritan New England. |
| The Tenant | Freida McFadden | Psychological Thriller | First person | Single | A woman who rents out a room in her home becomes increasingly unsettled by her tenant’s behavior, discovering too late that she has invited a calculated predator into her life. |
| The Impossible Fortune | Richard Osman | Mystery | Third person | Multiple | The Thursday Murder Club reunites to investigate a decades-old financial mystery that spirals into murder, international intrigue, and personal reckoning for its aging sleuths. |
| Beautiful Ugly | Alice Feeney | Psychological Thriller | First person | Dual | A fractured marriage is tested when a shocking crime exposes how little spouses truly know about each other—and how easily love curdles into suspicion. |
| Wind and Truth | Brandon Sanderson | Epic Fantasy | Third person limited | Multiple | As the fate of Roshar hangs in the balance, long-brewing wars, ancient magic, and moral reckonings collide in the climactic volume of The Stormlight Archive. |
| Alchemy of Secrets | Stephanie Garber | Fantasy | Third person limited | Single | A young woman drawn into a hidden magical society uncovers dangerous truths about her past and the price of power in a world where secrets are currency. |
| The Sirens | Amelia Hart | Literary Fantasy | Multiple (mixed) | Multiple | Interweaving timelines and voices, the novel traces generations of women bound by the sea, myth, and a haunting inheritance that blurs legend and reality. |
| The Book of Lost Hours | Hayley Gelfuso | Literary Fantasy | Third person | Multiple | A rare book that can alter time draws scholars and thieves alike into a race that spans continents, histories, and competing visions of fate. |
| The Poppy Fields | Nikki Erlick | Speculative Fiction | Third person | Multiple | In a near-future society, grieving individuals enter a government-run program that allows temporary emotional detachment—until the consequences of choosing numbness become irreversible. |
| Fearless | Lauren Roberts | YA Fantasy | First person | Single | A young woman trained to suppress fear must confront her past and her growing feelings for an enemy as rebellion brews in a brutal, controlled society. |
| Rebel Witch | Kristen Ciccarelli | Fantasy | Third person limited | Single | A witch forced into alliance with the empire that destroyed her coven plots revenge while questioning whether vengeance will cost her the future she wants. |
| Fake Skating | Lynn Painter | YA Romantic Comedy | First person | Single | A competitive teen figure skater enters a fake-dating arrangement with a rival, only to discover real feelings complicate both her heart and her Olympic dreams. |
| The House of My Mother | Shari Franke | Memoir | First person | Single | A daughter raised in a rigid, controlling household recounts her upbringing inside a family structure shaped by extremism, obedience, and emotional abuse. |
| Exit Zero | Catherine Bertino | Literary Short Stories | Third person limited (mostly) | Multiple | Set largely in coastal Florida, these stories follow women at emotional crossroads—divorce, illness, caretaking, desire—capturing moments when small decisions quietly but irrevocably alter a life’s direction. |
| Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive! | Melissa Lozada-Oliva | Literary Short Stories | First person (predominant) | Multiple | A sharp, darkly funny collection in which young women navigate religion, sexuality, obsession, and power in a culture saturated with spectacle, judgment, and desire, often exposing how belief—romantic, spiritual, or ideological—can become both refuge and trap. |
| Hurricane Envy | Sarah Jaffe | Literary Short Stories | Mixed | Multiple | Characters living in the shadow of economic precarity and environmental threat grapple with desire, resentment, and ambition, as personal longing collides with systems too large to escape. |
| The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli | Karina Yan Glaser | Middle Grade | Third person | Multiple | Two children from different worlds form a fragile bond as they navigate friendship, separation, and longing across nine lunar cycles shaped by cultural tradition and personal loss. |
| Dive | John David Anderson | Middle Grade | Third person | Single | A teenager joins an elite swim team, where ambition, secrecy, and pressure beneath the surface force him to confront the cost of winning and the limits of loyalty. |
| The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest | Aubrey Hartman | Middle Grade | Third person omniscient | Single | When a cursed, undead fox stalks a haunted forest, a young protagonist must unravel dark magic and local legend to stop the threat before it consumes the woods. |
