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Best Books To Read In 2025
Buzzy novels, compulsively readable memoirs, and a few guilty pleasures.
When I started writing this annual book list back in 2021, I never imagined it would become such a highlight of my year — or such a beloved tradition among readers. Yet here we are, five years later, still sharing in the joy of discovering the books that will shape our conversations, expand our horizons, and keep us turning pages late into the night.
Ensure you’ve cleared some space on your bookshelves because 2025 is filled with literary treats.
Fiction lovers, get ready: this year brings the triumphant return of literary icons like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, alongside a fresh wave of exciting debuts and much-anticipated second novels from some of today’s most talked-about writers.
Non-fiction fans, there’s plenty for you too. From simple yet essential book by Andrew Huberman to memoirs that promise to inspire and educate, the books on this list will have you hooked from the first page and your “to-read” pile is about to get bigger — and better — than ever.
One quick note before we dive in: This article contains Amazon affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them. It’s a great way to support this work while stocking your shelves with amazing reads.
So grab a cup of tea, settle in, and let’s explore the best books to read in 2025.
1. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In her first novel since her 2013 global sensation Americanah, Adiche immerses us in the lives and longings of four women: Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer isolated in America during the pandemic; Zikora, her eternally high-achieving and recently broken-hearted best friend; Omelogor, Chiamaka’s publicly outspoken (and privately self-questioning) cousin back in Nigeria, and Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper who is struggling mightily to give her daughter a better life in a new country. Through these fully realized characters, we can more fully understand ourselves and the networks — both recognized and overlooked — that connect us all.
Publishing on March 04, 2025
2. Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green
Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it. John Green, a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.
Publishing on March 20, 2025
3. Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros
Onyx Storm, the third book in Rebecca Yarros’ wildly popular Empyrean series, picks up as Violet Sorrengail, a small but mighty dragon rider, prepares for war against the Venin, a species of human who have sacrificed their souls to steal power from the land.After more than a year at Basgiath War College, Violet realizes that support for the Venin, a.k.a. the Dark Wielders, does not only lie beyond the walls of the competitive military school, but also within its ranks. Unsure of who to trust, Violet embarks on a fantastical journey to find allies who can help her hone her emerging powers, which may ultimately be the key to winning this battle for supremacy.
Publishing on January 21, 2025
4. World Eaters By Catherine Bracy
In theory, venture capital is just a way to direct money from institutional investors to fledgling businesses. Every major American tech company to emerge in the past few decades, and countless less famous ones, has been backed by VC. And yet Bracy, the chief executive officer of advocacy group TechEquity, argues this model is pernicious in ways we’re only beginning to grasp. She takes issue with what she describes as venture capital’s emphasis on “hyper maximalist growth” — saying it focuses too much on short-term success — and persuasively demonstrates how VC’s prevalence has created a startup monoculture.
Publishing on Mar 04, 2025
5. The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan
If you loved the Seven Husband of Evelyn Hugo then you will be obsessed with this. Cate Kay is one of the world’s most famous novelists, with a movie franchise and even theme park in the works and yet she’s completely anonymous. In Fagan’s debut novel we go into the complicated history of the elusive writer and discover just what made her keep her identity a secret from the world.
Publishing on January 7, 2025
6. Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
Disowned by her mum and dumped by her lover, Nadia decides to accept a United Nations job in Iraq where she’s responsible for rehabilitating Isis women. When she meets Sara, who joined Isis as a teenager, the pair form an instant connection, bonding over their shared backgrounds and similar personalities. Then Sara shares a big secret, one that forces Nadia to make an impossible decision. Fundamentally deftly balances searing humour with weighty questions about belief, ethics and international aid.
Publishing on Feb 25, 2025
7. Matriarch by Tina Knowles
Tina Knowles is best known as the mother of Beyonce and Solange, but in her aptly titled debut memoir, the matriarch of all matriarchs is finally telling her own story. From her upbringing in Galveston, Texas, to her time on the road with Destiny’s Child to watching her superstar children take flight on the global stage, Knowles offers a multigenerational epic of Black motherhood, human resilience, and creative genius.
Publishing on April 22, 2025
8. Rental House by Weike Wang
Weike Wang (author of Chemistry and Joan Is Okay) returns with another hit in Rental House. The story follows college sweethearts Keru and Nate some years after they’ve graduated while they’re on two different vacations, on Cape Cod and in the Catskills. As their parents visit, the difference between their families — Keru’s Chinese immigrant parents and Nate’s white, Appalachian, working-class parents — brings the issues in their marriage to the forefront. As Elif Batuman blurbed, Rental House is “for anyone who’s experienced demanding parents, misunderstanding in-laws, a vacation-gone-wrong, or mid-life questions about how to reconcile your own personality liabilities with those of the person you love most.” So, it’s for literally all of us.
Published on Dec 03, 2024
9. Isola by Allegra Goodman
In Isola, Marguerite is heir to a vast fortune — until she’s orphaned, and her guardian, Roberval, brings her along with him on a journey to the New World. When she falls for Roberval’s secretary, he brutally punishes them by abandoning them on a small island.
Isola is inspired by the real life story of Marguerite de la Rocque, and what results is a powerful tale of resilience, survival, and a strong woman who defied all odds.
Publishing on Feb 04, 2025
10. Protocols by Andrew Huberman
Protocols provides simple, powerful, and evidence-based solutions to life’s most common challenges. Designed to improve your mental health, physical health, and performance, these guidelines are customizable, allowing you to adapt them to your specific needs.
With his clear and engaging style, Dr. Huberman explains the scientific principles behind each protocol and how they can deliver immediate, effective results. Protocols is your essential road map for achieving optimal health.
Publishing on April 22, 2025
11. The Manor of Dreams by Christina Li
YA author Christina Li’s adult literary debut, The Manor of Dreams, is a modern gothic tale about the battle over a trailblazing 1980s star’s crumbling mansion. Following Vivian Yin’s death, her daughters find themselves fighting an estranged mystery relative for the deed to their reclusive mom’s sprawling estate. Things only get worse once the warring factions decide to move into the dilapidated home together. Once inside, they discover that the manor hides terrible secrets that it’s hellbent on keeping.
Publishing on May 6, 2025
12. Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian
To have a baby or not to have a baby, that is the question at the centerof Sanjena Sathian’s satirical second novel, Goddess Complex. After leaving her struggling actor husband over a disagreement about whether or not they should have children, Sanjana Satyananda is looking to move forward with her life and the anthropology dissertation she abandoned years earlier. But first, she must finalize their divorce. When her ex suddenly goes missing, Sanjana embarks on a phantasmagoric journey to find him that offers her a glimpse of what her life would be like if she did become a parent.
Publishing on Mar 11, 2025
13. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong is probably the most well-known young poet around, thanks to his two acclaimed collections, Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother. But he’s a novelist too — and his second foray into that genre, The Emperor of Gladness, is on the way. A 19-year-old is tempted away from a suicide attempt at the edge of a bridge by an elderly, dementia-struck widow. With little else to do, he becomes her carer, and they develop an unlikely but unbreakable relationship. Expect the kind of prose and emotional sensitivity that make the soul swoon.
Publishing on May 15, 2025
14. The Dry Season by Melissa Febos
Around 2016, best-selling author Melissa Febos swore off sex for a year. Now, with her fifth memoir, The Dry Season, she’s sharing what she learned from that experience. Mixing personal narrative with cultural criticism, the author of Girlhood explores how celibacy radicalized her, giving her permission to put all of her focus on herself, her work, and the platonic relationships that deserved more of her attention.
Publishing on June 3, 2025
15. To Save and Destroy By Viet Thanh Nguyen
Nguyen, who wrote the Pulitzer-winning novel The Sympathizer, has compiled the essays he delivered in 2023 and 2024 at Harvard’s Norton Lectures into this compact volume. Topics range from the value (social, financial) of his cultural “otherness” to the responsibilities of minority creators in the arts. Slight as the book may be, it’s packed with what we’ve come to expect from Nguyen: clean, fluid prose, a combination of political and social critique with allusions to his own biography, as well as arguments so compelling they feel like simple recitations of fact.
Publishing on April 8, 2025
16. The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook by Meredith Hayden
Learn to cook, host, and eat like a private chef with 100 recipes from Meredith Hayden of Wishbone Kitchen. With sharp, witty commentary, themed menus, and gorgeous imagery, The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook will inspire you to rediscover the joy of cooking, romanticize your grocery hauls, and find any excuse to celebrate with friends and family.
Publishing on May 6, 2025
17. Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza
Death Takes Me puts a subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story. Cristina Rivera Garza’s 2007 novel, newly translated from the original Spanish by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker, begins with a literature professor also named Cristina finding the body of a castrated man while jogging. After looking through the crime scene photos, she discovers a message written in coral-colored nail polish next to the corpse, lines of poetry from the late Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, who Cristina has studied for years. When Pizarnik’s work starts showing up at similar crime scenes, Cristina is enlisted to help catch the murderer before the mysterious killer catches her first.
Publishing on February 25, 2025
18. Albion by Anna Hope
This book, its fascinating characters, steady-paced plot, and haunting prose will stay with you long after reading. Set over the course of one weekend the Brookes family come back together to their ancestral home for the funeral of their father. Told from each family members’ point of view you come to understand the complex secrets they’re all clutching onto and their unique relationships with the house and surrounding grounds. Tensions are rising and things are only fractured further with the arrival of a newcomer Clara, who has a secret that will unearth everything they think they know about the home all their identities are so closely interwoven with.
Publishing on June 3, 2025
19. Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld
You won’t be able to put down Curtis Sittenfeld’s second short story collection. Sittenfeld’s mastery of a comedy manners remains on display in Show Don’t Tell. In one story (“Lost But Not Forgotten”) Sittenfeld returns to the story of Lee Fiora, the protagonist of Prep, as she goes to her high school reunion. In the titular “Show Don’t Tell,” it begins “At some point, a rich old man named Ryland W. Peaslee had made an enormous donation to the program, and this was why not only the second-year fellowships he’d endowed but were called Peaslees…” Don’t you want to read that immediately?
Publishing on Feb 25, 2025
