From gripping thrillers, witty satires and poignant epics to captivating histories and juicy memoirs, 2025 was full of great books. Read on for 30 of our favorites.
FICTION
Karen Russell (Knopf)
The latest from the Pulitzer finalist and MacArthur fellow is set in Nebraska during the Great Depression — a very real backdrop for a very surreal story, complete with a sentient scarecrow and a “prairie witch.” Don’t let that scare you off. Russell spins a gripping tale as the lives of a Polish farmer, a basketball star, a New Deal photographer and others become intertwined when Dust Bowl storms rage across the town.
Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books)
This short, fascinating puzzle of a novel explores ideas about identity and the roles we play. At the start, a successful actress meets a much younger man for lunch at a Manhattan restaurant, but their relationship is unclear. He claims to be her son, but she says that’s impossible. As things unfold, the actress’ performance and real life blur.
Patrick Ryan (Random House)
This captivating bestseller emanates loneliness and desire. Set in Ohio and bookended by World War II and Vietnam, it tracks two families constrained by suburban norms and bound by a brief affair and its lasting consequences. Patrick Ryan renders the personal drama with wisdom and restraint. Wars and lovers come and go. Children are born and parents die. Life unfolds against history.
Dream State
Eric Puchner (Doubleday)
As she’s planning her wedding at the Montana lake house of her doctor fiance’s family, Cece falls in love with his troubled best friend from college, Garrett. She must choose between the two very different — but very close — men as her nuptials become flooded with Norovirus and betrayal. Eric Puchner portrays her decision and its aftermath over the decades that follow with creativity and grace, as the characters have children and grow older and somewhat wiser. Bonds are broken and sometimes healed, though nothing — including the warming Montana environment — is left unchanged.
Susan Choi (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“Trust Exercise” author Susan Choi’s latest opens with a mystery: While walking along a Japanese beach with his young daughter, a man — who can’t swim — disappears. The girl doesn’t remember what happened and her father is presumed to have drowned. The inevitable plot twist is a big reveal, but it’s the finely detailed personal relationships that make this book sing.
David Szalay (Scribner)
The prestigious Booker Prize was recently awarded to this dark rags-to-riches tale of a man who rises above the poor circumstances of his youth — raised by a single mother on a housing estate in Hungary — to the upper echelons of London. Szalay renders his character’s journey, with various sexual liaisons, isolation and alienation, in taut, declarative sentences, including a final one that lingers.
Lily King (Grove Press)
Yes, it has some of the trappings of a Sally Rooney novel — glittering young creatives at university talking about literature — but King portrays the events in her fast-moving book with a mature empathy, rather than cool pretensions, and the ending packs a wonderfully brutal emotional wallop. A writing student who goes by Jordan falls into a lively love triangle with two intellectuals boys. Decades later, Jordan is a successful novelist with a beautiful family. Then, unexpected events catapult her college friends back into her life, and she must reckon with the loose threads of her past.
Amity Gaige (Simon & Schuster)
Valerie Gillis, an experienced 42-year-old hiker, goes missing on the Appalachian Trail, writing letters to her mother in her journal as she battles the wilderness. Meanwhile, two women — a Maine game warden and an armchair detective in a Connecticut retirement home — investigate her disappearance. This year’s most crowd-pleasing thriller, it’s both a search-and-rescue mission and a thorny exploration of mother-daughter dynamics.
Xenobe Purvis (Henry Holt and Co.)
In a small village in 18th-century England, five orphaned sisters live with their ailing grandfather and attract the suspicion of the townspeople, some of whom believe the girls are turning into dogs. Purvis’ debut novel is just 240 pages, but it packs a tense, atmospheric punch, and it’s deservedly drawn comparisons to “The Virgin Suicides” and “The Crucible.”
S.A. Cosby (Flatiron Books: Pine & Cedar)
Many novels are acclaimed for having a cinematic feel, but this vivid, violent tale reads more like a prestige television series. A patriarch in a crime-ridden Virginia town ends up in a coma after a car crash, and his adult children — older son and money man Roman, troubled younger brother Dante and exhausted sister Neveah — come to realize that it was no accident. A little bit Southern Gothic, a little bit Shakespearian and, yes, a little overwritten in a fun way.
Kiran Desai (Hogarth)
It’s been nearly two decades since Indian writer Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize with “The Inheritance of Loss,” and her new book has the rich depth and length — nearly 700 pages — of something that’s been allowed to percolate slowly. At college in Vermont, wannabe novelist Sonia struggles with loneliness, and a well-meaning relative in India attempts to arrange a marriage between her and a nice Indian boy in New York City. Instead, Sonia becomes entangled with a rich, mentally ill older man who gets her a job at a Brooklyn art gallery. Meanwhile, Sunny’s relationship with his live-in girlfriend — a Midwestern girl who complains about his spicy food — is fraught with resentment and cultural differences. Desai takes her time building her two titular characters and their backstories. When they finally collide nearly half way into the book, each back in India and needing a break from NYC, it’s all the more rewarding.
Honor Jones (Riverhead Books)
This debut treads well-trod territory — a city gal divorcing in midlife, mother-daughter relationships, childhood sexual abuse and lasting trauma — but with uncommon subtlety and empathy. Honor Jones finds complexity in parents who looked the other way and paints vivid, troubling scenes that feel astonishingly true.
Lucas Schaefer (Simon & Schuster)
In Austin, Texas, in the late ’90s, a 16-year-old boy vanishes after he plans to meet up with the Russian phone-sex operator he’s been spending his Hanukkah money on. Years later, his troubled uncle gets a surprise tip that leads him to dig into his nephew’s disappearance — and experience encounters with a madcap cast of characters at the boxing gym the boy had frequented. Stylish, ambitious and insightful, this is a novel that, dare we say, packs a punch.
Charlotte Wood (Riverhead Books)
You haven’t heard this one before. An atheist Australian woman in her 60s leaves her life in Sydney for the seclusion of a rural convent. There she encounters three visitations: a mouse infestation, the delivery of her long-dead sister’s remains and a visitor from her past. It’s a totally original, strangely compelling story.
Jade Chang (Ecco)
Should you love, resent, pity or sympathize Lola Treasure Gold, the protagonist of Jade Chang’s follow-up to “The Wangs vs. the World”? It’s all of the above, as the Los Angeles millennial — grieving her best friend’s shocking death while casting around for a career path — stumbles into wild success as a guru to people desperately seeking meaning and with the disposable income to pay for it. Fun, funny and ultimately moving, but served with a side of skeptical side-eye.
NONFICTION
Laurie Gwen Shapiro (Viking)
This juicy biography of Amelia Earhart has everything: “air rodeos,” sugar daddies, flashy cars, racy fashions, sex and more. Shapiro examines Earhart’s relationship with her husband, George Putnam, the showman publisher who made the high-flying aviatrix a star — and possibly led to her downfall. Though a fierce feminist, the good-natured Earhart let her pushy paramour control her schedule and public image. In turn, he encouraged her recklessness, setting up dangerous stunts for a quick buck or a sensational headline, including her last, fatal trip around the globe.
Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker (Little, Brown Spark)
Legendary “disease detective” Michael Osterholm uses a fictional outbreak in a Somali village to show how a new virus, as contagious as COVID but far more lethal, could race through refugee camps, jetliners, and megacities before the world even agrees on what it’s facing. Moving between this scenario and real crises from 1918 influenza to HIV, Ebola, Zika and COVID-19, he exposes how fragile supply chains, political denial, and collapsing public trust leave us wide open to the next hit. Osterholm doesn’t traffic in charts but in chilling clarity: Pathogens have a 220,000-to-1 generational advantage over humans, and “the only currency public health has is trust”—which COVID shattered.
Laurie Woolever (Ecco)
Yes, Laurie Woolever was Anthony Bourdain’s longtime friend and personal assistant, and her memoir is filled with tidbits about the late great — including her heartbreaking final text with him — that Bourdain fans are sure to enjoy. And yes, she also worked for Mario Batali and offers up tawdry tidbits about working for the hard-partying chef who was felled by sexual misconduct allegations. But Woolever’s book is also a compelling, bravely honest, beautifully written look at addiction, ambition, sexual compulsions, parenting and ambivalence.
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson (Simon & Schuster)
Forget Coco Chanel. Claire McCardell is the most influential fashion designer of all time. In the 1930s and ’40s, the plucky American championed dresses with pockets, ballet flats and mix-and-match separates and introduced leggings, hoodies, wrap dresses and denim into womenswear. Dickinson’s engaging biography finally gives this genius her due, bringing her exciting, glamorous world and rebellious ideas to life.
Charles Piller (Atria/One Signal Publishers)
Charles Piller exposes how the failed Alzheimer’s drug simufilam — developed by Cassava Sciences and valued at $5.4 billion — was based on manipulated research images and the flawed amyloid hypothesis. Whistleblower Matthew Schrag uncovered shocking evidence of scientific fraud that diverted resources from promising treatments, revealing systemic problems plaguing medical research where over 55,000 studies have been retracted. Piller carefully explains how Schrag used NIH-endorsed software to spot “shockingly blatant” signs of tampering, and why this matters beyond one drug: “You can cheat to get a paper,” Schrag says. “You can’t cheat to cure a disease.”
Haley Cohen Gilliland (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
This riveting book tells the story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, whose grandchildren went missing during Argentina’s military junta in the 1970s and ’80s. Gilliland chronicles the heart-rending decades these women spent searching for their grandchildren, many born in captivity to mothers who were then “disappeared” — that is, dropped out of airplanes. In the process, these brave women defied the government, inspired a breakthrough in genetic testing and helped reunite 139 missing children with their biological families.
David McWilliams (Henry Holt and Co.)
Economist David McWilliams tells the story of money through the anxious people who have used it, from a Sumerian brewer sweating a 33% barley loan to Roman senators triggering the world’s first credit crash and bailout under Tiberius. He follows money’s evolution from clay tablets and temple IOUs to Nazi counterfeiting plots and modern central banks, showing how credit, debt and trust become tools of power, empire and resistance. McWilliams draws direct lines from ancient Rome’s property collapse to modern financial crises (“It was 2008, but with togas”) and reveals the chilling truth that Lenin and Hitler grasped: “Mess with money and you mess with far more than the price system — you mess with people’s heads.”
Keith McNally (Gallery Books)
Keith McNally’s Instagram reports from dinner service at his Balthazar and Minetta Tavern are always a delight, and his book is this year’s not-to-miss memoir. The prolific, outspoken restaurateur (who hates that word — sorry, Keith) dishes on growing up in London and working as a child actor, opening the iconic Odeon and numerous other classic NYC spots, and his two divorces, a serious stroke and much more.
Sophie Elmhirst (Riverhead Books)
In 1972, an unconventional young couple quit their day jobs with dreams of sailing around the world. But, a year into their journey, an encounter with a whale sunk their boat, leaving the pair stranded for months on a rubber raft in the Pacific. The harrowing true story isn’t just a survival tale, it’s a fascinating, compelling picture of the psychology of marriage that reads like fiction. (Spoiler warning: The woman’s strength and optimism and focus on seemingly trivial matters — making playing cards, planning future dinner party menus — are what gets them through, while the man contemplates suicide and grows weak.) Elmhirst doesn’t stop the book with their rescue but continues on as the couple struggles with their fame and re-acclimating into “normal” life.
Caroline Fraser (Penguin Press)
Caroline Fraser investigates whether Tacoma, Washington’s industrial pollution — 53 factories releasing arsenic, lead and toxic chemicals — created America’s serial killer capital. Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, Charles Manson and Jack Spillman all spent formative years breathing contaminated air near smelters. Studies show childhood lead exposure correlates with aggression and crime, suggesting environmental toxins may have unleashed monsters. Fraser connects the dots with chilling precision, proving that every one of Tacoma’s four major contamination “plumes” has hosted activities of serial rapists or murderers. And she traces the pattern all the way back to Jack the Ripper’s soot-choked London.
Benjamin Wallace (Crown)
Benjamin Wallace investigates Bitcoin’s enigmatic creator Satoshi Nakamoto, who invented cryptocurrency worth $100 billion yet remains completely unknown. Despite theories ranging from novelist Neal Stephenson to Elon Musk, Nakamoto’s identity stays hidden — possibly deliberately, as his anonymity gave Bitcoin its best shot at decentralized success. Wallace tracks down every major suspect (all deny it) and reveals why the mystery endures as Bitcoin’s most compelling feature: In a world where mysteries are rapidly ceasing to exist, this one feels increasingly unsolvable.
Mary Roach (W. W. Norton & Company)
Science writer Mary Roach explores the astonishing frontier of human body replacement, from pig heart xenotransplants keeping patients alive for months to cod skin healing burns better than synthetics. She examines 3D-printed organs, finger-to-penis reconstructions and lab-grown tissues, revealing how pragmatic medical fixes restore function and humanity — measured not in sci-fi spectacle but ordinary days reclaimed. Roach delights in surgeons’ gallows humor and kitchen metaphors (a dermatome as cheese slicer, a perfusion cart as salad spinner), leaning into absurdities without losing sight of what’s at stake: survival, dignity and years added to lives.
Ione Skye (Gallery Books)
Come for the Gen X (and Boomer—the author’s absentee dad is “Season of the Witch” singer Donovan) nostalgia, stay for the thrillingly honest writing. Actress Ione Skye, best known for her star turn in “Say Anything,” is a pop-culture Zelig and writes about experiences, good and sketchy, with Keanu Reeves, Anthony Kiedis, River Phoenix and, most heartbreakingly, the Beastie Boys’ Ad Rock. But this is far more than a woman telling her life story through famous men. Skye’s Hollywood childhood, film career, unusual first foray into parenting and life regrets spring to vibrant, cinematic life.
Graydon Carter (Penguin Press)
Carter’s stories about the heady, black-car years at Condé Nast, where he was the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair from 1992 to 2017, are fizzy fun that romanticize the magazine era. From the “Mission Impossible”-style subterfuge the publication went to to keep its coveted Suri Cruise cover a secret to the unveiling of Watergate source Deep Throat, the memoir is like a 432-page Page Six item.
Cameron Crowe (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
Oscar-winning filmmaker Cameron Crowe recounts his teenage years as a Rolling Stone journalist embedded with Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, the Allman Brothers and David Bowie. The prodigy graduated high school at 15 and gained extraordinary access, watching bands write hits, navigating cocaine-fueled confessions and being berated by a paranoid Gregg Allman — experiences that ultimately inspired Crowe’s movie “Almost Famous.” Crowe’s journalism reads like a greatest hits of American rock, as he captures the exact moment when “deep truths are being spoken.”
