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The Best Books of 2025 (So Far)


We’re more than a third of the way through 2025 and we at The Book Review have already written about hundreds of books. Some of those titles are good. Some are very good. And then there are the following.

We suspect that some (though certainly not all) of these will be top of mind when we publish our end-of-year, best-of lists. For more suggestions for what to read next, head to our book recommendation page.

The Nobel laureate’s new novel, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, revisits a violent chapter in South Korean history: Between 1947 and 1954 on Jeju, an island off the coast of South Korea, at least 30,000 people were killed in mostly government-perpetrated atrocities. This disturbing, dreamlike book centers on a writer who travels to Jeju during a blizzard to rescue a friend’s pet bird, only to uncover the depths of her friend’s obsession with the massacre. Read our review.

Goodman’s gripping novel traces the fate of a real-life 16th-century French noblewoman, Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval. Marooned on a desolate island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence by her unscrupulous guardian after falling in love with his aide, Marguerite, along with her lover and her devoted nurse, must fight to survive as the harsh Canadian winter approaches. Marguerite’s narration is elegantly restrained, as if telling her story were an opportunity to impose order on a life she did not design. Read our review.

Wood’s somber, exquisite novel centers on a 60-something atheist wildlife conservationist who leaves behind her husband and career to live in a convent near her rural Australian hometown. Despite a series of disrupting incidents — a plague of mice, the arrival of the remains of a nun who disappeared 20 years earlier, the reappearance of her childhood classmate — the narrator finds in this retreat the time and space to ruminate on forgiveness, regret and how to live and die, if not virtuously, then as harmlessly as possible. Read our review.

Adichie’s first novel since 2013 — when she won a National Book Critics Circle Award for “Americanah” — draws on a notorious real-life sexual assault case as she follows the lives of three Nigerian women and one of their former housekeepers. The circuitous, engrossing narrative revolves around Chiamaka, an anxious travel writer; her best friend Zikora, a successful lawyer; and her cousin Omelogor, a blunt banker-turned-grad-student. In elegant prose full of the minutia of daily life, Adichie grapples with the hierarchies of language and the reality of women’s bodies. Read our review.

Jones’s past fiction has confidently used various horror genres to explore the Native American experience, and his gruesome new joyride of a novel follows suit — via a Blackfeet man who becomes a vampire in the 1870s and seeks vengeance for the country’s sins. The book is an entertaining nesting doll of stories, toggling between the bloodsucker, a 1912 pastor and a 21st-century researcher as Jones invites us to reflect on how the stories we tell about ourselves can be at once confessions and concealments. Read our review.

Collins returns to the world of “The Hunger Games,” 17 years after the first book, with this brutal and heart-wrenching prequel about Haymitch Abernathy — the jaded but fiercely devoted mentor who coached the teenage revolutionary Katniss Everdeen in the original series — and his experience at the 50th Games. In expanding Haymitch’s story, complete with plenty of grisly details and a vibrant cast of new and familiar characters, Collins paints a shrewd portrait of the machinery of propaganda and how authoritarianism takes root. Read our review.

In this slow-burn thriller, an experienced hiker named Valerie goes missing on the Appalachian Trail and two other women — a veteran game warden and a lonely but lively 76-year-old former scientist stuck in a retirement community — must crack the case. “Heartwood” absorbs the reader in the subculture and shorthand of the trail, exploring the thorny tangles of motherhood (and daughterhood) and building satisfying suspense about whether, and how, all three women will emerge from their metaphorical woods. Read our review.

Szalay’s cool, remote novel follows a lonely young man, Istvan, who grows up with his mother in a housing estate in Hungary and gets swept along on a journey, peppered with sex and violence, to the upper echelons of British society. Even as Istvan advances into privileged enclaves, he remains coarse, boorish and surprisingly sensitive; one of the book’s primary subjects is male alienation. Szalay lets us feel Istvan’s longing for meaning, for experience, for belonging, as he moves from humble beginnings to heady heights and back again with the detachment of a survivor. Read our review.

Michigan prohibited segregation in public education decades before the Supreme Court did the same for the nation in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Yet nearly 20 years after Brown, the public schools in Detroit remained almost totally segregated. In her powerful new book, Adams explores how this happened, the failed efforts to integrate and the implications for public education and civil rights today. Read our review.

During the Covid pandemic, Dalton — a British writer and political adviser — stumbled across an abandoned newborn brown leveret, or hare, in the English countryside near her home and decided to raise it herself despite knowing nothing about hares (or their smaller cousin, the rabbit). Her sweetly meditative memoir, which includes illustrations, describes how her furry new housemate changed her outlook on life during the pandemic and beyond. Read our review.

For seven years, beginning in 2011, Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook (now called Meta), eventually as a director of global public policy. Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and grew increasingly feckless, even as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes. “Careless People” is darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. Read our review.

Sheff’s new biography of Yoko Ono, the 92-year-old artist and widow of John Lennon, convincingly argues for her relevance as a feminist, activist, avant-garde innovator and world-class sass. Sheff — a prolific journalist and author who conducted one of the last significant interviews with John and Yoko, for Playboy, and later became good friends with her — has written the closest thing to an authorized biography the world will get. The book is meaty and predictably sympathetic, but not fawning, mostly written in a straightforward prose that suggests sympathy is wholly justified for a figure who was not just dismissed but demonized. Read our review.

Written by a journalist who also has a Ph.D. in anthropology, this powerful book — an exceptional feat of reporting — details the plight of “the working homeless” in the rapidly gentrifying city of Atlanta, where someone with a full-time job can still get priced out of a place to live. Explaining that between 2010 and 2023 the median rent shot up by a staggering 76 percent, Goldstone offers an immersive narrative of how five Atlanta families found themselves in the direst of straits: Working a lot and earning very little, they ended up sleeping in cars, crashing with relatives or paying for a squalid room in an extended-stay hotel, statistically invisible even as they suffered some of the most difficult years of their lives. Read our review.

Borger was a child when his father — an Austrian Jew who had fled to Wales in 1938, when he was 11 — died by suicide. Decades later, working as a writer and editor at The Guardian, Borger made a startling discovery: His father’s flight to freedom had been facilitated by a heartbreaking personal ad in his very newspaper, one of dozens that desperate Jewish parents in Nazi Europe had placed to find foster homes for their children as the specter of war grew. In this haunting and revelatory book, part memoir and part history, Borger tracks down the subjects of several of those ads, whose stories — alongside his own — illuminate the tension between forgetting and remembering. Read our review.

The second installment of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s trilogy about the Revolutionary War contains a vast, brilliantly illuminated world. Atkinson’s sweeping account of the middle years of the multifront war is so compulsively readable that despite its length — around 800 pages — it’s difficult to put down. Weaving together major and less-known figures, dramatic battles and everyday minutia, the book teems with visceral details while thoughtfully exploring the many complexities of this pivotal conflict. Read our review.



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