www.nytimes.com /2025/05/07/books/best-books-2025-so-far.html

The Best Books of 2025 (So Far)

The New York Times Books Staff 12-16 minutes 5/7/2025
The illustration shows arched portions of 15 book covers in a grid pattern on a blue background.
Credit...The New York Times

The nonfiction and novels we can’t stop thinking about.

We’re halfway 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.

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The book cover of “The Sisters” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri.

This big, impressive novel revolves around a trio of magnetic Swedish women — the Mikkola sisters, daughters of an eccentric Tunisian mother. As they crisscross the world from Stockholm to Tunis to New York, their lives are recounted by their childhood acquaintance Jonas, who bears a striking resemblance to the book’s author. Read our review.

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The book cover of “The Director” by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin.

Movie stars and Nazis are irresistible ingredients in any book. Kehlmann’s smartly entertaining new novel about the great Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst offers both, detailing their once intimate, often symbiotic ties. “The Director” is a marvelous performance — not only supple, horrifying and mordantly droll, but fluidly translated by Ross Benjamin and absolutely convincing. Read our review.

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The book cover of “These Summer Storms,” by Sarah MacLean.

Popular with Times Readers

Alice reluctantly returns to her family’s estate after her estranged father, a tech billionaire, is killed in an accident, leaving behind a series of tasks for his wife and children. The first contemporary novel by MacLean, an acclaimed author of historical romance, weaves together gripping drama, a summer love story and a nuanced portrait of a family grappling with secrets, privilege and grief. Read our review.

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The book cover of “The Catch” by Yrsa Daley-Ward.

Daley-Ward’s first novel follows semi-estranged twin sisters who were adopted in infancy by different families after their mother vanished. Now in their 30s, their strained relationship is thrown into sharp relief when one of them becomes convinced she has seen their mother, still alive and seemingly frozen in time. This metaphysical experiment on grief, family and longing holds all the excitement of a big summer read. Read our review.

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The book cover of “King of Ashes” by S.A. Cosby.

In Cosby’s fifth Southern noir thriller, a wealthy Atlanta investment banker returns to his Virginia hometown after a car crash leaves his father in a coma, only to find the rest of his family threatened by a deadly gang. Our reviewer, Chanelle Benz, called it “a gripping roller coaster ride of escalating danger in cars and crematories, punctuated by pulpy moments of dark glamour.” Read our review.

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The book cover of “Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil” by V.E. Schwab.

Schwab, best known for novels like “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” and “Vicious,” returns with a time-sweeping, character-juggling, lesbian vampire mystery that moves between 1532 Spain, 1827 London and 2019 Boston. Our reviewer described it as “a tale told sharply, but sweetly enough it goes down as easy as that happy-hour cocktail that, surprisingly, knocks you flat.” Read our review.

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The cover of “To Smithereens,” by Rosalyn Drexler

Originally published in 1972, Drexler’s brilliantly offbeat novel depicts two seemingly unrelated subcultures in the New York City of that era — the art world and women’s wrestling — by way of the vivid but unlikely relationship between a self-serious art writer and the strong young woman he encourages to take up professional wrestling. Read our review.

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The book cover of “Isola” by Allegra Goodman.

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. Read our review.

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The book cover of “Stone Yard Devotional” by Charlotte Wood.

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 — including a plague of mice — 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.

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The book cover of “Sunrise on the Reaping” by Suzanne Collins.

Collins returns to the world of “The Hunger Games” 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 trilogy — 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.

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The book cover of “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” by Stephen Graham Jones.

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. Read our review.

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The book cover of “Flesh” by David Szalay.

Szalay’s novel follows a lonely young man, Istvan, who grows up in a Hungarian housing project 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.

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The book cover of “Heartwood” by Amity Gaige.

Popular with Times Readers

When an experienced hiker named Valerie goes missing on the Appalachian Trail, two other women — a veteran game warden and a lonely but lively 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.

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This is the cover of “A Marriage at Sea,” by Sophie Elmhirst.

In 1972, a young British couple decided to ditch their jobs, sell their house and sail the world. All went well until their boat was capsized by a breaching whale, at which point their story became one not merely of miraculous survival but also of a relationship placed under the greatest imaginable pressure. Elmhirst’s account is as much a meditation on intimacy as a remarkable adventure tale. Read our review.

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The book cover of “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America” by Brian Goldstone.

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. 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.

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This is the cover of “The CIA Book Club,” by Charlie English.

This rollicking account of the C.I.A.’s mission to smuggle contraband books and magazines into the Eastern bloc focuses on how the operation unfolded in Poland in the 1980s. As our reviewer Joseph Finder wrote, “English’s book is a bracing reminder that, not so long ago, forbidden literature really could help tip the balance of history.” Read our review.

Save “The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War With Forbidden Literature” to Your Reading List.

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The book cover of “Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church” by Kevin Sack.

Written by a former New York Times reporter, this masterpiece of narrative nonfiction tells the story of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., “the most historic Black church in the South’s most historic city,” now best known as the site of an egregious act of barbarism: the killing of nine congregants in 2015 by a white supremacist. Sack’s captivating narrative features vivid prose, prodigious research and palpable emotion, disciplined by a meticulous attention to the facts. Read our review.

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The book cover of “Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin” by Sue Prideaux.

Paul Gauguin’s boldly colored, formally inventive artwork inspired painters from Van Gogh and Picasso to the German Expressionists. In this terrific biography, Prideaux draws on recently discovered source material to deliver an enthralling account of an artist whose life was as inventive as his art. Read our review.

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This is the cover of “Daughters of the Bamboo Grove,” by Barbara Demick

Demick traces the divergent paths of a pair of twin girls born in China under the one-child rule. Their parents sent one of the babies to live with relatives, hoping she’d evade the scrutiny of authorities. Instead, she was kidnapped by a “family planning” agency and adopted by Americans who were unaware of her origins. Reported over many years, their story delivers an emotional wallop. Read our review.

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The cover of “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” by Yiyun Li

Li’s new memoir offers an elegant, somewhat aloof rumination on the suicide of her son James at 19, in 2024 — six years after the suicide of his older brother, Vincent, then 16. This disturbing, inconsolable tribute is a memoir unlike others, strange and profound and fiercely determined not to look away. Read our review.

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The cover of “Apple in China,” by Patrick McGee

This smart and comprehensive account makes a devastatingly clear case that Apple’s decision under Tim Cook, the current C.E.O., to manufacture about 90 percent of its products in China has created an existential vulnerability not just for Apple, but for the United States — nurturing the conditions for Chinese technology to outpace American innovation. Read our review.

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The book cover of “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” by Sarah Wynn-Williams.

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. Read our review.

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The book cover of “Raising Hare” by Chloe Dalton.

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.

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The book cover of “The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780,” by Rick Atkinson.

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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