Fiction | Nonfiction
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. We discuss many of these titles on an episode of the Book Review podcast. For more suggestions for what to read next, head to our book recommendation page.
Fiction
I want an utterly absorbing, old-fashioned love story
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
by Kiran Desai
In this rich, bustling, old-fashioned epic, a young couple pushed toward marriage by their Indian families embark on what Desai has called “an endlessly unresolved romance,” navigating competing forces of tradition and modernity, love and duty, East and West. Our critic Alexandra Jacobs, noting that the novel was 20 years in the making, wrote that “in an era of hot takes and chilly optimized productivity, here is sweet validation of the idea that to create something truly transcendent — a work of art depicting love, family, nature and culture in all their fullness — might take time.” Read our review.
How about an eerie historical novel reminiscent of Shirley Jackson?
The Hounding
by Xenobe Purvis
In 1700s England, the town of Little Nettlebed is scandalized by a rumor that the five Mansfield sisters, already considered odd and aloof, are transforming into a pack of dogs at night. Purvis’s debut is a wildly inventive riff on the Gothic form, with enough suspense and mounting dread to rival Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Read our review.
I want to get lost in a continent-spanning family epic
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.
I’d like a sweeping story about art and fascism
The Director
by Daniel Kehlmann
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.
What’s the best romance our columnist has read all year?
August Lane
by Regina Black
Our columnist, Olivia Waite, described this second-chance romance set in the country music world as “a sullen, smoldering ember that’s one breath away from blazing into an inferno,” adding, “This is not the aw-shucks kind of country: It’s the murder ballads, the rolling thunder, the long black road — and the best romance I’ve read all year.” Read our review.
I want a cast of characters to root for throughout love, war and family travails
Buckeye
by Patrick Ryan
The old-fashioned sweep of Ryan’s doorstop novel, about two complicated families in small-town Ohio that intersect across the mid-20th century, feels intrinsically American in the way of a Thornton Wilder play or an Andrew Wyeth painting. Jess Walter, who reviewed it for us, called it “omniscient, sweeping, almost defiantly sentimental”; “the book, he added, “is a reminder of the deep pleasure of following a cast of characters over their entire lives, through births, deaths, marriages, tragedies and, in this case, hard-won reconciliations.” Read our review.
How about a small-town crime drama?
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.
A time-hopping vampire mystery? I’m in!
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.
I want a survival drama based on true events
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.
Give me a quietly apocalyptic book with mice and nuns
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.
I’d like a propulsive addition to a beloved series
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.
How about a book that mashes up horror and history?
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.
I love rags-to-riches stories that make me think
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.
I want a slow-burn Appalachian thriller
Heartwood
by Amity Gaige
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.
Nonfiction
I’d like a wild survival story
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.
I want a memoir of a formidable mother
Mother Mary Comes to Me
by Arundhati Roy
To the long, sonorous roll call of difficult mothers in literature, add Mary Roy — Mrs. Roy to you, and, most tellingly, to her own daughter. That daughter is Arundhati Roy, who won a Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel, “The God of Small Things,” and who uses this polished new memoir to recall the imperious and volatile woman who raised her, instilling by example a fierce love of education and social justice even as she hurled insults and, occasionally, crockery. Read our review.
How about a tender biography of an American literary icon?
Baldwin: A Love Story
By Nicholas Boggs
In this tender new biography, Boggs goes far beyond other scholars in tracing how James Baldwin’s relationships affected his work. Charles Blow, who reviewed the book for us, called it “stunning,” writing that “the reader is immersed in the man of Baldwin, the chaos and the preternatural talent, the tragedy and the aching heart, the flesh that itches to be touched and the voice that will not be suppressed.” Read our review.
Give me a deep, personal dive into the housing crisis
There Is No Place for Us
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.
I want a deeper understanding of American history
Mother Emanuel
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.
How about a colorful, illuminating biography?
Wild Thing
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.
Or a human window into a misunderstood historical chapter?
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.
I like memoirs — the more gutting, the better
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.
I want to understand the devices that run my life
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.
OK, now give me a darkly funny tech exposé
Careless People
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.
I need a palate cleanser. Got anything warm and fuzzy?
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.
The post The Best Books of the Year (So Far) appeared first on New York Times.
