We are still a few days out from the new year, but our editors have been reading diligently to give you a sneak peak of the best books of 2025. This isn’t a comprehensive list, of course—how could it be when the year hasn’t even yet begun? Rather, it’s a sampling of what we’ve been able to get our hands on and what we are most excited about. (You won’t find any sketchy preview-type blurbs here. These are things we’ve actually read and loved.) And if you’re still catching up on the best books of 2024, fear not—we’ve got you covered there, just look back at our year in review. Make sure to mark this page; we’ll be updating it as the year unfolds.
Playworld by Adam Ross (January)
An alternate title for Playworld (Knopf), Adam Ross’s dazzling and endearing new novel, could be The Lying Life of Children Treated Like Adults. Loosely based on the author’s own years as a child actor in Reagan-era Manhattan, straining to balance his professional obligations with the rigors of his prep school (and the all-important demands of wrestling season), the book follows Griffin, a teenager whose gifts as a performer are plainly a little too finely honed for his own good. Almost without meaning to—though it is he who makes the reckless first move—Griffin slides into a clandestine relationship with Naomi, the wife of a friend of his parents, the capacious backseat of her silver Mercedes sedan 300SD serving as both love nest and, in arguably even more formative ways, a therapist’s office. (This, despite the fact that Griffin has been seeing an actual analyst since he was six; again, this is a city kid.) Gorgeously textured and frequently very funny—Griffin’s wisecracking younger brother, Oren, is a scene-stealer—the book’s particular portrait of late-20th-century, upper-middle-class adolescence takes a generously wide angle, reveling in all the heady, scuzzy, confusing bits of coming of age. —Marley Marius
Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett (January)
At the beginning of Adam Haslett’s riveting Mothers and Sons (Little, Brown and Company), his first novel since the 2016 Pulitzer finalist Imagine Me Gone, the past is clouded in mystery. It’s a past that his two central characters—the 40-year-old gay immigration lawyer Peter who lives a monotonous, overworked existence in New York City, and his estranged mother Ann, who runs a community retreat for women in rural Vermont—have no wish to revisit. But after an asylum case concerning a young queer Albanian man falls into Peter’s lap, repressed memories of a teenage infatuation begin to pierce through the fog, and the devastating event that prompted the seismic break from his mother as a teenager is slowly and elegantly revealed. Unfurling across multiple timelines with impressive, confident fluidity, Mothers and Sons is a powerful study of the impossibility of trying to hold back the tides of familial hurt and trauma. When the levee finally breaks, the outcome is both heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful. —Liam Hess
Isola by Allegra Goodman (January)
In a postscript to her latest novel, Isola (Dial Press), Allegra Goodman describes how she encountered the true story that inspired it in a children’s picture book. Though she was deep into writing an entirely different novel, she worked on Isola in the afternoon. It’s a remarkable origins story given that nothing about Isola betrays its author’s divided attention. The novel tells the story of a young woman born into an aristocratic family in France in the 16th century. After her parents die, her wellbeing—in the loosest terms—is entrusted to a rapacious and almost abusive guardian who decides to bring her on a ship he’s leading to the New World. When he discovers that she has begun a secret affair with his secretary, he abandons her and the secretary on an uninhabited island near the Canadian coast. Like Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds, Goodman’s Isola is among a new generation of survival story: a tale that distills larger themes of power, ownership, tenacity, and colonialism into intimate, vulnerable narratives. It is an extraordinary book that reads like a thriller, written with the care of the most delicate psychological and historical fiction. —Chloe Schama
Vantage Point by Sarah Sligar (January)
Sarah Sligar’s Vantage Point (Macmillan) is a modern Gothic tragedy, with all the ingredients of the genre brought into the present. The well-to-do Weiland family is subject to a curse that condemns them to untimely deaths that unfold with somewhat melodramatic flair: They perish on the Titanic or are mauled by bears in Yosemite. The contemporary version, however, is more digital in nature: Clara, whose brother, Teddy, is running for Senate, finds herself the victim of an explicit video leaked online that threatens to upend her sibling’s candidacy. But is it even real—or a cunning depfake? Clara and her brother have been raised on a remote island in Maine surrounded by generational wealth, and there is an acutely rendered upstair-downstairs dynamic that plays out in the novel as well. Teddy has married Clara’s best friend, a woman from a very different station in life, and the subtle excavations of their varying perspective offers a subtle social commentary, laid on top of this propulsive and highly entertaining thriller. —C.S.
Homeseeking by Karissa Chen (January)
The epic sweep of Karissa Chen’s debut Homeseeking (Putnam) spans borders, oceans, decades, and wars to unfurl the tale of Suchi and Haiwen, childhood sweethearts whose fates are bound together from their time as neighbors in Japan-occupied Shanghai. Vivid historical detail brings alive the settings, from 1960s Hong Kong to 1970s Taiwan, 1980s New York, and finally late-2000s Los Angeles—where the now elders reconnect to see if they can overcome their past traumas. Pachinko-like in scope, it too illustrates how individual lives, here of the Chinese diaspora, are buffeted by history and geopolitics and that the ensuing pain and loss can be borne across a lifetime. —Lisa Wong Macabasco
The Visitor by Maeve Brennan, introduction by Lynne Tillman (January)
A thrill to start the year off with more necessary reissues of Maeve Brennan’s work, spearheaded by the brilliant UJK-based publishers Peninsula Press. Brennan was a celebrated, glamorous Irish writer, with a New Yorker column that observed the city. Last year, Peninsula released The Long-Winded Lady, a pithy, melancholic collection of her vignettes across the basement restaurants and subway skirmishes of ’50s and ’60s New York by a wry and stylish flâneuse, with a crisp introduction by Sinéad Gleeson. This year brings The Visitor (Peninsula Press). Our protagonist is 22-year-old Anastasia King, who leaves Paris and returns to Dublin after the death of her mother. In the six years she’s been away, her estranged father has died. Her paternal grandmother heaves with bitterness and though Ana intends to stay, her implacable grandmother sees her as an unwelcome visitor. This is an alert, terse, and compact novella that excavates family disaster and freedom, that shows off Brennan’s deep-staring documentarian eye. Long may the Brennan revival continue.—Anna Cafolla
The Echoes by Evie Wyld (February)
The Anglo-Australian writer Evie Wyld has a talent for unnerving tales of intergenerational hauntings. Her fourth novel, The Echoes (Knopf), shows her in good, ghostly form. We begin in a London flat where Hannah’s boyfriend, Max, is a spectral presence, having died in veiled circumstances. In short chapters, Wyld skips us forward and backward in time, to Hannah’s alarming Australian childhood, and to the unraveling days of Hannah and Max’s relationship (a secret abortion, domestic squabbles, much drunkenness). The novel is pointillist and virtuosic, gradually revealing the shameful secrets in Hannah’s past—gothic doings in the Australian outback—and showing the way they reverberate, shudderingly, into the present. —Taylor Antrim
Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld (February)
Good as Curtis Sittenfeld’s novels are (among them Prep, American Wife, Romantic Comedy), fans of hers had reason to think, upon the arrival of her first collection in 2019, that her short stories were even better. These were topical, witty, and subversively sexy stories about jealousy, desire, and domestic and professional turmoil. And now comes her new collection, Show Don’t Tell (Random House), a hugely entertaining and formidably intelligent tour through the psyche of mostly middle-aged mothers (and a few fathers), moderately content and successful, and still yearning for more. Sittenfeld’s prose has astonishing ease and her fleet, brisk dialogue sparkles with humor and mischief, taking agile inspiration from the here and now (a story about a babysitter to a couple modeled on Jeff and Mackenzie Bezos, another about an artist who sets lunch dates with married men to test the so-called Mike Pence rule). The collection ends with a sweet and stirring sequel to Prep, returning to her boarding school for an alumni reunion—fan-service of a kind, but also sheer delight. —T.A.
Gliff by Ali Smith (February)
If Ali Smith’s four-book magnum opus Seasonal Quartet forensically examined post-Brexit malaise in contemporary Britain, her latest novel, Gliff (Pantheon), offers a chilling window into its endgame: a world where surveillance, data collection, algorithmic tools, and environmental collapse have created an Orwellian hellscape. Through Smith’s elliptical prose, we slowly piece together the realities of this dystopian Albion, as two “unverifiable” siblings are left to fend for themselves after their activist mother and her partner are disappeared. Hiding in an abandoned suburban home, the younger sister develops a relationship with a horse in a nearby field, providing a glimmer of hope and a suggestion of escape as sinister, mysterious forces attempt to hunt them down. She names the horse Gliff: a word whose nebulous meanings—a short moment, a transient glance, a sudden fright—echo the book’s puzzle-piece structure, as fleeting scenes eventually come together to form a strangely compelling whole. It’s a vivid portrait of a decaying civilization—one snuffed out not with a bang, but with a bleak, bureaucratic whimper. —L.H.
Love in Exile by Shon Faye
We don’t usually think of affairs of the heart as being clear-cut, but this is the approach Shon Faye, who writes the “Dear Shon” advice column for Vogue, among other things, very often takes. Faye has an unusual ability to distill complicated, confusing dynamics into their essential components, offering straightforward advice that is never overly simple. That she does this as a trans woman is almost beside the point, and in some ways you could say the same about her new book Love in Exile (FSG Originals), an autobiographical account of the author’s search for love, but also an account of how and why we define our own self-worth in terms of love. Faye has a perspective and a style that is distinctly her own, but offers insight and enlightenment that is appealingly universal. —C.S.
Lion by Sonya Walger (February)
Sonya Walger’s Lion (NYRB) is the kind of book that will appeal to various readers for entirely different reasons. Walger is an actor who appeared for many years on the TV show Lost, and the loosely fictionalized novel offers an intimate look at the author-actor’s childhood—and the larger-than-life father fixture (the titular lion) who dominated it. Her father is an Argentinian bon vivant who is also a diplomat, a drug addict, a gambler. As quickly as he soars, he plummets: After a stint in one of the most notorious prisons in Europe, he has to return home to live in a tiny high-rise apartment in Buenos Aires paid for by his parents. Much of Lion is a reconciliation of the glory and glamor of his life with the ways he fails his daughter—and in this, there is a moving depiction of the impressionistic emotional lessons of childhood, and an investigation of the fundamental question of what makes a good parent. Or, more precisely, why is it that we venerate the figures who hold themselves most aloof? —C.S.
No Fault by Haley Mlotek (February)
We’ve socialized divorce as one of the worst outcomes that can follow marriage, but what if it were simply something that took place in some people’s lives, without undue baggage and with the potential for a whole artistic genre to be created around it? Haley Mlotek nobly pushes forth a thesis statement for this very genre in her debut memoir, referencing other artists (Leslie Jamison, Sarah Manguso, and Jenny Offill) who have made their work out of the wreckages of their marriages. The story that Mlotek tells about the end of her marriage–about all marriages, really–is entirely her own, just as a divorce should belong entirely to the couple at its center, and I look forward to seeing what story she’ll choose to tell next. —Emma Specter
Tilt by Emma Pattee (March)
A story of resilience in the face of environmental collapse plays out in Tilt (Simon & Schuster), a jarringly propulsive debut from the novelist Emma Pattee. The book unfolds over the course of a single day, in which its very pregnant protagonist decides to make a long-delayed trip to Ikea to purchase a crib. While she is there, an earthquake strikes, wreaking havoc and destruction on her city. All modes of communication are foreclosed; infrastructure crumbles. The world she suddenly faces looks an awful lot like what advocates warning of the earthquake that is likely to strike the Pacific Northwest have forecasted. Here, it is rendered thrillingly, awfully vivid—with a plot propelled by a simple, but powerful deadline: Will she make it to safety before she has the baby? Tilt heralds the arrival of a powerful new literary voice. —C.S.
Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood (March)
There’s nothing remotely easy about this book. (Hood avoids gratuitous excess in describing her gang rape, but there’s only so much one can keep from conjuring when recounting extreme trauma.) But the tale that Hood tells dives deep and is richly layered and worth reading, especially if you’re able to move through the world without a constant awareness of the ways in which you are vulnerable. Hood has been vulnerable and she has been strong, and it’s the strong Hood that emerges victorious from the pages of Trauma Plot. You’ll be rooting for her through every page of this searing memoir. —E.S.
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One by Kristen Arnett (March)
This book seems destined to be known as “the sexy clown novel,” but it’s so much more than that. To be sure, the links that Arnett draws between clowning as an art form and queerness as an identity are strong: Some people will innately dislike you because of the way you move through the world, and the trick is to avoid them. The heart of this novel is the conflicted and unyielding stance of its protagonist, Cherry, who turns to clowning to try to hang on to the memory of her brother after he passes and soon learns more than she could have hoped for from an older woman with experience in the genre. This novel is sweet, sexy, sad, articulate, and funny. —E.S.
Sister Europe by Nell Zink (March)
Nell Zink’s sophisticated, rambunctiously comic novels have ranged ambitiously across time and space from 1960s rural Virginia (Mislaid) to 1980s downtown New York (Doxology) to present day Berlin—the setting of her new one Sister Europe (Knopf). A literary dinner hosted by an absentee royal is being held and a loose gang of Berliners have been invited, a writer Demian, his American publisher Toto, his glamorous friend Livia. In tow are Demian’s trans teenage daughter, and Toto’s unlikely hook up, nicknamed The Flake. There’s a hugely wealthy prince on hand too, who makes a poorly received pass at Demian’s daughter, but then the whole multi-generational gang spills out into late-night Berlin in search of adventure. Picaresque, amusing and brisk, this is a worldly hang-out novel of 21st century manners. —T.A.
Audition by Katie Kitamura (April)
Katie Kitamura writes with a spare, almost clinical, efficiency, but that doesn’t limit the depth of her characters or the complexity of the dynamics she depicts. Like Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry or Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, Audition (Riverhead) is divided into sections with distinctly different perspectives—each ricocheting off the other to make you wonder how we craft and understand truth. In the first, a young man appears in the life of a middle aged actress, convinced (despite the impossibility of the proposal) that he is her son. The second section depicts a reality in which he actually is her son. The strange pendulum swing from one scenario to the other catches you off guard—and isn’t that the mark of truly exciting fiction. —C.S.
Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory (April)
If you’re looking for a genuinely innovative, heart-pumping, and swoonily romantic Sapphic read, look no further than Jasmine Guillory’s latest, which revolves around a straitlaced (and previously straight) event planner named Avery willfully submitting to “flirting lessons” with local lesbian heartbreaker Taylor. The chemistry between the two women is instant and propulsive, and although I’m usually a fan of reading the book before seeing the movie, I can’t help wishing for an on-screen adaptation of this romance novel that lets us see Avery and Taylor salsa-dance their way into each other’s hearts. Guillory is a well-established master of the romance genre, and I, for one, am very excited to see her talents applied to the worthy cause of finally giving queer women something to blush over in the library stacks. —E.S.
Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan (May)
Max is caught on a tightrope of discontent, on one side her London life as legal counsel for a tech company where she impersonates A.I, and then that of a published poet, who happens to also be trans. She takes a big fall down the stairs of a New Year’s Eve party, and avoids getting it seriously checked out. Instead, she finds focus on Vincent, a lawyer and amateur baker with a corporate, cookie-cutter friendship group, haunted by a tumultuous past relationship from a gap year in Thailand. (His conservativeChinese parents also never envisioned him dating a trans woman.) It’s a story of millennial fears and forgiveness, reckoning with past mistakes, stylishly interweaving two compelling voices as they unravel their own love story. Disappoint Me (Penguin Random House) follows Dinan’s debut novel, Bellies, which is another example of deeply empathetic writing and elastic endings that stay with you long after. —A.C.
The Dry Season by Melissa Febos (June)
Can celibacy ever really hope to yield the insight and clarity that sex and relationships can? That’s the question Melissa Febos sets out to answer in this account of a year spent firmly within the bounds of her own company. It might surprise you to learn how much Febos took away from the experience of simply following her own needs, whims and desires without turning her attention to romantic strife or sexual pursuit. As a queer memoirist, Febos provides a sorely needed perspective on the cultural trope of the “incel,” presenting instead a model for celibacy that is self-guided rather than socially imposed and compassionate rather than punitive; this book should be required reading for anyone who’s ever been told to “just take a break from relationships.” —E.S.
Tart, Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef by Slutty Chef (July)
You might know Slutty Chef, the anonymous London-based chef, from her hectic and hilarious Instagram account: documenting e-bike rides with meal deals and kebabs in the basket, Scampi Fries-laden tables for end-of-shift debriefs, the skewering of one particular London male celebrity chef. Or her British Vogue column, where she writes of fine dining as foreplay, pre and post-coital crudités, and the bloated and balshie kitchens dominated by men. Tart, Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef (Simon & Schuster) is Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential meets Lena Dunham’s Girls, steaming with sweaty double-shifts (in the kitchen and bedroom), devouring the city of London with a belly-deep sense of hunger. To be inhaled in one sitting. —A.C.
