In a hard year—and when, recently, have we had one we’d consider easy?—books can be a lifeline and a balm, a place to retreat and regain our grounding. Among the many entertaining, delightful, poignant, and treasured new works of fiction and nonfiction that were published this year, the very best offered fresh perspective and a strong voice to cut through the noise. S.A. Cosby and R.F. Kuang took us on high-octane journeys that blended genre thrills with literary impact. Miriam Toews and Yiyun Li probed grave personal losses, offering insights from the edge of grief. Katie Kitamura and Lily King put relationships under a microscope, examining how, and how thoroughly, the bonds we create can shape us. Taken together, the books on this list show narrators real and imagined grappling with some of life’s greatest challenges, and nevertheless surviving—as timely and valuable a message as readers can ask for. Here, the 10 best books of 2025.
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10. A Truce That Is Not Peace, Miriam Toews
Miriam Toews’ first book of nonfiction in more than 20 years begins with a fictionalized premise: she is asked, in advance of a literary festival in Mexico, to consider the question, “Why do you write?” And she finds it so impossible to conjure an answer that will satisfy the event’s director that her appearance is canceled. This momentary obstacle, an amalgamation of real experiences, becomes a rich, long-term project. In A Truce That Is Not Peace, the acclaimed Canadian author meanders through her childhood and early motivations to write, the losses of close family members, her Mennonite background, misadventures in both being parented and parenting, and more formative moments. In a memoir that’s at once wry, gutting, and exhilarating, Toews holds her life and her creative process up to the light to examine the threads that tie them together.
9. King of Ashes, S.A. Cosby
The author of Blacktop Wasteland, Razorblade Tears, and All the Sinners Bleed—one of the most acclaimed writers of crime fiction to emerge over the past six years—S.A. Cosby offers another grisly and gripping Southern noir novel. Atlanta-based financial adviser Roman Carruthers is back in Jefferson Run, the Virginia town where he grew up, to deal with a number of family crises. His father was just in a catastrophic car crash, his sister is buckling under the pressure of running the family business, and his little brother owes a debt to a vicious gang—which, Roman quickly realizes, has everything to do with their father’s “accident.” And then there’s the lingering mystery of what happened to their mother, who disappeared when they were young. Roman’s only choice is to employ the skills of his trade to try to make things right for his family, even if he has to do some wrong along the way. Cosby has a talent for lining up dominoes and knocking them down in the most unexpected of ways, crafting thrillers that are as high-velocity as they are rewarding.
Read More: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025
8. Katabasis, R.F. Kuang
Two postgraduate students in Cambridge University’s Department of Analytic Magick follow their recently deceased advisor to the afterlife in hopes of retrieving his soul and rescuing their career prospects. R.F. Kuang, the author of The Poppy War series, Babel, and Yellowface—and a Yale PhD candidate herself—conjures a fantasy quest narrative that gleefully skewers the lopsided power dynamics in academia. It’s a campus novel where the campus is literally hell. Kuang consults everything from Dante’s Inferno to mind-bending logic concepts like the impossible Penrose stairs to create the landscape and mechanics of her underworld. Then she throws two desperate, competitive students into its depths to see whether they can find their way back to the land of the living—and if, along the way, they might learn something more valuable than what can be gleaned from textbooks.
7. Baldwin: A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs
An intimate look into the private life of one of America’s most celebrated writers, Baldwin: A Love Story finds connections between the author’s literary insights and his many close relationships, with figures from Harlem painter Beauford Delaney to Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger to French artist Yoran Cazac. Nicholas Boggs spent decades researching this thoughtful and well-paced biography, consulting archival material and even interviewing, after presuming him dead, a crucial surviving player in Baldwin’s life story. The book is an exploration of Baldwin’s identity and a close reading of how his lived experiences, as a writer and traveler, as a Black man in America, and as a romantic, informed his most indelible writing.
6. A Marriage at Sea, Sophie Elmhirst
Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a married couple, were hankering for an adventure when they bought and boarded a boat in the early 1970s, set for a multiyear voyage from England to New Zealand. But nothing could have prepared them for the harrowing journey that followed. Nine months into their mission, a whale sank their vessel, and the Baileys found themselves adrift on a raft in the Pacific Ocean, where they would flounder under incredible strain for 118 days. British journalist Sophie Elmhirst tells the true story of a couple that survived against the odds, taking as much interest in the interpersonal dramas that played out between them as in the trials of being lost at sea. In a narrative that reads like fiction, Elmhirst recounts Maralyn’s unflappability as it contrasts with Maurice’s pessimism, studying a partnership put to the ultimate test.
5. Audition, Katie Kitamura
Katie Kitamura’s Audition resists simple description—it doesn’t fit into our usual framework for what a novel should be—and it hardly gets easier to explain, no matter how many times a person may attempt to communicate the experience of reading it. Which is appropriate, given that Kitamura’s subject is performance itself, the ways in which we try, and often fail, to inhabit the roles we’ve been assigned: spouse, parent, artist, subject. The novel begins with an unnamed protagonist, a successful actor set to appear in a play, sitting down for a tense dinner in New York City with a notably younger man. She’s worried about how it looks, like she might be the man’s lover or even his mother. And then her husband walks in, raising the stakes. Who is this young person, really? Kitamura explores more than one possible answer, probing the bounds of how people can relate to one another. Audition is as thrilling as it is enigmatic.
4. A Guardian and a Thief, Megha Majumdar
In near-future Kolkata, daily life is becoming a strain. Food is scarce and violence is escalating. Ma is ready to get out, and to bring her father Dadu and 2-year-old daughter Mishti with her. Her husband has set up a life in Michigan, and all Ma needs to do is attain the three passports and climate-refugee visas they’ve been approved for, and get her family on a plane. But someone from the shelter where Ma works as a manager has his eyes on her. Boomba, who has his own family to think about, envies what few comforts Ma has, and when he breaks into her home to steal food and cash, he unwittingly takes the trio’s documents—and their hope for escape—with him. In her National Book Award-shortlisted follow-up to A Burning, Megha Majumdar sets two families on a crash course, testing the weight of their morals against the strength of their love.
3. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad
What began as a viral tweet became one of the most discussed and widely praised books of the year, the winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction. In October 2023, journalist and author Omar El Akkad took to social media to condemn those who had nothing to say about the horrors inflicted by the Israeli government on the people of Gaza in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” The sentiment informed his searing book, both memoir and polemic, which weaves together personal stories of his upbringing in Egypt, Qatar, and Canada, as well as his experience of parenthood in the U.S., with a sharp analysis of the apathy with which so many regard the suffering of people they conveniently designate as “other.” When he accepted the National Book Award in November, El Akkad spoke to directly to a tension that has hung over the enthusiastic reception of his book by many of the same audiences he seeks to address within it: “It’s very difficult to think in celebratory terms about a book that was written in response to a genocide.”
2. Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li
Sometimes it’s the simplest language that best communicates the most complex of experiences. In Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li employs clean, penetrating prose to tell a story of extreme personal tragedy. In 2017, Li’s elder son Vincent died by suicide at the age of 16. Seven years later, her younger son James, then 19, died the same way. Li’s memoir, a finalist for a National Book Award, shows her, in the wake of James’ death, mining the experience and meaning of grief on the page, even as she rejects the concept: “I am against the word ‘grief,’ which in contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an end point,” she writes. “The sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living, and the less awkward people around you will feel.” Li is not interested in moving on from the pain of her loss. She endeavors to understand it, and to carry on nevertheless.
1. Heart the Lover, Lily King
What begins as the hormone-fueled story of a campus love triangle, punctuated by bad sex and the heady banter of English majors, reveals itself to hold far greater weight. In Lily King’s Heart the Lover, Jordan (a nickname, after The Great Gatsby’s Jordan Baker) is an undergraduate toying with early ambitions to become a novelist when she’s pulled into the social world of the two star students in her 17th-century literature class. Sam and Yash are best friends and roommates, and while Jordan initially dates Sam, it’s Yash who becomes a great love—and who, more than 20 years later, reappears in Jordan’s settled life and cracks her heart open. A companion novel to King’s 2020 best seller Writers & Lovers, Heart the Lover showcases King’s talent for portraying intimacy and its enduring impacts. In tracing Jordan’s evolving relationship with Yash, she illuminates the gap between youthful certainty and the earned recognition of how little in life and love is truly within our control.
If you or someone you know need help, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.