The 20 Best Novels of 2025 (So Far)
Cancel your plans for the foreseeable future—besides book club meet-ups—and make sure your library card is in good working order, because 2025 continues to be an incredible year for books. Beloved and award-winning writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Suzanne Collins, Fredrik Backman, and Taylor Jenkins Reid have all put out new novels in recent months, with even more from other faves still on the horizon. You’re also likely to find some new favorites in the bevy of debut works out this year from promising up-and-coming authors, some of whom have already made deals to bring their first books to the screen.
To fill out your TBR list with some new releases, we’ve rounded up the best novels of 2025 so far, including many that are already out, plus some still to come. Though they span nearly every fiction genre—from lit fic to suspense to speculative sci-fi to romance, and everything in between—they barely scratch the surface of this year’s seemingly endless docket of page-turners. Be sure to check back throughout the year for updates to this list, as you can expect to be booked and busy. (Get it?)
‘All the Water in the World’ by Eiren Caffall
Release date: January 7
Fans of Station Eleven and other dystopian survival stories, this one’s for you. It takes place in N.Y.C. after all the glaciers have melted and follows a girl living with her family in a settlement atop the American Museum of Natural History. They’re eventually forced to leave the city and sail north, hopefully to safety, which proves to be a journey that carries them past many others who have found their own ways to survive in the strange new world.
‘The Favorites’ by Layne Fargo
Release date: January 14
Still looking to fill the Daisy Jones & the Six-shaped hole in your heart? This one might do the trick: Told in documentary style, it dives into the passionate on-again, off-again romance between two figure skaters and their often-dramatic relationships with their tight-knit circle of über-competitive frenemies. Pro tip: Like Daisy Jones, the movie-like storytelling style makes for an excellent audiobook.
‘Witchcraft for Wayward Girls’ by Grady Hendrix
Release date: January 14
This thriller-y, horror-y new entry from the author of the bestseller The Final Girl Support Group is set in the ‘70s at a home for “wayward girls,” a.k.a. unwed pregnant women, who have been forced into bleak, strictly monitored lives. When one of the residents is given a book about witchcraft, the girls finally have a chance to experience power—with all the good and bad that entails.
‘Good Dirt’ by Charmaine Wilkerson
Release date: January 28
Charmaine Wilkerson’s extremely moving debut novel Black Cake was a massive hit and adapted into a Hulu series in 2023. Good Dirt has so far been just as buzzy: It’s another sweeping, multi-generational story that follows a woman as she dives into not only the unsolved murder of her brother nearly two decades before but also the closely connected history of a family heirloom that was destroyed the same day.
‘Death Takes Me’ by Cristina Rivera Garza
Release date: February 25
Cristina Rivera Garza won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for her nonfiction investigation into her sister’s 1990 murder, Liliana’s Invincible Summer. Though Death Takes Me—originally published in Spanish and translated into English by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker—is technically fiction, it’s another powerfully written exploration of gendered violence featuring a character with Garza’s name.
‘Dream Count’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Release date: March 4
Over a decade since her last novel, Americanah author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‘s long-awaited next novel follows four women across the U.S. and Nigeria. A writer, a lawyer, a finance maven, and a housekeeper, all four of the main characters are on their own paths toward learning how to love and be loved amid the turbulence of family, work, relationships, and life in general.
‘The Dream Hotel’ by Laila Lalami
Release date: March 4
Laila Lalami’s last book, the National Book Award-shortlisted The Other Americans, was a tangly crime story. This time around, she takes on another unputdownable genre: speculative fiction. The Dream Hotel is set in a world where the government uses algorithms to analyze dreams in an attempt to prevent crimes from happening and lock up the alleged future criminals in terrifyingly strict facilities. You know, just in case you want to become even more worried about our society’s growing reliance on AI!
‘All the Other Mothers Hate Me’ by Sarah Harman
Release date: March 11
Comedy and crime don’t always mix, but they do perfectly here. Sarah Harman’s debut novel stars Florence, a single mother whose 10-year-old son becomes the lead suspect in the disappearance of his bully. Florence, a former girl band star and party girl, takes on the task of clearing her son’s name, and hilarious, twisty chaos ensues. If that sounds like the makings of a perfect TV show, fear not: The creator of The Bear is already on it over at FX.
‘The Antidote’ by Karen Russell
Release date: March 11
The Antidote tracks a cast of characters living through the Dust Bowl in Nebraska. But, because this is a Karen Russell book, it’s not your average historical fiction: One of the characters is a “Prairie Witch” who stores memories and secrets in her body, and the whole tale is easily (and powerfully) translated to our longstanding tendency to gloss over the messy parts of history, as well as our current-day climate crisis.
‘Early Thirties’ by Josh Duboff
Release date: March 18
This one’s perfect for fans of The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue and basically all of Dolly Alderton’s work. It follows a pair of best friends in—you guessed it—their early 30s who must finally start growing up and building the adult lives they want and, in the process, must relearn the outlines of their best friendship.
‘Hot Air’ by Marcy Dermansky
Release date: March 18
If the cover of Hot Air isn’t enough to draw you in, the synopsis surely will be. Joannie arrives in Johnny’s backyard for her first date in seven years, only to have her childhood crush, Jonathan, now a billionaire, and his wife Julia crash their hot-air balloon into Johnny’s pool, setting up a very tangly love quadrangle.
‘Sunrise on the Reaping’ by Suzanne Collins
Release date: March 18
The Hunger Games books might technically be classified as YA, but adults can get plenty out of the beloved (and terrifying) dystopian series, too, whether or not you’ve been following the series since 2008. Years after publishing the original trilogy, Collins returned with a prequel in 2020, and this newest entry falls between the two. It’s set during the 50th annual Hunger Games, featuring Katniss’s future mentor Haymitch. The games that year infamously drew double the number of child tributes into the killing competition. Bonus: We won’t have to wait long to see it onscreen, as a movie version is already in development for a 2026 release.
‘Audition’ by Katie Kitamura
Release date: April 8
You won’t really know what Audition is about until you read it (and even then, you may have trouble deciding what and who to believe). Described as a “Möbius strip of a novel,” it flips back and forth between a pair of narratives that intertwine and contradict each other for a sharp exploration of the performances we put on every day.
‘My Friends’ by Fredrik Backman
Release date: May 20
As with every single one of Fredrik Backman’s previous novels, you’ll want a box of tissues handy while diving into My Friends. It’s a dual-timeline story where, in the present day, a young woman is on a mission to uncover the identities of a group of people featured in the corner of a famous painting, and 25 years earlier, a group of teenage best friends is building a powerful found family.
‘Atmosphere’ by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Release date: June 3
Taylor Jenkins Reid is an expert at weaving stories of complicated women throughout the 20th century, and her latest novel definitely fits the bill. Atmosphere is set amid the 1980s NASA Space Shuttle program and centers on Joan, a brilliant scientist who joins the program alongside a crew of equally passionate characters, all thrilled for their chance at space exploration until disaster strikes. You’ll want to keep the tissues nearby for this one, too.
Release date: June 17
There’s been no shortage of feminist retellings of ancient myths and classics in recent years, and this next one deserves a place on your shelf. With elements of horror and suspense, it revisits Euripides’s The Bacchae, following a woman drawn in by a cult of women who appear to be living much more freely than she’s ever been allowed to.
‘Maggie: Or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar’ by Katie Yee
Release date: July 22
Katie Yee’s very funny, very moving debut novel takes a quirky approach to personal tragedy. The narrator faces the one-two punch of learning that her husband is having an affair and receiving a cancer diagnosis. To deal with her devastating reality, she names her tumor after her husband’s mistress—yes, they’re both the titular Maggie—and talks to it regularly as she navigates her circumstances.
‘A New New Me’ by Helen Oyeyemi
Release date: August 26
Helen Oyeyemi has built a reputation for her wacky, whimsical world-building, and her newest novel keeps it going. It tells the story of Kinga, who has a different self for every day of the week—literally: Each day, she’s a completely different person from the day before, with different jobs, hobbies, and habits. Things get especially complicated when one of her selves discovers a man tied up in her (their?) apartment. So, it’s basically that movie Split, but, thankfully, more “playful and absurd” than “so terrifying that I had to stop watching halfway through.”
‘We Love You, Bunny’ by Mona Awad
Release date: September 23
You don’t have to have read the original Bunny book to dive into this one—though it’s so good and strange that you really, really should. We Love You, Bunny serves as a prequel, a sequel, and a standalone journey into the bizarre Bunny hive-mind. It mashes up Mona Awad’s familiar combo of dark academia, fairytale-y and horror-y elements, and wry humor to tell the Bunnies’s origin story.
‘Will There Ever Be Another You’ by Patricia Lockwood
Release date: September 23
Patricia Lockwood’s first novel proved that the poet and memoirist can tackle fiction, as well. An expert chronicler of all the weird, beautiful, banal, and deeply moving moments that make up the human experience, No One Is Talking About This left some people (me) oscillating wildly between sobbing and cracking up from page to page. Her next novel promises to delve even deeper, as it follows a woman who, while dealing with the mind-altering effects of an illness and a family tragedy, begins spiraling out of herself and sanity in search of a new way to exist in the current world.
