The 25 Best Novels of 2025 That You Absolutely Need to Read

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, which infamously drew double the number of child tributes into the killing competition, including Katniss’s future mentor Haymitch. Bonus: We won't have to wait long to see it onscreen, as a movie version is already in development for a 2026 release.

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.

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, as I can personally attest to its high potential for ugly-crying at the simultaneous beauty and tragedy that comes with being human. 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, that group of teenage best friends is building a powerful found family.

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—including the unexpected but undeniable love of her life—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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Release date: October 21

Just a warning: The title of this dark comedy refers to something very different from the cutesy snack plates that have made “girl dinner” a perennially trending topic on social media. A college student and a professor, both navigating the perils and frustrations of modern womanhood, are drawn in by the allure of an ultra-exclusive sorority on campus that promises power and self-assurance, albeit for an outrageous cost—and not of the monetary variety.

Release date: November 4

The author of the hilarious My Sister, the Serial Killer is back with this novel, in which a young woman grows up bearing the weight of two intense family beliefs: that she’s her late aunt reincarnated, and that the women of the family are plagued by a curse ensuring no man can ever be truly happy in their homes. Determined to shake off all the superstitions, Eniiyi pursues a mystical cure-all that might just allow her to live her own life, free of those heavy limitations.

Release date: November 11

Octavia is still trying to find her place at the tech company where she just started a new job. She's been struggling to keep up with its demands and simultaneously logging every microaggression she’s received as one of the company’s few Black employees. When a coworker invites her to help develop an AI tool free of the racist and sexist biases of other such technologies, things take a thriller-y turn as the pair discovers a horrific secret at the company. 

Release date: December 2

Fans of reality TV and funny, moving tales of self-discovery, make room on your shelf for this one. The titular character is a man in his early 30s who, after discovering that his senator husband has been cheating on him, decides to return to the Survivor-like reality competition show that he’d been a part of a decade before. In joining the show, he comes rushing headlong into all the mistakes and betrayals he’s been trying to forget ever since his first go-round on Endeavor.

Release date: December 2

The official description for Lauren Rothery’s debut novel calls it a cross between Bojack Horseman and Joan Didion—so color me extremely intrigued. It follows the intertwining stories of an aging A-lister, his longtime best friend/lover, and an aspiring filmmaker, as they grapple with their longing for success, love, and authentic connection underneath the lights and artifice of L.A.