The 10 Best Books of 2025

The envelope, please: After a full year spent reading hundreds of books and meeting regularly to bicker — er, converse — about their merits and flaws, the editors of the Book Review have chosen the 10 Best Books of 2025.

In novels that transport us from the battlefields of World War I to contemporary Swedish dance clubs to the halls of a convent in rural Australia, and from Nazi movie studios to New York art galleries where immigrants look for a sense of connection, our fiction picks offer sweeping stories about timely and timeless topics with a sense of verve and style.

In nonfiction, we chose immersive journalistic accounts of the housing crisis and a historic Black church, along with a riveting biography of a misunderstood painter, a fraught mother-daughter memoir and an enthralling shipwreck story that is as much a meditation on marriage as it is a seafaring adventure.

You can hear our editors discuss these books, and others they loved, on the latest episode of the Book Review podcast, and you can check out our larger list of 100 Notable Books of 2025 here. And for the longer view, here’s a list of all of our Best Books picks since 2000.

Fiction

Angel Down

by Daniel Kraus

On paper, “Angel Down” sounds like a book that shouldn’t work: It’s a stream-of-consciousness World War I novel, told in one sprawling, 285-page-long sentence, about a failed draft dodger who finds, of all things, an angel on the battlefield. And yet, Kraus brings all of these elements together to craft a triumphant, unforgettable book filled with bravura writing, indelible set pieces and an urgent message. Read our review.

The Director

by Daniel Kehlmann

How nerve-racking to be G.W. Pabst, the 20th-century Austrian filmmaker at the center of Kehlmann’s wondrous novel. He’s an auteur stuck in Europe under Nazi rule, forced to make propaganda and benign duds for the Reich while compromising every creative principle he once stood for. “The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in,” Pabst murmurs at one point, winning over exactly no one. Still, Kehlmann’s complex portrait, brightened by caustic humor and memorable historical cameos (and fluidly translated from the German by Ross Benjamin), presents an intriguing test of integrity in a fracturing world. The timing couldn’t have been better. Read our review.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

by Kiran Desai

Like the richest 19th-century fiction, this nearly 700-page family saga had our critic Alexandra Jacobs swooning: “Crowded but never claustrophobic,” she wrote, and “better company than real-life people.” A tentative romance between the title characters, immigrants from India caught between obligation and self-expression, is the throughline. Skittering between nations and generations from the late 1990s to just after 9/11, Desai stirs in scheming heirs, coveted recipes, a missing amulet and the art monster from hell. Read our review.

And read our critic A.O. Scott on a scene he loves from this novel here.

The Sisters

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

“There was something about the Mikkola sisters that made me feel less alone,” says Jonas, the narrator of this spry and sprawling novel, and a playfully neurotic stand-in for the author himself. Up close and from afar, at drunken parties and at pickup basketball games, he follows the fortunes of Ina (stolid), Evelyn (magnetic) and Anastasia (unfettered) for more than three decades. He, like them, is half Swedish and half Tunisian; he, like them, hungers to break away and blossom. Though hardly a quick read, “The Sisters” zooms forward, powered by hurtling prose and a literary magic trick: Khemiri tells the story in increments of time that grow increasingly briefer, ending on one minute in the future that offers long-awaited grace. Read our review.

Stone Yard Devotional

by Charlotte Wood

In the remote plains of New South Wales, Australia, a woman arrives at a convent in desperate need of solitude and retreat. It’s a curious choice: She left behind a full life in Sydney, and is an atheist who abhors the “savagery” of the Catholic Church. Yet she is lulled into contentment, falling into a comforting rhythm of work and contemplation.

Three arrivals upset this harmony: A mouse infestation of biblical proportions horrifies the nuns, who resolutely set about stamping out the vermin. The bones of a sister who died abroad are returned to the convent, and are accompanied by a woman from the narrator’s past. True to its title, this exquisite novel traces the interior path of a woman grappling with how to live without causing harm. In the process, Wood shows that our attention is one of the most sacred gifts we have to offer. Read our review.

Nonfiction

A Marriage at Sea

by Sophie Elmhirst

In 1972, a young married couple, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, decided to give up their lives in England and sail to New Zealand on their boat, the Auralyn. But after nine months, the Auralyn was destroyed by a breaching whale, leaving the Baileys stranded for 118 days in the Pacific aboard a makeshift raft.

The story of their survival is miraculous enough — Elmhirst masterfully recreates the daily fears, tediums and triumphs of a life in which every moment could be your last. But what really elevates this beautifully constructed narrative is the sensitive characterization of two very different people — a misanthrope and an optimist. It’s a story that, while remarkable, will leave everyone asking essential questions about loneliness, about character and about partnership. Read our review.

Mother Emanuel

by Kevin Sack

When a white supremacist intent on fomenting a race war shot and killed nine members of a Bible study class at Charleston’s Emanuel A.M.E. Church in 2015, he struck at the heart of the oldest African American Episcopal congregation in the South, in a city that had been the center of the country’s slave trade and the place where the Civil War began.

Assigned to cover the aftermath of the massacre for The New York Times, Sack understood that the story carried far-reaching symbolic weight. His resulting book, nearly 10 years in the making, is a timely feat of research and reporting, a vivid chronicle of the Black church’s essential role in America’s story, and a surpassingly eloquent testament to resistance, resilience and faith. Read our review.

Mother Mary Comes to Me

by Arundhati Roy

In this unsparing yet darkly funny memoir, the prizewinning novelist captures the fierce, asthmatic, impossible, inspirational woman who shaped her as a writer and an activist — and left her emotionally bruised for a lifetime. Roy doesn’t let herself off too easily, however. Fleeing from an insular Indian community to the cosmopolitan Delhi and then the global stage, she — like her mother — is imperious, impatient and unforgettable. Read our review.

There Is No Place for Us

by Brian Goldstone

With uncommon precision, tenacity and grace, Goldstone, an anthropologist turned journalist, casts a shocking spotlight on the “working homeless,” a term that should be an oxymoron but which in America defines hundreds of thousands of people. Following five Atlanta families for whom home is a car, a relative’s couch or a squalid room in an extended stay hotel — often some rotating combination of all three — his book gives intimate human shape to a population uncounted by the government and largely invisible to the public, one that, owing to soaring rents, paltry wages and misguided urban policy, is barely surviving even with a paycheck. Read our review.

Wild Thing

by Sue Prideaux

In the annals of art history, bad boy artists are legion, and the 19th-century French painter Gauguin often figures near the top of the list — denounced as a colonizer who seduced underage Tahitian girls and spread syphilis in the South Seas. Prideaux’s enthralling biography, studded with keen close readings of her subject’s innovative art, chips away at this caricature, fashioning in its stead a slyly witty portrait of an original and contradictory man who experienced extreme wealth and abject poverty, who abandoned his wife, children and country in pursuit of his singular artistic vision, and who fought for the interests of his Polynesian neighbors against the colonial authorities even as he took in several of their daughters as child brides. Read our review.

Related Content