Where the Crawdads Sing leads Netherlands’ top 1,000 books; TikTok favorites surge

Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing tops the Hebban 1000, the eighth edition of Hebban.nl’s list of the thousand most beloved books. This year, 29,000 members of the Netherlands’ largest online reading community took part in the vote.

Owens’ 2018 novel weaves together two narratives that ultimately converge: one centers on a young girl growing up in the North Carolina marshes, and the other tracks the investigation into a celebrity murder in a small coastal town.

The continued #1 ranking of Owens is partly attributed to the 2022 film adaptation, which brought a second wave of readers to the book. In the Dutch market, it has remained a "gateway book" for people joining the Hebban community.

Dutch books are prominently represented in the top 10 of Hebban’s list, including Anya Niewierra’s De Camino (5th), Harry Mulisch’s The Discovery of Heaven (9th), and Roxane van Iperen’s ’t Hooge Nest (10th). Arthur Japin leads Dutch authors with seven novels featured in the 2025 Hebban 1000.

For the first time, the "Romantasy" genre (a mix of Romance and Fantasy) made a significant dent in the top 100. Rebecca Yarros (Fourth Wing) debuted high on the list, reflecting a global reading trend that has firmly taken hold in the Dutch market.

Lucinda Riley, known for her Seven Sisters series, leads the list with 14 titles included. Despite her passing in 2021, Riley’s 14-title dominance shows that her Seven Sisters series remains a cultural phenomenon in the Netherlands,

The Hebban 1000 is created from readers’ personal top book lists: participants select their favorites, and the results are used to generate the yearly list of 1,000 titles.

For 2025, the Hebban 1000 used a new counting system: every book carries the same weight, and only lists from the past 18 months were considered, noticeably reshaping the order.

The decision to only count lists updated in the last 18 months significantly favored modern bestsellers over older classics. The list saw a surge in "BookTok" favorites after they had gained popularity on TikTok. Authors like Colleen Hoover and Taylor Jenkins Reid saw multiple entries climb higher than in previous years because their fanbases are currently very active on the platform.

The 2025 list features over 150 new entries that were not present in the 2024 edition, making it one of the most volatile and "freshest" editions in the history of the Hebban 1000.