The Best Books of 2025
Technically, it’s all the books I read in 2025, including the best, the worst, and everything in between. Below you’ll find the final ranking of the books that I reviewed over the course of that year.
An innovative character study in which an aging woman's life story is revealed through the letters she writes and receives from a myriad of perpeople.
A children's book about life's most difficult subject—death—told with compassion, humor and grace at a level on par (or above) any adult literature.
A small town, a love triangle, a murder, and a trial form the foundation of this twisty, emotional novel set in mid-1900s England.
Filled with tragedy, perseverance, and love, the novel focuses on the fictional first women in the NASA space program in the early 1980s.
Goo's sweet time travel tale sees a 17-year-old from 2025 transported back to 1995 to try to help her own mother win homecoming queen.
Edgy and violent, Cosby's latest sees a successful money manager sucked into working for a sadistic gang in order to save his brother.
Kerr's mature and tightly-plotted debut follows the murder investigation of the founder of a fictitious tech company in San Francisco.
When a woman washes ashore on a remote island, the lone family living there nurses her back to health. But both parties have secrets...
A time-traveling tale that dissects the most famous legend in the land, Harrow once again creates a binge-worthy blend of fantasy and creativity.
Sparked by a viral obituary, this unlikeliest of memoirs introduces us to the crazy Corren family and their larger-than-life mother.
A mother debates what to name her son, and her three choices create three parallel timelines in this mature and solidly composed debut.
A short read that explores the all-encompassing experience of young love and how it is put in perspective upon reflection later in life.
A strong start to a new fantasy series, a roguish young man travels to a distant city to solve the mystery of his father's death.
A worthy continuation of what started with The Silverblood Promise, Book 2 is filled with heists, mini quests, and more of everything you loved in Book 1.
The most anticipated book of 2025 mostly delivers, as author Yarros continues the Empyrean series and Violet Sorrengail's evolution.
An author who has fiercely protected her anonymity—despite writing the biggest book series on the planet—finally tells all in a memoir.
Nearly twenty-five years after a home invader destroyed their lives, a couple reunites to provide victim personal statements at his trial.
Collins returns to give us the origin story of Haymitch Abernathy in a way that might make this the best Hunger Games novel to-date.
A woman returns to the elite boarding school she attended after 20+ years to search for answers about the murder of her roommate senior year.
The intersecting journeys of the author's father, who survived years in WWII concentration camps, and the American soldiers who found him.
Two teenagers are forced to compete to become a Scythe, whose job is to control overpopulation by killing a set number of people each year.
A young woman with special powers infiltrates a training program for the military while working undercover for a resistance organization.
A photographer spends a summer at a lake house where she meets a cocksure man whose charms threaten their mutual vow of friendship.
Two writers compete for the opportunity to author the memoir of a reclusive heiress while coming to realize they might just be soulmates.
Decades of missteps and immorality by J & J are laid bare as they repeat a pattern of placing profits over people's health and lives.
The daughter of a convicted serial killer has kept her identity a secret for 20 years, but someone has found out and is determined to expose her.
A teacher's aide who dreams of adopting a young boy from her school competes in a contest for the sole copy of a reclusive author's new book.
Another gritty offering from Mottley, who this time explores teen pregnancy and a small group of teen moms who help each other through it.
A sweet and heartfelt story about finding love when you least expect it, told with a distinctly British cheekiness and sense of humor.
A thoroughly researched exploration of the rise in mental illness among Gen Z, paired with several suggestions for how we can fix it.
A quick 50-page read, the story of a young girl who is delivered by her father to stay with a family in a neighboring town in Ireland.
A woman returns home to ghostwrite her estranged father's memoir while trying to unravel if he was responsible for the 50-year-old murder of his siblings.
A girl grows up in a remote cabin in Montana with just her father, whose distrust of technology and government grows each year.
A novel premise gives way to a well-structured mystery in which a woman must solve her own murder before an aneurysm kills her.
A generational character study centered on the intertwined lives of two families in a small Ohio town, focused mostly on identity and the impact of war.
A local publican is found dead with a crown of antlers on his head in this multi-layered mystery taking place in a small English town.
As a major storm approaches, a woman living alone in the woods finds a girl hiding in her toolshed, covered in blood and clutching a knife.
Author Raybourn runs it back with everyone's favorite female assassins in their 60s, in a sequel that's just as good as the original.
A no-holds-barred account by a former high-ranking employee that lays bare secrets about Facebook and its executives that are shocking to see in print.
An Atlanta cop with a secret terminal brain tumor attempts to orchestrate his death in the line of duty to help his family financially.
Told mostly via flashbacks about four childhood friends, the novel focuses on resiliency and found family in the face of domestic violence and neglect.
A continuation of the Arc of a Scythe series, the novel picks up where book one ended as the scythedom becomes increasingly divided.
An exposé on a fraternity-led Xanax trafficking ring, focused on Greek life and the pervasiveness of benzodiazepine use at colleges.
Actor Jeremy Renner recounts the harrowing events of an accident that left him with 38 broken bones and clinging to life by a thread.
A 38-year-old nearly-divorced mother of three starts a summer fling with a dashing, slightly younger man. Can it last?
A mysterious and private man appears one day in a small Georgia town and begins to have a profoundly positive impact on several residents.
When a lawyer starts to dig into the murder of his best friend, all signs seem to point to his own law firm being behind involved.
One of the biggest comedic acts touring today shares random tales from his life, from early days in Tennessee to his rise in comedy.
Author Mary Roach is back with her signature blend of wit as she examines the human body and all of the potential ways we attempt to modify it.
A woman who was part of a secret society while at Princeton investigates her sister's death, who was also part of the same society.
Brooks recounts the ongoing impact of the unexpected death of her husband of 35 years and her process years later to properly grieve.
A woman must set aside losing her job the day before her daughter's wedding as she navigates the intricacies of the wedding weekend.
Teddy Roosevelt's sons embark on a quest in 1929 to obtain a specimen of a giant panda, an animal rarely seen and wholly unknown at the time.
A nun leaves her convent to investigate the disappearance of her friend, only to encounter multiple murders at her boarding house.
A chance set of events leads to a down-on-his-luck elderly man assuming the identity of another in this sweetly sappy feel-good story.
Our assassins hell-bent on *not* killing return in a sequel to Assassins Anonymous that is satisfying but falls short of the original.
A speculative historical novel that imagines what might have happened if Japan gained possession of an atomic bomb near the end of World War II.
Two lives unexpectedly intertwine as a Senator's daughter connects with an elderly woman who might be secretly connected to the young woman's family.
A portrait of Gen Y from the perspective of a couple who "came of age with the internet" and spend their days seeking happiness, mostly without success.
Part memoir, part history of fire, author Thomas recounts his time with the Los Padres Hotshots while positing ways to deal with megafires.
When her husband goes off the rails, taking three people hostage, his wife tries to save him while unraveling the why behind his act.
Exploring addiction, incarceration, and the impact of tragedy on a family, the story follows a father serving a 3-year sentence.
A difficult novel to review without spoiling the story, it focuses on a family trying to have another child before a shocking event disrupts everything.
A modern take on Lord of the Flies, centered around a reality TV show, where winning depends on who can be the most self-absorbed and materialistic.
A woman tries to break a curse which causes the women in her family to transform into a tree forever if they stay in a place too long.
Set in 1981, a 14-year-old girl—whose hobbies happen to include studying roadkill—helps police investigate several murders in England.
A serial killer returns to Portland after almost twenty years to terrorize a local radio host, targeting the one person who saw him and lived.
A woman returns to her hometown in South Carolina, only to be confronted with clues that help her unravel her sister's disappearance twenty years prior.
Robert Langdon is back for another romp through an international city—this time, Prague—and a secret about human consciousness that could rock the world.
Focused mostly on the abrupt dissolution of a twenty-six-year marriage, too many random detours leave it feeling scattered and incohesive.
A British couple decide to sail from England to New Zealand in the 1970s, only to be stranded in the middle of the Pacific after a whale destroys their boat.
A B-52 bomber that has been missing for over 60 years suddenly returns to U.S. airspace in 2025...and it's carrying a nuclear bomb.
A young mother falls for a strange, disfigured man and chooses to live with him and her six-year-old daughter in a remote Alaskan cabin.
A no9el about true-crime aficionados that uses the recent University of Idaho murders as its source material, an ill-conceived choice.
The search for a missing hiker in Maine serves as the backdrop for this novel more focused on the complexities of human relationships.
A woman's life is upended when a half-brother she didn't know she had convinces her to join him on a road trip to find their father.
A colonizer from Earth is stuck on an alien planet and must unravel the internal politics of the local species while trying to survive.
The novel follows the fictional life and friends of Frankie Howe, from Ireland to London to America and back, from the 1950s to today.
Mostly character study plus social commentary, it follows a fictional female journalist in Japan as she interviews a convicted serial killer.
A serial killer targeting Asian women during the pandemic combines with a ghost story to form one of the more racist books I've read.
Part international espionage, part man on the run, a novel that suffers from plot holes big enough to drive a Russian tank through.
A strange and polarizing story, focused mostly on a New Hampshire family and their youngest grandson as he searches for identity and belonging.
A menopausal mother narrates her family's week at the beach on Cape Cod—their 20th in a row—while musing on the changes life brings.
A cyber thief is forced to flee from Homeland Security when her crimes finally come to light in this poorly-plotted mess of a book.
A non-binary monk leaves on a journey to find themself and in the process encounters a robot who is seeking to learn what humans need.
One email on the first of every month with a summary and rating of each book reviewed over the past 30 days, and a look at where the year's ranking stands.