It’s no simple endeavour landing on a list of the best books of 2025. The year has been full of worthy contenders and everyone has wildly different tastes (I, for example, love a trashy psychological thriller with at least three absurd twists, while my partner almost exclusively reads cult ’90s sci-fi). Even so, among the deluge of books to get lost in, there have been a few major standouts this year. Consider this a list of some of our favourites, from colourful literary debuts to hard-hitting nonfiction.
Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan
In a sea of literary fiction about modern dating, it’s not easy to find a novel that is simultaneously propulsive, relatable and also satisfyingly unique. In Disappoint Me – a book that flits between two characters, reformed party girl Max and her lawyer boyfriend Vincent – British-Malaysian novelist Nicola Dinan tackles everything from interpersonal politics and heterosexual dynamics to millennial ennui and toxic masculinity, all with a seamless flow that’ll have you hooked. If you enjoyed Oisín McKenna’s Evenings and Weekends or Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, you’ll love this.
Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst
Earlier this year, I asked whether Waist Deep, the debut novel from Linea Maja Ernst, could be the “quintessential millennial novel we’ve been waiting for” and I stand by that proposal. The book, which has been translated into 10 languages, follows seven friends from university – now in their early 30s – as they spend a week together in a cabin in rural Denmark. Some are now mothers, some are in open relationships, some have just recently transitioned. Expect: tensions (both sexual and otherwise), old feelings and new revelations, all set within a woozy, languid summer among the trees.
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Some books are just so delicious that you don’t want them to end, and Dream Count by widely-acclaimed Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one such creation (luckily, at 416 pages, it’s quite hefty). The book follows four women whose stories entwine: Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer stuck in America during the pandemic, her high-flying lawyer friend Zikora, her banker-turned-grad student cousin Omelogor and Chiamaka’s housekeeper, Kadiatou. Think: masterful writing, colourful momentum and the sort of storytelling that’ll remind you why you like reading.
Love In Exile by Shon Faye
We don’t usually think of affairs of the heart as being clear-cut, but this is the approach Shon Faye, who writes the “Dear Shon” advice column for Vogue, among other things, very often takes. Faye has an unusual ability to distil complicated, confusing dynamics into their essential components, offering straightforward advice that is never overly simple. Love in Exile is an autobiographical account of the author’s search for love, but also an account of how and why we define our own self-worth in terms of love. Faye has a perspective and style that is distinctly her own but offers insight and enlightenment that is appealingly universal. – Chloe Schama
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
If you read one non-fiction book this year, make it One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian-American novelist and journalist who’s spent the past 20 years reporting on everything from Black Lives Matter to climate disaster and the violence in Gaza. This one’s an urgent, powerfully argued and eloquently delivered book about the failures of the Western world to stand for the freedom it claims to represent. “This is an account of a fracture,” he writes, “a breaking away from the notion that the polite, western liberal ever stood for anything at all.”
Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh
And here we have another one for those who – like me – love vivid, evocative prose about the interior lives of its characters. Fun and Games from Irish novelist McHugh is set in 2009 (why do so few books take place in the late-Noughties?!) and follows 17-year-old John Masterson over one summer on the West of Ireland before his exam results come through. He’s working mind-numbing shifts at a hotel, getting action where he can and trying to keep his head down after his mum’s nude sext to another man was leaked to the whole island. As I wrote earlier this year for our summer round-up, think: the male version of Sally Rooney.
Sister Europe by Nell Zink
Nell Zink’s sophisticated and comic novels have ranged ambitiously across time and space, from 1960s rural Virginia (Mislaid) to 1980s downtown New York (Doxology) to present-day Berlin (her newest release, Sister Europe). Our story begins with a literary dinner hosted by an absentee royal, and a loose gang of Berliners have been invited: a writer, Demian; his American publisher, Toto; and his glamorous friend Livia. In tow are Demian’s trans teenage daughter and Toto’s unlikely hook-up, nicknamed The Flake. There’s a hugely wealthy prince on hand, too, who makes a poorly received pass at Demian’s daughter, but then the whole gang spills out into late-night Berlin in search of adventure. Picaresque, amusing and brisk, this is a worldly hangout novel of 21st-century manners. – Taylor Antrim
Lion by Sonya Walger
Lion is the kind of book that will appeal to various readers for entirely different reasons. Sonya Walger is an actor who appeared for many years on the TV show Lost, and this loosely fictionalised novel offers an intimate look at her childhood – and the larger-than-life father fixture (the titular lion) who dominated it.
Her father is an Argentine bon vivant who is also a diplomat, drug addict and gambler. As quickly as he soars, he plummets. After a stint in one of the most notorious prisons in Europe, he has to return home to live in a tiny high-rise apartment in Buenos Aires paid for by his parents. Much of Lion is a reconciliation of the glory and glamour of his life with the ways he fails his daughter – and in this, there is a moving depiction of the emotional lessons of childhood and an investigation of the fundamental question of what makes a good parent. Or, more precisely, why is it that we venerate the figures who hold themselves most aloof? – CS
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One by Kristen Arnett
This book seems destined to be known as “the sexy clown novel”, but it’s so much more than that. To be sure, the links that Arnett draws between clowning as an art form and queerness as an identity are strong. Some people will innately dislike you because of the way you move through the world, and the trick is to avoid them. The heart of this novel is the conflicted and unyielding stance of its protagonist, Cherry, who turns to clowning to try to hang on to the memory of her brother after he passes and soon learns more than she could have hoped for from an older woman with experience in the genre. This novel is sweet, sexy, sad, articulate and funny. – Emma Specter
Audition by Katie Kitamura
Katie Kitamura writes with a spare, almost clinical efficiency, but that doesn’t limit the depth of her characters or the complexity of the dynamics she depicts. Like Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry or Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, Audition is divided into sections with distinctly different perspectives – each ricocheting off the other to make you wonder how we craft and understand truth. In the first, a young man appears in the life of a middle-aged actress, convinced (despite the impossibility of the proposal) that he is her son. The second section depicts a reality in which he actually is her son. The strange pendulum swing from one scenario to the other catches you off guard – and isn’t that the mark of truly exciting fiction? – CS
