My picks for this year's best books tilt a bit to nonfiction, but the novels that made the cut redress the imbalance by their sweep and intensity. Here are my favorites from 2025:
The Antidote by Karen Russell
The Antidote is my pick for novel of the year. An epic story of immigration, land grabs and aspiration, The Antidote is set in Nebraska and framed by two actual weather catastrophes: The "Black Sunday" dust storm on April 14, 1935 — in which people were suffocated by a moving black wall of dust — and, a month later, the Republican River flood. The central character here is a so-called "Prairie Witch" who heals her customers by holding "whatever they can't stand to know. " Karen Russell herself is America's own Prairie Witch of a writer, exhuming memories out of our national unconscious and inviting us through her spellbinding writing to see our history in full.
Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
Buckeye is an historical novel set, as its title indicates, in Ohio. Stretching from pre-World War II to the close of the 20th century, the story focuses on two married couples whose lives intersect. When we first meet her, Margaret Salt, a red-headed "looker," walks into the hardware store where Cal Jenkins works and demands he turn on the radio. There's commotion in the streets and because Margaret's husband is serving in the Navy, she wants to know what's happening. It turns out Germany has surrendered. Overwhelmed, Margaret kisses Cal and Cal, a happily married man and new father, likes it. Throughout this sweeping novel, whose story ranges from intimate moments like that one to World War II sea battles, Ryan underscores how contingency shapes our lives.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Kiran Desai has kept readers waiting nearly two decades for a second novel, but The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny makes the wait worthwhile. At the outset, Sonia, a college student in Vermont, is homesick for her native India. Her depression makes her vulnerable to a visiting painter, an art monster. Meanwhile, Sunny has left India to work in New York, but distance can't shield him from his fearsome mother. Desai's near 700-page novel ruminates on exile and displacement, not only from one's home country and family, but from one's own sense of self. The multi-stranded plot roams from Delhi and New York to Italy, Goa and Mexico. This is a novel of ideas, as well as a tangled love story with enough coincidences to make Dickens blush.
Heart the Lover by Lily King
Both a prequel and a sequel to King's novel 2020 Writers & Lovers, the structure of Heart the Lover is so ingenious, its emotional charge so compelling, you don't have to have read the earlier novel to be drawn into this triangular love story. The novel opens in a college English class in the 1980s where our main character, a working-class woman nicknamed "Jordan," who harbors literary ambitions, becomes involved (sequentially) with two male star students. Heart the Lover is about screwing up, wising up, finding yourself and realizing what you may have lost in the process. To quote Elena Ferrante, another great chronicler of women's lives, Heart the Lover is also about the "velocity with which life [is] consumed."
Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade
Gertrude Stein's writing, as the critic Wyndham Lewis put it, sometimes has the consistency of "a cold, black suet-pudding ... the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through." And, yet, maddening as she can be, many of us sense that, when it comes to Stein's literary genius, there really was a "there there." Francesca Wade's lively and unconventional biography, called Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, digs deeper into Stein's childhood, her early years in Paris and her relationship with Alice B. Toklas. Rather than ending the biography with Stein's death in 1946, Wade devotes the second half of her book to the tale of those obsessive admirers who helped Stein achieve serious posthumous recognition.
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
"For we think back through our mothers if we are women" declared Virginia Woolf; however, few autobiographers have ever written so exquisitely and vividly of a mother–daughter bond as Arundhati Roy does in Mother Mary Comes to Me. Roy's single mother was a beloved teacher who founded a school in India. Roy and her brother, however, endured their mother's rage: "You're a millstone around my neck" was one of Roy's mother's stock verbal slaps. And, yet, Roy, who escaped her mother's orbit at 18 and didn't see her for years, also writes: "I truly believed she would outlive me. When she didn't, I was wrecked, heart-smashed." Roy's memoir beautifully holds, but doesn't resolve, those contradictions.
Bread of Angels by Patti Smith
Patti Smith's memoir, Bread of Angels, expands upon Just Kids, her 2010 memoir that's since become a classic in the canon of "coming to New York" stories. Smith delves into more intimate material here, like the mystery of her paternity, her sense of her own sexuality and her 14-year-marriage to the late musician Fred "Sonic" Smith. (Their early relationship inspired the hit song, "Because the Night," which Smith co-wrote with Bruce Springsteen.) Of her decision to step back from performing and into a quiet life in Michigan with Fred and their two children, Smith says, "the desire for illumination eclipsed that of ambition." Smith's beautiful, slightly ornate writing voice is as original as everything else about her life and work.
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Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt
No other scholar brings the world of the English Renaissance to life in with the verve and erudition of Stephen Greenblatt. In previous books he's explored how Shakespeare was crucially shaped by his environment (Will in the World) and how the chance rediscovery of a Roman poem in the late Middle Ages kickstarted the Renaissance (The Swerve). Here, he plunges readers into the fraught world of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's edgy contemporary, who pioneered the use of blank verse in plays like Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus. Greenblatt also investigates the bedeviling mysteries of Marlowe's rumored career as a spy and his violent murder at 29.
Last Seen by Judith Giesberg
In 2017, historian Judith Giesberg and her team of grad student researchers launched a website called Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery. It now contains over 4,500 ads placed in newspapers by once enslaved people hoping to find loved ones. The earliest ads date from the 1830s and stretch into the 1920s. In her arresting new book, also called Last Seen, Giesberg offers a close reading of 10 of those ads. Giesberg isn't trying to generate reunion stories. Although there are a couple of those in this book, Giesberg tells us the cruel reality was that, the "success rate of these advertisements may have been as low as 2%." Instead of happy endings, these ads offer readers something else: They serve as portals into "the lived experience of slavery."
A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst
Part extreme adventure tale, part meditation on a loving partnership, A Marriage at Sea tells the story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, an unconventional lower-middle-class British couple who saved up their money and set off in a wooden sloop in 1972 to see the world. Their plans went awry some months later when a whale knocked a hole in their sloop, sinking it within minutes. The couple spent four months adrift on a rubber raft, catching and eating raw fish, sucking water out of turtles' eyeballs and fighting the temptation to succumb to despair. Elmhirst knows how to tell a perfect storm of a story, relying, in part, on a diary kept by Maralyn, the more commonsensical of the pair.
Books We Love includes 380+ recommended titles from 2025. Click here to check out this year's titles, or browse more than 4,000 books from the last 13 years.
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