For those whose New Year’s resolution is to read more, here’s a list that will get you excited to actually stick to your goal.
The 39 most anticipated books of 2025 include Susan Choi’s long-awaited follow-up to Trust Exercise, an essay collection from environmental justice activist Catherine Coleman Flowers, and the latest installment in Rebecca Yarros’ best-selling Empyrean series, which she calls “her favorite” entry in the romantasy trilogy.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The slate for this new year also features memoirs from Top Chef’s Kristen Kish, activist and astronaut Amanda Nguyen, philanthropist Melinda French Gates, celebrated author Arundhati Roy, and Tina Knowles, whose daughter Beyoncé hopes won’t spill too much “Mama Tea” with her debut. Other notable 2025 releases include a Taylor Jenkins Reid romance for the space ages, journalist Amanda Hess’s guide to parenting in the digital age, and Torrey Peters’ much-anticipated follow-up to her best-selling debut, Detransition, Baby.
From R. F. Kuang’s dark-academia love story to Imani Perry’s ode to the color blue and its connection to Black culture, these are the new books coming in 2025 that you’re going to want to read.
Best-selling author and sports journalist Kate Fagan’s debut novel is framed as an unreleased memoir from a pseudonymous queer writer who has spent her life running from her complicated past. After Cate Kay’s successful book series is optioned for film, she realizes she can no longer hide her true identity. With help from her former friends and lovers, she tells the unvarnished story of her rise to the top and what she sacrificed to get there.
Buy Now: The Three Lives of Cate Kay on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
In journalist Elizabeth Harris’ debut, Ethan and Gabe are a loving New Jersey couple who find themselves slowly drifting apart due to their growing political differences. When Ethan decides to run for Congress as a Republican, his progressive partner is forced to choose between his leftist ideals and his upwardly mobile spouse. Across town, Nicole, a free-spirited artist turned suburban mom, is facing a similar conundrum in her marriage. It’s only when a former flame—Ethan’s journalist sister—reenters Nicole’s life that she begins to reconsider her desires in this domestic drama about love, marriage, and ambition.
Buy Now: How to Sleep at Night on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Onyx Storm, the third book in Rebecca Yarros’ wildly popular Empyrean series, picks up as Violet Sorrengail, a small but mighty dragon rider, prepares for war against the Venin, a species of human who have sacrificed their souls to steal power from the land.After more than a year at Basgiath War College, Violet realizes that support for the Venin, a.k.a. the Dark Wielders, does not only lie beyond the walls of the competitive military school, but also within its ranks. Unsure of who to trust, Violet embarks on a fantastical journey to find allies who can help her hone her emerging powers, which may ultimately be the key to winning this battle for supremacy.
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Nobel Prize-winner Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, newly translated from the original Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, delves into a tragic chapter of modern Korean history. After an injury lands Inseon in the hospital, she asks her friend Kyungha to do what seems like a simple favor: go to her home on Jeju Island and care for her beloved pet bird. But once Kyungha gets there, she is forced to grapple with the devastating effects of the Jeju Uprising on her country and its people. Kang’s novel is a haunting exploration of friendship amid historical trauma.
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Black in Blues is an intimate meditation on the color blue and its connection to Black history and culture. Beginning with the production of indigo dye in the 16th century, a product that was often traded for an enslaved person, National Book Award winner Imani Perry traces the history of the hue while ruminating on how its many shades (cobalt, periwinkle, navy) became intertwined with Black identity.
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Holy Ground, Catherine Coleman Flowers’ follow-up to her 2020 memoir, Waste, is an essay collection that explores the personal and political aspects of her work as an environmental activist. Across 10 essays, the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, who was one of TIME’s Most Influential People of 2023, tackles racism, reproductive rights, and rural poverty through the lens of environmental injustice, offering insightful analysis on how to address these issues on both a local and global scale.
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When a 16th-century French noblewoman and her lover are left stranded on a small island by her volatile guardian, they must find a way to survive the winter cold with next to nothing. Inspired by the true story of Marguerite de La Rocque, Allegra Goodman’s latest novel is a feminist castaway tale about love, faith, and self-actualization.
Buy Now: Isola on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Nothing seems to be going right for Gail Baines at the start of Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Tyler’s 25th novel, Three Days in June. The day before her daughter’s wedding, Gail loses her job, discovers she didn’t get an invite to festivities organized by the groom’s mom, and gets stuck rooming with her ex-husband and a depressed cat. But that’s not the worst of it: her daughter just discovered a shocking secret about the man she is about to marry, putting their big day in jeopardy. In this charming marriage story, the revelation throws Gail back to the unresolved issues surrounding her divorce—and she’s finally forced to reckon with its repercussions.
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Taking a page from Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, writer Ada Calhoun’s debut novel, Crush, inspired by her own experience, looks at a marriage on the verge of collapse. After her husband suggests they open up their relationship, a happily married middle-aged wife and mother finds herself pursuing an emotional affair with a friend from college. As things heat up, she is forced to interrogate what it is she wants and needs from a romantic partner.
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Death Takes Me puts a subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story. Cristina Rivera Garza’s 2007 novel, newly translated from the original Spanish by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker, begins with a literature professor also named Cristina finding the body of a castrated man while jogging. After looking through the crime scene photos, she discovers a message written in coral-colored nail polish next to the corpse, lines of poetry from the late Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, who Cristina has studied for years. When Pizarnik’s work starts showing up at similar crime scenes, Cristina is enlisted to help catch the murderer before the mysterious killer catches her first.
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Award-winning novelist Omar El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, reckons with what it really means to be an American right now. After 20 years of working as a journalist, covering the War on Terror, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the growing death toll in Gaza, the Egyptian-Canadian writer, who now lives in the U.S., has been disheartened by the lack of compassion and empathy he’s seen from his adopted country. With his new book, he tries to make sense of how the promise of the American dream has become such a nightmare.
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With his debut novel, Variety’s chief correspondent and former TIME TV critic Daniel D’Addario shows why it’s not always an honor just to be nominated. The Talent follows a group of actresses on the awards-show trail during an especially fraught season. The five women—the grande dame, the ingénue, the great thespian, the long shot, and the former child star—must confront their rivalries, anxieties, and insecurities if they wish to take home a little gold man on Hollywood’s biggest night.
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Laila Lalami’s fifth novel, The Dream Hotel, is set in a near future where everything, including one’s dreams, is under surveillance. When museum archivist Sara returns to Los Angeles after a conference abroad, she is detained for a crime that, based on data from her dreams, she will commit in the future against her husband. To stop this from ever happening, she is taken to a retention center where she finds other women who are being held captive for crimes they have yet to commit. In this paranoid techno–thriller, Sara must prove her dreams are not a reality in order to escape.
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Amanda Nguyen, one of TIME’s 2022 Women of the Year, tells her life story with help from her younger selves. The activist and astronaut’s memoir, Saving Five, incorporates her point of view at the ages of five, 15, 22, and 30 in magical interludes to help her make sense of her difficult childhood, campus sexual assault, and subsequent fight for justice, which led to the passage of the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act in 2016.
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Former broadcast journalist Sarah Harman’s debut thriller, All the Other Mothers Hate Me, looks at the mysterious case of a missing boy who happens to be the heir to a frozen food empire. When 10-year-old Alfie Risby goes missing during a class trip, everyone starts pointing fingers. The boy’s rich parents land on former party girl and disgraced girl-band member Florence Grimes’ son, Dylan, who was mercilessly bullied by Alfie. Now Florence must do the unthinkable: make nice with the other school moms in order to clear her kid’s name. Another reason to get excited about this book? It’s being adapted for TV by The Bear creator Christopher Storer.
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Karen Russell, the best-selling author of Swamplandia!, returns with her long-awaited second novel, The Antidote, a historical epic set during the Dust Bowl era. After a severe dust storm ravages a small Nebraska town in 1939, five locals—a Polish wheat farmer, his orphan niece, an enchanted New Deal photographer, a chatty scarecrow, and a “Prairie Witch,” whose body stores the memories the settlers wish to forget—find themselves struggling to rebuild. What the community soon realizes is that in order to create a more sustainable future, they must first reckon with the mistakes of their violent past.
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To have a baby or not to have a baby, that is the question at the centerof Sanjena Sathian’s satirical second novel, Goddess Complex. After leaving her struggling actor husband over a disagreement about whether or not they should have children, Sanjana Satyananda is looking to move forward with her life and the anthropology dissertation she abandoned years earlier. But first, she must finalize their divorce. When her ex suddenly goes missing, Sanjana embarks on a phantasmagoric journey to find him that offers her a glimpse of what her life would be like if she did become a parent.
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Stag Dance, Torrey Peters’ follow-up to her best-selling 2021 debut, Detransition, Baby, is a collection of one novel and three stories that offers a provocative look at gender rediscovery and indecision. The titular novel focuses on a group of male lumberjacks who decide to throw a dance party in which some of the workers volunteer to attend as women, leading to an unlikely rivalry. The short stories look at a secret romance between a junior and his femme roommate at a Quaker boarding school, a hormonal apocalypse brought on by a vengeful ex-girlfriend, and a young person’s dark night of the soul while partying in Las Vegas.
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Climate journalist Emma Pattee’s debut novel, Tilt, is a natural disaster adventure set over the course of 24 hours. After a massive earthquake leaves a nine-months pregnant woman stranded at an IKEA in the middle of Portland, Ore., she decides to walk back to her home, which is located on the other side of the disaster zone. Along the way, she witnesses a grocery store riot, makes friends with a young mother, and reflects on her struggling marriage, disappointing career, and anxieties surrounding impending motherhood.
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Intimacies author Katie Kitamura’s tense new novel, Audition, begins with a Manhattan lunch date between an accomplished theater actor and a troubled man who is young enough to be her son. The twists and turns of this destabilizing novel, which unspools the competing narratives of the aforementioned characters, will leave readers wondering what is real and what is performance.
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With her essay collection, Authority, Andrea Long Chu interrogates what makes a true expert in a world where everyone thinks they know everything. Across more than 20 pieces, most of which were previously published between 2018 and 2023, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic often turns her discerning eye toward the arts, tackling topics that include The Phantom of the Opera’s place in the musical canon, A Little Life author Hanya Yanagihara’s writerly motivations, and whether a video game adaptation can ever be considered prestige TV.
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Philanthropist Melinda French Gates’ latest book, The Next Day, encourages you to embrace life’s changes—and she’s speaking as someone with a lot of experience in this department. Over the last four years, French Gates has gone through a series of personal and professional changes that have forced her to rethink her future, telling TIME in June, “I feel like, Wow, I’m 60. I better surround myself with people and still travel [so that] I’m still absolutely learning, because the world is moving, the world is changing.” With her newest memoir, she promises to offer a “rare window” into some of the most transformational moments of her life, including becoming a parent, the loss of a dear friend, and her recent departure from the charitable foundation she started with ex-husband Bill Gates.
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With her debut memoir, Top Chef season 10 winner turned host Kristen Kish recalls her rise to culinary fame. In Accidentally on Purpose, she writes about her earliest days in the kitchen and shares behind-the-scenes stories of her reality show experience. Kish also delves into her Midwest childhood as a Korean adoptee and what it meant to come out as an adult, sharing the unexpected challenges and happy accidents that helped her find her true calling.
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Matriarch offers Beyoncé and Solange’s mom a chance to finally tell her story. In her debut memoir, Tina Knowles writes about raising two superstar daughters, but also details her own humble beginnings growing up the youngest of seven in 1950s Galveston, Texas. A talented seamstress and hairstylist, Knowles (born Celestine Ann Beyoncé) longed to change the world through her art.In the book, she shares the creative risks, all-encompassing romances, and parenting lessons that helped her become one of the most famous moms in the world.
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Four years after the release of her fiction debut, Caul Baby, best-selling author Morgan Jerkins returns with her second novel, Zeal, a multigenerational romance that spans more than 150 years. In 2019 Harlem, Oliver and Ardelia throw a party to celebrate their engagement. Before it ends, Oliver hands his fiancée a love letter written in 1865 by a soldier who, after being discharged from the Union Army as a free man, returned home to Mississippi in hopes of reconnecting with the woman he loved. The centuries-old note will forever change the way the couple sees their love story.
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New Yorker executive editor Michael Luo’s first book covers the history of Chinese exclusion in America. Across nearly 600 pages, Strangers in the Land traces how the welcomed arrival of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. in the mid-19th century quickly turned violent, resulting in the passing of a series of exclusionary laws in 1889. (The title is taken from a direct quote from Supreme Court Justice Stephen Johnson Field’s majority opinion in the case, which marked the first time the U.S. barred a people from immigrating based on their race.) Luo follows the trajectory of the Asian American community up until the present day, sharing how his own Taiwanese family was impacted by a disgraceful chapter in U.S. history.
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YA author Christina Li’s adult literary debut, The Manor of Dreams, is a modern gothic tale about the battle over a trailblazing 1980s star’s crumbling mansion. Following Vivian Yin’s death, her daughters find themselves fighting an estranged mystery relative for the deed to their reclusive mom’s sprawling estate. Things only get worse once the warring factions decide to move into the dilapidated home together. Once inside, they discover that the manor hides terrible secrets that it’s hellbent on keeping.
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With her first memoir, Second Life, New York Times critic at large Amanda Hess explores what it’s like to raise a child in our tech-saturated culture. Using her own experience as a first-time mom, she explores the advantages and drawbacks to having answers to every possible parenting question at your fingertips. And she offers a deep dive into the surreal network of prenatal genetic tests, gender reveal videos, and “freebirth influencers” that are shaping a new generation of chronically online caretakers.
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Poet and essayist Ocean Vuong’s third novel, The Emperor of Gladness, is a big-hearted ode to second chances. After Grazina, an elderly widow with early-stage dementia, saves Hai from taking his own life, the teenager becomes her caregiver. The unlikely pair form an unexpected friendship that changes Hai’s life in ways he could never imagine.
Buy Now: The Emperor of Gladness on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
The latest novel from Kevin Wilson, the best-selling author of Nothing to See Here, centers around an unusual family road trip. Twenty years after her father left,never to be heard from again, Madeline “Mad” Hill meets Reuben, a 40-something stranger who claims to be her older half-brother. After hiring a private investigator to track down their absentee dad and other half-siblings, Reuben is hitting the road to confront the man who abandoned them and wants Madeline to come with. Once she says yes, she finds herself on an unbelievable adventure that will force her to question the true meaning of family.
Buy Now: Run for the Hills on Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
With her new novel, Taylor Jenkins Reid, the best-selling author behind Daisy Jones and the Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, heads to space. Set in the 1980s, Atmosphere follows physics professor Joan Goodwin as she attempts to become one of the first women to join NASA’s Space Shuttle Program. Amid her training, Joan finds herself falling for another recruit. When a terrifying incident on mission STS-LR9 puts the lives of her colleagues—including her love—on the line, Joan must find a way to bring the crew home safely.
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In poet and writerYrsa Daley-Ward’s fiction debut, The Catch, twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have been all but estranged since their mother vanished in the River Thames. When Clara, now a famous author, spots a woman on the streets of London who looks exactly like their mom did the day she disappeared, she enlists her isolated sibling’s help in figuring out the true identity of this mystery woman. To do this, the two will have to finally confront their shared past. The book promises to be a thrilling exploration of the sacrifices women are forced to make for their families.
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Around 2016, best-selling author Melissa Febos swore off sex for a year. Now, with her fifth memoir, The Dry Season, she’s sharing what she learned from that experience. Mixing personal narrative with cultural criticism, the author of Girlhood explores how celibacy radicalized her, giving her permission to put all of her focus on herself, her work, and the platonic relationships that deserved more of her attention.
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Susan Choi’s new novel, Flashlight, inspired by her 2020 short story of the same name, traces the disappearance of a father across time, space, and memory. When Louisa was 10, she took a walk on the beach with her dad, only to wake up washed up on shore alone. Her father, who couldn’t swim, had disappeared. For years, Louisa has found herself replaying the events of that day over and over, looking for clues that could help her find her missing dad. But now she’s beginning to wonder: What if he’s out there but doesn’t want to be found?
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Writer and poet Rob Franklin’s debut novel, Great Black Hope, is a coming-of-age story about race and class. Reeling from the recent death of his friend, Smith, a queer, Black Stanford graduate, is arrested for cocaine possession in the Hamptons and immediately placed in mandatory treatment. While there, he uses his prestigious education to his advantage, but he knows his race means he will only get so many chances. In order to get ahead, Smith will have to keep on the straight and narrow—which is easier said than done.
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In her debut essay collection, I Want to Burn This Place Down, cultural critic Maris Kreizman writes about losing faith in American institutions and finding power in transformative rage. In this series of politically charged essays, she shares her musings on the myth of the “good Democrat,” moving even further to the political left in her 40s, and being a former goody two-shoes who now believes you have to break a few rules to make this world a more equitable place.
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R.F. Kuang, the best-selling author behind the Poppy War trilogy, Babel, and Yellowface, returns to her fantasy roots with her new novel, Katabasis. After the death of her mentor, which may or may not be her fault, magician Alice Law decides she will travel to hell to save his soul. The only problem is her magic school rival, Peter Murdoch, is headed there too, with every intention of rescuing him first. The two soon realize that they must find a way to work together if they have any chance of making it back home alive.
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With her first memoir, celebrated Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy traces her life from childhood to the present day, putting much of her focus on her complex relationship with her late mother. Roy began writing Mother Mary Comes to Me after her mother’s death in 2022, but noted in the memoir’s announcement that she has “been writing this book all my life,” calling her mom “her most enthralling subject.”
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Jeannie Vanasco’s third memoir, A Silent Treatment, looks at the psychological cost of refusing to communicate. It’s a topic that has personal significance to the author; her mother, after moving in with her during the pandemic, began using the silent treatment as a form of punishment for any perceived slight. She once went six months without saying a word to her daughter. Using her own harrowing experience as her guide, Vanasco investigates the punishing effects of leaving things unsaid.
Buy Now: Jeannie Vanasco’s books on Amazon | Barnes & Noble
