Year-End Lists

The New Yorker: The Best Books of 2025, a list of "essential reads" that accompanies a long list of further recommendations

[see also The Best Books of 2024 • The Best Books of 2023 • The Best Fiction and Poetry of 2022 • The Best Nonfiction of 2022 • The Best Books We Read in 2020]

Nonfiction

• A Marriage at Sea

  A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
  Sophie Elmhirst
• A Truce That Is Not Peace
  Miriam Toews
• Buckley

  The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
  Sam Tanenhaus
• Dead and Alive
  Zadie Smith
• The Fort Bragg Cartel

  Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces
  Seth Harp
• Is a River Alive?
  Robert Macfarlane
• Lorne

  The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
  Susan Morrison
• Melting Point

  Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land
  Rachel Cockerell
• Strangers in the Land

  Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America
  Michael Luo
• Things in Nature Merely Grow
  Yiyun Li
• We the People

  A History of the U.S. Constitution
  Jill Lepore
• The Zorg

  A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
  Siddharth Kara

Fiction & Poetry

• Audition
  Katie Kitamura
• Flashlight
  Susan Choi
• Flesh
  David Szalay
• Joy Is My Middle Name
  Sasha Debevec-McKenney
• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
  Kiran Desai
• Ocean of Clouds
  Garrett Hongo
• Perfection
  Vincenzo Latronico
• The Sisters
  Jonas Hassen Khemiri
• Trip
  Amie Barrodale
• What We Can Know
  Ian McEwan
• The Wilderness
  Angela Flournoy
• Will There Ever Be Another You
  Patricia Lockwood