Year-End Lists

Time Magazine: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

[see also The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 • The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020 • The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020 • The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 • The 10 Best Fiction Books of the 2010s • The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s • The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2019 • The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2019 • Best Books of 2018 • Top 20 Books of 2017]

Fiction

• All That We See or Seem
  Ken Liu
• The Antidote
  Karen Russell
• Atmosphere
  Taylor Jenkins Reid
• Audition
  Katie Kitamura
• Bad Bad Girl
  Gish Jen
• Boleyn Traitor
  Philippa Gregory
• The Book of Records
  Madeleine Thien
• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
  Stephen Graham Jones
• The Catch
  Yrsa Daley-Ward
• Crush
  Ada Calhoun
• Cursed Daughters
  Oyinkan Braithwaite
• Dead Money
  Jakob Kerr
• Death of the Author
  Nnedi Okorafor
• The Dream Hotel
  Laila Lalami
• The Edge of Water
  Olufunke Grace Bankole
• The Emperor of Gladness
  Ocean Vuong
• Flashlight
  Susan Choi
• Gingko Season
  Naomi Xu Elegant
• Good Dirt
  Charmaine Wilkerson
• Good Girl
  Aria Aber
• Great Black Hope
  Rob Franklin
• A Guardian and a Thief
  Megha Majumdar
• Heart the Lover
  Lily King
• The Hounding
  Xenobe Purvis
• Isola
  Allegra Goodman
• Katabasis
  R.F. Kuang
• King of Ashes
  S.A. Cosby
• A Language of Limbs
  Dylin Hardcastle
• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
  Kiran Desai
• Lonely Crowds
  Stephanie Wambugu
• Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar
  Katie Yee
• Mercy
  Joan Silber
• Moderation
  Elaine Castillo
• Mỹ Documents
  Kevin Nguyen
• An Oral History of Atlantis
  Ed Park
• O Sinners!
  Nicole Cuffy
• Other People's Houses
  Clare Mackintosh
• Palaver
  Bryan Washington
• Pan
  Michael Clune
• People Like Us
  Jason Mott
• Pick a Color
  Souvankham Thammavongsa
• Run for the Hills
  Kevin Wilson
• Shadow Ticket
  Thomas Pynchon
• Sky Daddy
  Kate Folk
• Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave

  My Cemetery Journeys
  Mariana Enriquez
• The South
  Tash Aw
• Sweet Heat
  Bolu Babalola
• Theft
  Abdulrazak Gurnah
• These Summer Storms
  Sarah MacLean
• The Three Lives of Cate Kay
  Kate Fagan
• Tilt
  Emma Pattee
• To Smithereens
  Rosalyn Drexler
• The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
  Rabih Alameddine
• Vera, or Faith
  Gary Shteyngart
• Victorian Psycho
  Virginia Feito
• We Do Not Part
  Han Kang
• Where Are You Really From

  Stories
  Elaine Hsieh Chou
• Wild Dark Shore
  Charlotte McConaghy
• The Wilderness
  Angela Flournoy

Nonfiction

• All the Way to the River

  Love, Loss, and Liberation
  Elizabeth Gilbert
• Baldwin

  A Love Story
  Nicholas Boggs
• Black in Blues

  How a Color Tells the Story of My People
  Imani Perry
• Book of Lives

  A Memoir of Sorts
  Margaret Atwood
• Bread of Angels

  A Memoir
  Patti Smith
• Careless People

  A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
  Sarah Wynn-Williams
• Claire McCardell

  The Designer Who Set Women Free
  Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
• The Colonel and the King

  Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership that Rocked the World
  Peter Guralnick
• Dead and Alive
  Zadie Smith
• The Dry Season

  A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
  Melissa Febos
• A Flower Traveled in My Blood

  The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children
  Haley Cohen Gilliland
• Forest Euphoria

  The Abounding Queerness of Nature
  Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
• Gemini

  Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story
  Jeffrey Kluger
• Girl on Girl

  How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
  Sophie Gilbert
• Gwyneth

  The Biography
  Amy Odell
• Hostage
  Eli Sharabi
• I'll Tell You When I'm Home

  A Memoir
  Hala Alyan
• Is a River Alive?
  Robert Macfarlane
• I Want to Burn This Place Down

  Essays
  Maris Kreizman
• Joyride

  A Memoir
  Susan Orlean
• Mark Twain
  Ron Chernow
• A Marriage at Sea

  A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
  Sophie Elmhirst
• The Martians

  The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America
  David Baron
• Mother Mary Comes to Me
  Arundhati Roy
• Nothing More of This Land

  Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity
  Joseph Lee
• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
  Omar El Akkad
• The Quiet Ear

  An Investigation of Missing Sound
  Raymond Antrobus
• Raising Hare

  A Memoir
  Chloe Dalton
• Replaceable You

  Adventures in Human Anatomy
  Mary Roach
• Saving Five

  A Memoir of Hope
  Amanda Nguyen
• Strangers in the Land

  Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America
  Michael Luo
• The Tell

  A Memoir
  Amy Griffin
• Things in Nature Merely Grow
  Yiyun Li
• The Trouble of Color

  An American Family Memoir
  Martha S. Jones
• A Truce That Is Not Peace
  Miriam Toews
• The Zorg

  A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
  Siddharth Kara
• 1929

  Inside the Greatest Crash in History--and How It Shattered a Nation
  Andrew Ross Sorkin

Poetry

• The Idea of an Entire Life
  Billy-Ray Belcourt
• Primordial
  Mai Der Vang
• Scorched Earth
  Tiana Clark
• Stay Dead
  Natalie Shapero