These Are The 10 Best Books Of 2025 According To The New York Times Ms

Leo Migdal

-Dec 12, 2025, 3:56 PM

these are the 10 best books of 2025 according to the new york times ms

10 Best Books of 2025, According to The New York Times (Picture Credit - Instagram) The literary world of 2025 offered a rare kind of brilliance, the kind that arrives quietly but stays long after the year has passed. The New York Times list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 reflects the depth and power of a year shaped by bold voices, unforgettable characters, and striking truths. These books did not just earn their place. They captured it with heart, craft, and emotional clarity. Whether through fiction that pushed boundaries or nonfiction that confronted reality with honesty, each title became a defining part of 2025, leaving readers with stories that illuminate, comfort, and challenge in equal measure.

Also Read: 10 Best Children's Books of 2025 A theatre director’s ambition simmered behind every rehearsed line. Kehlmann’s ‘The Director’ examines the pressures of artistic life, ego, and the pursuit of recognition. Following a celebrated figure navigating professional and personal challenges, the novel blurs genius and obsession. Through sharp, witty storytelling, it captures envy, power struggles, and moral dilemmas within the theatre world. Benjamin’s translation preserves Kehlmann’s precise humour and intensity, immersing readers in the conflicts between ambition and integrity.

The Director (Picture Credit - Instagram) Last week, The New York Times shared their 100 Notable Books of 2025. Now, they're back with their overall top 10 books of 2025. Book Riot Editorial is made up of passionate readers, writers, and book lovers dedicated to delivering insightful book recommendations, literary analysis, and the latest in book culture. With expertise spanning multiple genres and a deep understanding of the publishing industry, we offer thoughtful commentary, book deals, and news that matters to readers. Whether it’s uncovering hidden gems, analyzing literary trends, or championing diverse voices, Book Riot’s editorial team is here to keep you informed and inspired.

Last week, The New York Times shared their 100 Notable Books of 2025. Now, they’re back with their overall top 10 books of 2025: five fiction and five nonfiction. As you might expect, the fiction books are all literary fiction, including a stream-of-consciousness World War I novel, a book about an Austrian filmmaker in World War II, and a 700-page family saga. You can listen to The New York Times Book Review podcast to hear editor Gilbert Cruz and his colleagues discuss their process of narrowing the 100 notable picks to these top ten. They also talk about what made these ten titles stand out. Here are the ten best books of 2025, according to The New York Times.

If you click on links we provide, we may receive compensation. Books by Stephen Graham Jones, Suzanne Collins and more made the '100 Notable Books of the Year' NYT list and PEOPLE's recommendations For anyone looking to wrap up their 2025 TBR lists or in the thick of holiday shopping, look no further. We combed through The New York Times' list of 100 Notable Books of 2025 and cross-checked their editors' favorites against PEOPLE's monthly recommendations to pinpoint a list of books recommended by experts at both... From stunning historical fiction by Allegra Goodman, haunting horror by Stephen Graham Jones to Oprah's Book Club pick A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar and the hotly-anticipated Hunger Games prequel Sunrise on... In this hilarious, profound novel, lonely teenager Griffin Hurt, disconnected from the dysfunctional adults around him in 1980s New York City, explores the many identities in his life, from child actor to champion wrestler...

— Caroline Leavitt Pre-publication book reviews and features keeping readers and industry influencers in the know since 1933. The New York Times has unveiled its list of the best books of 2025, with five fiction and five nonfiction titles selected by the editors of the newspaper’s book review section. Kiran Desai made the list for her novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the Booker Prize. Another Booker Prize finalist, Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, made the list, with the editors praising it as “exquisite.” The other fiction titles were Angel Down by Daniel Kraus; The Director, written by Daniel Kehlmann and translated by Ross Benjamin; and The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri.

Two nonfiction books shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize made the Times’ best-of-the-year list: Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, and Sophie Elmhirst’s A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession,... The New York Times: The 10 Best Books of 2025 [see also 100 Notable Books of 2025 • The 10 Best Books of 2024 • 100 Notable Books of 2024 • The 10 Best Books of 2023 • 100 Notable Books of 2023 •... Year-end lists are fingerprints; aggregate statistics are smudges. Therefore, I make no tallies. In a hard year—and when, recently, have we had one we’d consider easy?—books can be a lifeline and a balm, a place to retreat and regain our grounding.

Among the many entertaining, delightful, poignant, and treasured new works of fiction and nonfiction that were published this year, the very best offered fresh perspective and a strong voice to cut through the noise. S.A. Cosby and R.F. Kuang took us on high-octane journeys that blended genre thrills with literary impact. Miriam Toews and Yiyun Li probed grave personal losses, offering insights from the edge of grief. Katie Kitamura and Lily King put relationships under a microscope, examining how, and how thoroughly, the bonds we create can shape us.

Taken together, the books on this list show narrators real and imagined grappling with some of life’s greatest challenges, and nevertheless surviving—as timely and valuable a message as readers can ask for. Here, the 10 best books of 2025. Miriam Toews’ first book of nonfiction in more than 20 years begins with a fictionalized premise: she is asked, in advance of a literary festival in Mexico, to consider the question, “Why do you... This momentary obstacle, an amalgamation of real experiences, becomes a rich, long-term project. In A Truce That Is Not Peace, the acclaimed Canadian author meanders through her childhood and early motivations to write, the losses of close family members, her Mennonite background, misadventures in both being parented... In a memoir that’s at once wry, gutting, and exhilarating, Toews holds her life and her creative process up to the light to examine the threads that tie them together.

The author of Blacktop Wasteland, Razorblade Tears, and All the Sinners Bleed—one of the most acclaimed writers of crime fiction to emerge over the past six years—S.A. Cosby offers another grisly and gripping Southern noir novel. Atlanta-based financial adviser Roman Carruthers is back in Jefferson Run, the Virginia town where he grew up, to deal with a number of family crises. His father was just in a catastrophic car crash, his sister is buckling under the pressure of running the family business, and his little brother owes a debt to a vicious gang—which, Roman quickly... Roman’s only choice is to employ the skills of his trade to try to make things right for his family, even if he has to do some wrong along the way. Cosby has a talent for lining up dominoes and knocking them down in the most unexpected of ways, crafting thrillers that are as high-velocity as they are rewarding.

Read More: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 Two postgraduate students in Cambridge University’s Department of Analytic Magick follow their recently deceased advisor to the afterlife in hopes of retrieving his soul and rescuing their career prospects. R.F. Kuang, the author of The Poppy War series, Babel, and Yellowface—and a Yale PhD candidate herself—conjures a fantasy quest narrative that gleefully skewers the lopsided power dynamics in academia. It’s a campus novel where the campus is literally hell. Kuang consults everything from Dante’s Inferno to mind-bending logic concepts like the impossible Penrose stairs to create the landscape and mechanics of her underworld.

Then she throws two desperate, competitive students into its depths to see whether they can find their way back to the land of the living—and if, along the way, they might learn something more...

These Are The 10 Best Books Of 2025 According To The New York Times Ms

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