The best books of 2025
Raise your hand if you read a good book this year. ✋ Our hands are up! There were so many outstanding titles that landed on our bookshelves in 2025. From sizzling romantasy sagas to psychological thrillers that made us double-check the locks, this year’s stories gave a much-needed escape from busy schedules, long commutes, and an endless new cycle. Whether you found this year’s favorite from your library’s curated shelves, BookTok, a book club pick, a friend’s recommendation, or here at Libby Life, one thing’s for sure: there’s always another great book waiting for a spot on your TBR.
And speaking of... it’s time to introduce our annual roundup of 100 of the best books of 2025. Curated by our staff librarians who’ve tapped into bestseller lists, influencer picks, and trusted sources like The New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, and Library Journal, this list highlights the year’s biggest, most-talked-about titles that truly stood out.
Pro tip: Keep track of all the titles that interest you by creating a tag in the Libby app because we can all agree: these books can’t be missed.
Audition
by Katie Kitamura
One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
by Stephen Graham Jones
A chilling historical horror novel tracing the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.
The Emperor of Gladness
by Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.
Katabasis
by R. F. Kuang
Two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul—perhaps at the cost of their own.
Abundance
by Ezra Klein
A once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.
Sunrise on the Reaping
by Suzanne Collins
In this new prequel, readers finally get the story of Katniss’ mentor, Haymitch Abernathy, as he competed in the 50th annual Hunger Games.
Great Big Beautiful Life
by Emily Henry
Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping novel.
The Man Who Died Seven Times
by Yasuhiko Nishizawa
A subversively cozy Japanese murder mystery with an ingenious Groundhog Day twist: a teenager’s time-loop race to solve—and possibly prevent—his grandfather’s murder.
Flesh
by David Szalay
A collection of intimate moments over the course of decades, Flesh chronicles a man at odds with himself—estranged from and by the circumstances and demands of a life not entirely under his control and the roles that he is asked to play.
Baldwin
by Nicholas Boggs
Drawing on new archival material, original research, and interviews, this spellbinding book is the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, revealing how profoundly his personal relationships shaped his life and work.
Is a River Alive?
by Robert Macfarlane
A revelatory book that transforms how we imagine rivers—and life itself.
Flashlight
by Susan Choi
A novel tracing a father's disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
by Kiran Desai
A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity.
The Wilderness
by Angela Flournoy
An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their 20-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife.
Bog Queen
by Anna North
When an eerily preserved Iron Age body is discovered in an English bog, an American forensic anthropologist is drawn into a mystery that spans two millennia.
Heart the Lover
by Lily King
A magnificent and intimate novel of desire, friendship, and the lasting impact of first love.
Angelica and the Bear Prince
by Trung Le Nguyen
Being a teenager is no fairy tale… but that doesn’t mean you can’t find a little magic. A high schooler’s journey to recover from burnout leads to a surprising romance with a twist.
Pocket Bear
by Katherine Applegate
Meet Pocket, created as a good luck charm for soldiers going into battle, whose bravery and loyalty lives on long after the war.
Don't Trust Fish
by Neil Sharpson
An absurdly laugh-out-loud funny picture book about the villainy of fish, illustrated by National Book Award-winning creator Dan Santat.
*Title availability may vary.
📚❤️ Don’t forget to subscribe to Libby Life for a weekly email with all the hottest new releases, book recommendations, bookish quizzes, and more!
Check out the full list here:
Published Nov 26, 2025
Annie Suhy
Annie Suhy is the editor of Libby Life. When she’s not working, practicing yoga, or petting cats, she’s doing paint-by-numbers and buying more plants. An avid poetry fan, her favorite collection is The Splinter Factory by Jeffrey McDaniel. She is an Aries.