Every year, all staff are invited to submit the best titles they've read throughout 2025. These represent anything staff read and found noteworthy this year, published this year. If you prefer, you can skip straight to the complete list here.
As always, our final list contains all sorts of formats, genres, subject matter, etc. However, there were some interesting trends contained within the data that seemed worth noting.
Starred entries are books that multiple staff submitted as a 2025 Staff Pick.
Fiction | Special Shoutout: Fantasy Fiction | Nonfiction | Special Shoutout: Science Nonfiction
When Zeb Wyckham is summoned to a wealthy relative's remote Gothic house on Dartmoor, he finds all the people he least wants to see in the world...Nothing, he is certain, could possibly be worse. Then the grizzled old patriarch announces the true purpose of the gathering: He intends to leave the vast family fortune to whichever of the men marries Cousin Jessamine, setting off a violent scramble for her hand and his wealth. Disinterested in being tied further to a family he can barely stand, Zeb tries to leave only to realize that he's been trapped.
Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece Frances—that is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA's space shuttle program.
In this third installment in Mosley's series, "a family member's terminal illness leads P.I. Joe King Oliver to the investigation of his life: tracking down his long-lost father; and meanwhile, a new case pits King's professional responsibility against his own moral code."
A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.
In Cannon, Lee Lai's much anticipated follow-up to the critically acclaimed and award-winning Stone Fruit, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a slice of what Lai has on offer. As Cannon's shoulders bend under the weight of an aging Gung-gung and an avoidant mother, Lai's sharp sense of humor and sensitive eye produce a story that will hit readers with a smash.
Former Supreme Court clerk Avery Keene is back . . . trying to put the past behind her at a prestigious high-end law firm in Washington, D.C. Head down and focused on a new life, Avery is now working as an internal investigator when a high-profile client seeks her out. Camasca Enterprises has a big problem and a short runway... Avery and her colleagues, Jared, Ling, and Noah, are brought into the secretive company to investigate from the inside out. At the epicenter of a burgeoning, controversial industry, and with billions of dollars on the line, their task is simple: to determine whether Camasca's technical troubles and rising body count reveal something sinister at work.
When Ruth is caught shoplifting from the megachurch-owned craft store in her small hometown, she is locked in and attacked by employees who seem to have a secret and sinister plan for her.
A disabled Nigerian American woman pens a wildly successful Sci-Fi novel, but as her fame rises, she loses control of the narrative.
When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning scrawled on the brick wall beside the body, written in coral nail polish: "Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert." After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? As more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and if they are facing a darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city.
A year in the life of a wayward young man in New England who, by chance, becomes the caretaker for an eighty-two-year-old widow living with dementia, powering a story of friendship, loss, and how much we're willing to risk to claim one of life's most treasured mercies: a second chance.
The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom.
In 1919, as civil and social unrest grips the country, there is a little corner of America, a place called Harlem where something special is stirring. Here, the New Negro is rising and Black pride is evident everywhere...in music, theatre, fashion and the arts. And there on stage in the center of this renaissance is Jessie Redmon Fauset, the new literary editor of the preeminent Negro magazine The Crisis. W.E.B. Du Bois, the founder and editor of The Crisis, has charged her with discovering young writers whose words will change the world. Jessie attacks the challenge with fervor, quickly finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends.
A warm, witty, and wise novel about a woman who goes looking for answers after her first love turned best friend dies unexpectedly, and winds up finding herself.
After the funeral of the last living member of her family, Dorrie has never felt more lost and alone. That is, except fora Greek chorus of deceased relatives whose voices follow her around giving unsolicited advice and opinions. And they're only amplifying Dorrie's doubts about keeping the deathbed promise she made to return to her birthplace in Colombia. Fresh off a breakup with her long-term boyfriend, laid off from her job as a cartographer, and facing a daunting inheritance of her mothers' aging Minneapolis Victorian and two orange tabbies, how can she possibly leave the country now? But when an old flame offers to house sit, the chorus agrees that there's no room for excuses.
1954: When her former novice's dependable letters stop, Nora Breen asks to be released from her vows. Haunted by a line in Frieda's letter, Nora arrives at Gulls Nest, a charming hotel in Gore-on-Sea in Kent. A seaside town, a place of fresh air and relaxed constraints, is the perfect place for a new start. Nora hides her identity and pries into the lives of her fellow guests. But when a series of bizarre murders rattles the occupants of Gulls Nest it's time to ask if a dark past can ever really be left behind.
When a demonic presence awakens deep in a Mexican silver mine, the young woman it seizes must turn to the one man she shouldn't trust.
In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she's as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these ... stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long-held beliefs are overturned.
Originally serialized in the 1960s and 70s, in New York-based Yiddish newspapers, Chaim Grade's Sons and Daughters is a precious glimpse of a way of life that is no longer-the rich, Yiddish culture of Poland and Lithuania that the Holocaust would eradicate. We meet the Katzenellenbogens in the tiny village of Morehdalye, in the 1930s, when gangs of Poles are beginning to boycott Jewish merchants and the modern, secular world is pressing in on the shtetl from all sides. It's this clash, between the freethinking secular life and a life bound by religious duty-and the comforts offered by each-that stands at the center of Sons and Daughters.
There Are Reasons for This is a modern love song about the fallibility of love - in all its iterations - about the denial and tethering of desire, about the family we are given and the one we find for ourselves, and to what comes next, whatever that may be.
The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds.
The moon has turned into cheese. Now humanity has to deal with it. For some it's an opportunity. For others it's a moment to question their faith: in God, in science, in everything. Still others try to keep the world running in the face of absurdity and uncertainty. And then there are the billions looking to the sky and wondering how a thing that was always just there is now—something absolutely impossible. Astronauts and billionaires, comedians and bank executives, professors and presidents, teenagers and terminal patients at the end of their lives—over the length of an entire lunar cycle, each [gets a] moment in the moonlight. To panic, to plan, to wonder and to pray, to laugh and to grieve.
One night, Jess, a struggling actress, finds a five-year-old runaway hiding in the bushes outside her apartment. After a violent, bloody encounter with the boy's father, she and the boy find themselves running for their lives. As they attempt to evade the boy's increasingly desperate father, Jess slowly comes to a horrifying understanding of the butchery that follows them--the boy can turn his every fear into reality. And when the wolf finally comes home, no one will be spared.
A novel about a family living alone on a remote island, when a mysterious woman washes up on shore.
Collecting over 30 rare works of short fiction tinged with horror and eroticism by one of comics' most distinct voices, spanning over 20,000 years from the Stone Age to the apocalypse. Julia Gfrörer is quietly one of the most influential cartoonists of her generation. Emerging from the Portland scene at the height of the Obama era, her comics augured the dark times to come, using graphic sex, pitch-black horror, a hunger for exploring the past, and a line cruel as a whip to create her own unmistakable sense of millennial melancholy. Reflecting her DIY ethos, much of her work has only been available in self-published zines or independent anthologies, many of them rare or out-of-print until now.
Santo Domingo de la Calzada, 1532. London, 1827. Boston, 2019. Three young women, their bodies planted in the same soil, their stories tangling like roots. One grows high, and one grows deep, and one grows wild. And all of them grow teeth.
It's 1989, and Joe Agabian and his best friend Ronnie set out to spend their first summer working in the hedonistic gay paradise of Fire Island Pines. Joe is desperate to let loose and finally move beyond the heartbreak of having lost his boyfriend to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The two friends are quickly taken in by a pair of quirky, older house cleaners. But something seems off, and Joe starts to suspect the two older men of being up to something otherworldly. In truth, Howie and Lenny are members of a secret disco witch coven tasked with protecting the island—and young men like Joe—from the relentless tragedies ravaging their community.
Terlu Perna broke the law because she was lonely. She cast a spell and created a magically sentient spider plant. As punishment, she was turned into a wooden statue and tucked away into an alcove in the North Reading Room of the Great Library of Alyssium. This should have been the end of her story... Funny, kind, and forgiving, The Enchanted Greenhouse is a story about giving second chances-to others and to yourself.
Beneath the still surface of a lake lurks a monster with needle sharp teeth—hungry and ready to pounce. Jenny Greenteeth has never spoken to a human before, but when a witch is thrown into her lake, something makes Jenny decide she's worth saving. Temperance doesn't know why her village has suddenly turned against her, only that it has something to do with the malevolent new pastor. Though they have nothing in common, these two must band together on a magical quest to defeat the evil that threatens Jenny's lake and Temperance's family, as well as the very soul of Britain.
From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes Hemlock & Silver, a dark reimagining of "Snow White" steeped in poison, intrigue, and treason of the most magical kind.
Marisha's time is running out. She's already lost her family to the sleeping plague, and she fears she'll be next. Penniless and desperate for protection, Marisha is forced to accept a job as apprentice to the notorious koldunya, the sorceress Baba Zima. But Baba Zima is renowned for being both clever and cruel. And most difficult of all is her current apprentice Olena, who wants nothing to do with Marisha. Despite her fears and Olena's cold demeanor, Marisha finds herself drawn into the magical world of koldunry and delves further into Olena's research—a cure for the sleeping plague.
Doctor Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood School and one of the most powerful magicians in England. Her days consist of meetings, teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented, chaotic sixth formers, more meetings, and securing the school's boundaries from demonic incursions. Walden is good at her job—no, Walden is great at her job. But demons are masters of manipulation. It's her responsibility to keep her school with its six hundred students and centuries-old legacy safe. And it's possible the entity Walden most needs to keep her school safe from—is herself.
Like the other foundling girls who traded a decade of service for a home in the great cathedral, Sybil is a Diviner. In her dreams she receives visions from six unearthly figures known as Omens. From them, she can predict terrible things before they occur, and lords and common folk alike travel across the kingdom of Traum's windswept moors to learn their futures by her dreams. Just as she and her sister Diviners near the end of their service, a mysterious knight arrives at the cathedral. Rude, heretical, and devilishly handsome, the knight Rodrick has no respect for Sybil's visions. But when Sybil's fellow Diviners begin to vanish one by one, she has no choice but to seek his help in finding them--for the world outside the cathedral's cloister is wrought with peril.
Someone wants to murder Princess Melilot. This is sadly normal. Melilot is sick of being ordered to go on dangerous quests by her domineering stepmother. Especially since she always winds up needing to be rescued by her more magically talented stepsisters. And now, she's been commanded to marry a king she's never met. When hideous spider-wolves attack her on the journey to meet her husband-to-be, she is once again rescued-but this time, by twelve eerily similar-looking masked huntsmen...If Melilot can't unravel the mysteries and rescue herself from peril, kingdoms will fall. Worse, she could end up married to someone she doesn't love.
In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family. There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic—none more devotedly than the family's latest daughters Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees. But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters' bond but also their lives will be at risk.
Determined to avenge her parents' murder, a young woman infiltrates an elite academy to hunt the ruthless gang responsible, only to be sent undercover into their world, where deadly alliances, brutal betrayals, and a doomed prophecy threaten to unravel her mission — and her heart.
WARRIOR. King Maddox Kyronan's fire magic has earned him a ruthless reputation on the battlefield, but now his land is slowly burning. Ky's only chance to save his people is to enter a marriage alliance with the neighboring nation of Astranza, and hope that their royal family's power to manipulate the weather will help his kingdom flourish once more. ...PRINCESS. With enemies advancing on Astranza, Princess Jory's home needs the protection of the fearsome warrior king, but she is hiding a dangerous secret: her family's magic is fading....ASSASSIN. Asher's done what he must to survive, even if that means getting his hands dirty. Once a young nobleman in Astranza's palace, where he and Jory caused mischief together, now he's part of the Hunter's Guild, employing much darker skills.
What if we explored our relationship to consumption with the same depth and feeling we use to tell stories of great loves and losses? Americans are caught up in bulk. We guiltily watch Amazon boxes pile up on the porch, wade through endless reviews to find the perfect product, and crave the comforting indulgence of a chain restaurant. In American Bulk, Emily Mester intertwines cultural critique and personal history to explore how the things we buy, eat, amass, and discard become an intimate part of our lives.
Illustrated throughout with photographs, journal entries, and letters that bring immediacy and poignancy to the narrative, Art Work is full of thought-provoking insights about the hazards of early promise; the unpredictable role of luck; the value of work, work, work, and more hard work; the challenges of rejection and distraction; the importance of risk-taking; and the rewards of knowing why and when you say yes. In sparkling prose and thoughtfully juxtaposed visuals and ephemera, Art Work is a generous, provocative, and compulsively readable exploration of creativity by one of our most original thinkers.
When Choi realized that falling victim to his greasy cravings was not sustainable, he began to eat more nutritious foods--but he did it his way, to build a more realistic lifestyle not based on extreme dieting or deprivation. This equates to vegetable-forward recipes, with plenty of pit stops of comfort along the way, and tons of flavors layered in every single bite. ... Since this book is about taking steps, not leaps, there's also plenty of inspiration for when you're craving something indulgent, like crispy mashed potatoes, but with 'Power Up' modifications to make it healthier when you're ready.
A biography of stunt performer Helen Gibson, known as "the most daring actress in pictures" during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
A brief and humorous 500-year history of the Simplified Spelling Movement from advocates like Ben Franklin, C.S. Lewis, and Mark Twain to texts and Twitter.
Case brings her trademark candor and precision to a memoir that traces her evolution from an invisible girl "raised by two dogs and a space heater" in rural Washington state to her improbable emergence as an internationally-acclaimed talent. ... Case shows readers what it's like to be left alone for hours and hours as a child, to take refuge in the woods around her home, and to channel the monotony and loneliness and joy that comes from music, camaraderie, and shared experience into art.
With unprecedented access to Michaels (who has spent his career mostly avoiding reporters) and the entire SNL apparatus, The New Yorker's Susan Morrison takes you behind the curtain for the rollicking, definitive story of how Lorne created the institution that would change comedy forever....Nearly a decade in the making, Lorne is an intimate, deeply reported, and wildly entertaining account of a man singularly obsessed with the show that would define his life—and change American culture.
From the mid-19th century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their families to attend boarding schools that claimed to help create opportunity for these children to pursue professions outside their communities and otherwise 'assimilate' into American life. In reality, these boarding schools—sponsored by the US Government but often run by various religious orders with little to no regulation—were an insidious attempt to destroy tribes, break up families, and stamp out the traditions of generations of Native people.
Scaachi employs her signature humor and fierce intelligence to interrogate her previous belief that fighting is the most effective tool for progress. She examines the fights she's had -- with her parents, her ex-husband, her friends, online strangers, and herself -- all in an attempt to understand when a fight is worth having, and when it's better to walk away.
Through lyrical prose and evocative watercolor illustrations by award-winning Muscogee artist Dana Tiger, Washing My Mother's Body explores the complexity of a daughter's grief as she reflects on the joys and sorrows of her mother's life. She lays her mother to rest in the landscape of her memory, honoring the hands that raised her, the body that protected her, and the legs that carried her mother through adversity. Moving, comforting, and deeply emotional, Washing My Mother's Body is a tender look at mother-daughter relationships, the complexity of grieving the loss of a parent, and the enduring love of those left behind.
Kareem Rosser and Lee Lee Jones were young, beautiful, and deeply in love. Their love was a real-world romance that felt like a fairy tale: Kareem was raised in the Bottom--one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in Philadelphia--while Lee Lee was raised in the wealth of the Pennsylvania suburbs. They met and fell in love in the world of horses: Kareem, a nationally ranked polo player and Lee Lee, a legacy equestrian. The world was at their feet, a lifetime of joy and adventure ahead of them. But their love story is interrupted by a devastating accident, which almost costs Lee Lee her life, and destroys every plan and dream that Lee Lee and Kareem had made together.
The fascinating and remarkable true story of the world's first forensic ornithologist- Roxie Laybourne, who broke down barriers for women, solved murders, and investigated deadly airplane crashes with nothing more than a microscope and a few fragments of feathers.
In the early 1900s, many Americans actually believed we had discovered intelligent life on Mars, as best-selling science writer David Baron chronicles in The Martians, his truly bizarre tale of a nation swept up in Mars mania.
A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman's unlikely friendship with a wild hare.
A bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.
For millennia, depictions of snakes as alternatively beautiful and menacing creatures have appeared in religious texts, mythology, poetry, and beyond. From the foundational deities of ancient Egypt to the reactions of squeamish schoolchildren today, it is a historically commonplace belief that snakes are devious, dangerous, and even evil. But where there is hatred and fear, there is also fascination and reverence. How is it that creatures so despised and sinister, so foreign of movement and ostensibly devoid of sociality and emotion, have fired the imaginations of poets, prophets, and painters across time and cultures?