Welcome to Your 2025 In Books

In the 1950s, Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God) spent many years writing a historical novel about the biblical King Herod as follow-up to her 1939 book, Moses, Man of the Mountain. When Hurston died in 1960, the manuscript remained unpublished and was almost destroyed in a fire. But Plant, a Hurston scholar, painstakingly combed through the surviving singed and smoke-stained pages to bring The Life of Herod the Great to readers for the first time. The result is a stunning and layered work of imagination and scholarship.

Fellow millennials, did you close your eyes and wince a little when the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve in 1999? No? Just me? Like Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties, Shade’s clear-eyed look back at the 2000s has everything you remember: technology that was actually fun to use, Starbucks that felt luxurious, and the constant existential anxiety from 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Great Recession. Y2K is an artisanal blend of nostalgia and analysis that helps us understand the decade that still defines contemporary culture.

I’m a sucker for Big Boat Books like David Grann’s The Wager and Erik Larson’s Dead Wake, so Matthew Pearl’s (The Taking of Jemima Boone) new work of narrative nonfiction is right up my slipway. In the winter of 1887, an entire family of five, their dog, and two dozen crew members disappeared when their shark fishing boat was blown off course by a storm near Hawaii. What follows is a much darker version of Swiss Family Robinson when the shipwreck survivors encounter a stranded psychopath.

In 2025, we’re already living in an era when the proliferation of AI can make it impossible to determine what’s real. How much worse could that get a few decades or centuries from now? Erika Swyler’s (The Book of Speculation) fourth book is a timely science fiction novel set in Bulwark, a walled city that’s governed by AI. A woman named Enita, one of Bulwark’s upper-class “saints” thanks to the sacrifices her direct ancestors made to found the city, is drawn into a murder mystery after one of her fellow saints is killed and the city’s AI erases the death from history. It’s a haunting, suspenseful, and nuanced look at the future we may already be barreling toward.

This psychedelic fever dream is set in Argentina around the turn of the 23rd century, where the melting ice caps have completely reshaped South America. While the wealthy 0.1 percent invest in new viruses and escape the worst effects of climate change on roaming cruise ships, the sweltering “Caribbean Pampas” gives birth to a human-mosquito hybrid who may have the power to change the status quo. Dengue Boy is Nieva’s English-language debut, extrapolated from a shocking short story that won the O. Henry Award in 2022.

Chicago’s polymath poet, comic book writer, and sociologist returns with a fascinating and eye-opening look at how American schools have helped build and reinforce an infrastructure of racial inequality. From the Founding Fathers to today’s classrooms, Ewing’s (Ghosts in the Schoolyard) brilliant research and analysis of our two-track school systems, written in her signature bracing prose, is a must-read for every American parent and educator.

Cristina Rivera Garza’s writing rewires your brain, summoning the ghosts of vivid emotions you’d forgotten you could even feel. Every new translation of Rivera Garza (The Taiga Syndrome) is a literary event on the scale of Roberto Bolaño and Clarice Lispector’s posthumous English publications, and her new meta-thriller, Death Takes Me, is no exception. When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon a dead body, she helps a detective on the hunt for a serial killer who scrawls poetry near the corpses of his victims.

Lalami’s (The Other Americans) new novel has one of the best high-concept hooks of the year: a museum archivist is abducted by federal agents and taken to a detention center for observation after an algorithm predicts she will murder her husband in the near-future. During her monthslong stay in the facility, her dreams are monitored for evidence of homicidal intent. It feels like a mix between Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and Wim Wender’s Until the End of the World, written in Lalami’s silky and celebrated prose.

El-Mohtar’s last novel This Is How You Lose the Time War (co-written with Max Gladstone), is one of the only books to ever hit the bestseller lists four years after publication thanks to a viral tweet. Her new book, a concise fantasy adventure called The River Has Roots, is about Esther and Ysabel Hawthorne, two sisters who care for ancient trees in the town of Thistleford, which sits near the borders of Faerie. When one of the sisters gets romantically involved with a Faerie suitor, things take a turn for the worse. El-Mohtar is one of our finest crafters of sentences, and this book features a magic system called Grammar, so The River Has Roots automatically earns a spot on my nightstand.

Who can forget Karen Russell’s debut novel Swamplandia!, the Florida-set story of alligator wranglers that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction back in 2012? Her new novel focuses on the other side of the country, where dust storms and the Great Depression have devastated a small town called Uz, Nebraska, where a “prairie witch” that can receive and preserve your memories, a camera that can see into the past and the future, and a farm that seems to be supernaturally unaffected by the drought.

“I like to write novels that, to me, are broken at the level of conception, and then see if I can pull it off,” Graham Jones told Esquire two years ago. In Mongrels and The Only Good Indians, he took werewolves and ghost stories in exciting new directions. In the Indian Lake trilogy (My Heart Is a Chainsaw, Don’t Fear the Reaper, and The Angel of Indian Lake), he subverted our expectations for slasher horror. Now, he’s tackling the vampire mythos from a unique point of view: the lost 1912 diary of a Montana priest that records the life of a Blackfoot man named Good Stab.

“Binge” is exactly what I did (sorry) over the course of 48 hours with Nicholas’s last novel, Ascension, a suspenseful sci-fi thriller about a mountain that suddenly appears in the Pacific ocean. His new book, Dissolution, is about an elderly woman being interrogated by a stranger about her memories because someone is stealing the memories of her husband. I won’t go further in the plot than that, because putting together what’s happening is one of the novel’s pleasures.

Nayler’s debut novel The Mountain in the Sea is one of my favorite works of science fiction of the decade so far. Needless to say, I’m anxiously awaiting Where the Axe Is Buried, which sounds like a mix between Apple TV+’s Foundation and Slow Horses adaptations. In the not-too-distant future, the president of the Federation keeps downloading his mind into “a succession of new bodies,” the AI-driven government of Western Europe is working out about as poorly as today’s ChatGPT users would expect, and a team of crack spies and scientists is trying to fight back.

Vara wrote one of my favorite novels of the decade so far, The Immortal King Rao, so I’m excited to see her tackle the most controversial technology of that very same decade—the advent of ChatGPT and other LLM-based AI—in a work of nonfiction. A few years ago, Vara asked GPT-3 to co-write stories with her about the death of her sister, and the results went viral. Searches is a book-length exploration of humankind’s relationship with technology at this particularly fraught moment in time.

As unlikely as it is in reality, I can’t resist science fiction novels about humanity leaving our celestial cradle for another planet. I also loved the short story Joe Mungo Reed published in Esquire a few years ago—Islanders, about the cost of immortality. In his new book, Terrestrial History, a scientist in Scotland meets a man who claims to be from the future: specifically, a future colony on Mars that he’s here to ensure happens.

Katie Kitamura only writes intense and fascinating novels. Her last two, Intimacies and A Separation, absolutely blew me away with how she uses voice, tone, and a careful attention to detail to build suspense. In Audition, the setup is fairly simple: a woman and a significantly younger man meet for lunch at a restaurant in New York. But figuring out who they really are—and discovering how Kitamura will structure their stories—will make this another addictive puzzle box.

After publishing definitive biographies of Alexander Hamilton, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Ulysses S. Grant, and George Washington (the latter of which made our list of the fifty best biographies of all time), the seventy-five-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winner has turned his sights on the white-haired Bard of the Mississippi. From a birth in Missouri to a death in Connecticut, Chernow’s new 1,200-page doorstopper promises to be the most detailed account of Twain’s life ever published.

In addition to having one of my favorite covers of the year, Lincoln Michel’s (The Body Scout) new novel is a brilliant, funny, and pulpy homage to the golden age of science fiction. Set in Brooklyn, it’s about a group of young writers who collaborate on a shared fictional universe called The Star Rot Chronicles, which readers get to glimpse in interstitials between chapters narrated by the writing group’s most deluded member.

When I read the first chapter of Madeleine Thien’s new novel, The Book of Records, I had an intense emotional reaction. After a few more chapters, images from the book began appearing in my dreams at night. Both of these responses are extremely rare for me as a reader, but Thien has written something truly special here. It’s about a father and daughter migrating across the ocean who discover a liminal island where other migrants live in buildings made of time, but the less you know about the story before reading, the better.

Kuang’s follow-up to her dark academia masterpiece Babel will probably be the biggest fantasy book release of 2025. Her publicists are comparing Katabasis to “Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi,” and her publisher is giving the hardcover release stenciled edges, case effects, and illustrated endpapers—which means they’re confident it’ll be a major hit. All we know about the story is this: When Alice Law’s Cambridge professor of Magick dies, she travels to Hell to get him back.