This felt like sort of a strange year for books. About halfway through, I decided that I needed to come to terms with the fact that maybe I had already read all of the books I was going to enjoy, and the rest were not going to feel quite as special to me. Then, late October hit and a deluge of amazing books came out and upended my whole process. Now, I actually think it was a really fascinating year for books. I’m very excited to present this list to you. Do remember that these are my favorite books published in 2025 and I’m writing about them in alphabetical order.
To Go On Living: Stories by Narine Abgaryan
“Ginaments Metaksia leaves her house bright and early, at the crack of dawn. A flock of village swallows, having abandoned their perches in the cypress trees, are swooping overhead, making notches on the canvas of the quickly brightening sky with their sharp-tipped wings. The first dew - dense, life-giving - falls, dispatching the night. A cricket, confused about the hour of the day, breaks into its drawling song: chirr-up, chirr-up, chirr-up.
‘Good morning to you too, you poor soul,’ Metaksia greets him in her mind. The cricket, as if hearing her thoughts, cuts off and falls silent.
Today is Merelots, the day of the dead.”
Translated from Armenian, full of the quiet moments that populate days and weeks and lives, To Go On Living is unlike anything else I’ve ever read. This is the portrait of a town wrecked and ravaged by war. Each character in this book is reeling from loss. The sadness is unescapable.
And yet, as Abgaryan moves from house to house through this little border town, there’s an enduring sense of hope. Not that things will get better. Not that the lost will return. Not even that you’ll make it through the day. It’s simply that you are here now. You are here with your neighbors, with the birds, with the mountains, and the orchards. You are here and that is beautiful.
I loved this interconnected collection of stories so much.
Among Friends by Hal Ebbott“They had left on schedule and were making good time. The sky, taut as a sheet, stretched overhead. The roads were clear, the light a cool, cathedral blue. Amos didn’t drive much, but he liked it: the way the car enclosed them within tasteful curves, how it leapt forward under his foot.
The land dashed by - trees, trees, an interruption of rock. He watched a barn approach and snap past. Faded shingles, stacks of wood on the porch. It was early October. The summer had been defeated, the deathly chill of winter wasn’t yet at the eves. Things seemed amenable, open. There were still good days left.
Claire sighed and shut her book. Amos turned, touching her knee. She smiled wordless and lay her head against the window. From the back, Anna watched.”
Among Friends is my favorite debut of the year. It takes an ordinary weekend in a lifelong friend’s home in Upstate New York and deftly flips the world on its head.
Spaces that held a lifetime of safety and friendship become sinister and dark and terrifying. Questions of who can be believed replace an intimate trust between friends, lovers, and parents. It’s beautifully, achingly heartbreaking.
Hal Ebbott’s writing is special - confident and efficient and deceptively simple. I was captivated from the first lines, with Amos safely driving his wife and teenaged daughter in his safe car to his safe friend’s home, never knowing the darkness that would infect their lives in just a few short hours.
Ultimately, this is a story of class and gender in all of their trappings, and what happens when parents become human.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
“An eighteen-month-old with a bullet wound to the forehead. Maybe the sniper was aiming elsewhere. Maybe there’s some explanation. Maybe it was necessary.
Portland 2024:
Spring, nearing. My daughter has been building a city. Its Main Street runs the length of our hallway, from the front door to the dining room. She unspools a long sheet of paper and draws lane dividers and sidewalks, trees and shrubbery. Along the wall, near the little marks we’ve used to document her height since she could first stand, she has cut out and placed little storefronts made of pink and orange construction paper: supermarkets and coffee shops, a pet store. At the end of the road, at least a dozen stuffed animals sit solemnly within the confines of what I can only imagine is some kind of planned community. My daughter arranges them just so, gives each its space, starts building them a park. She turns seven soon, a hundred in dragon years. She is made of dreaming.”
This is the most important book on this list; this is the book that everyone needs to read; this is the hardest one to get through..
Omar El Akkad, in his essays, takes readers on a journey through the evolution of his mind. As a child born in Egypt, moving ever closer to the Fabled West, he deeply internalized the belief that Western Culture is bent toward justice, toward kindness, toward education, toward freedom.
Now that he’s here, he knows that was wrong.
As his daughter builds a town out of paper and plush animals, tens of thousands of children are slaughtered in Gaza. They are bombed and starved and murdered along with their parents and grandparents and siblings and teachers and doctors and neighbor shopkeepers. How do we reconcile this as parents, as citizens of nations who fund these weapons, who planted the seeds of these conflicts?
Please read this book.
Heart the Lover by Lily King“The professor is holding up two neon-orange pieces of paper.
‘Despite its vulgar packaging,’ he says, waving a page in each hand like a flagman at Daytona, ‘I feel compelled to read this one aloud.
The assignment had been to write a contemporary version of Bacon’s essay “History of Life and Death.” I’d waited till the last minute to write it. The only paper we had in the house was this thick stuff left over from our Halloween party. And it wasn’t easy, feeding that cardstock into my typewriter.
The professor doesn’t read it so much as perform it. He gives far more life and humor than I imagined it had.
There are two smart guys in the class. They sit up front together and I see only the backs of their heads, one with coppery brown hair and the other with a thick black ponytail. The professor runs things by them so often I assume they’re his grad school TAs. When my essay gets passed back to me, they both turn to watch where it goes.”
So begins Lily King’s newest book, Heart the Lover. Revisiting these first few paragraphs for the first time since I read it a few weeks ago, it’s amazing how much of what I love about this book is inside of these sentences. I think that may be why I’ve made a habit of structuring these end-of-the-year lists like this. When I have loved a book, the first few sentences always both flood my senses with all the things I felt when I read the book, and crystallize the reasons that I love it.
I immediately love our protagonist who has never really understood her power. I immediately miss college and classrooms and rushed assignments turned in on whatever can be found in a home that is not maintained and controlled by a parent or guardian for the very first time. I am reminded of the feeling of endless possibility that fully controls all decision making during college: you never know when you’ll run into the opportunity for your life to begin. In this class? At this party? Along this sidewalk? It could be anywhere and so you must go forth, always.
Heart the Lover is ultimately about all the things one person can feel in a life - and are we not endlessly lucky to be here, feeling things?
I deeply love this book.
“It seemed an unlikely choice, this large establishment in the financial district, so that I stood outside and checked the address, the name of the restaurant, I wondered if I had made a mistake. But then I saw him through the window, seated at a table toward the back of the dining room. I stared through the layers of glass and reflection, the frame of my own face. Something uncoiled in my stomach, slow and languorous, and I decided it would be better if I left now, if I did not go in to him.
At that moment, the front door opened and man stepped out, he inclined his head and held the door open, and because of that small courtesy - an invitation or injunction to enter - I went inside.”
I read Audition at the very beginning of January and immediately knew that it would be so hard to top. I love everything about this book - and also understand why it has been polarizing. The minute you feel like you finally understand what’s happening, you finally get your bearings, everything flips on its head. It’s maddening and disorienting, and so fully worked for me.
This is a taut, literary thriller that ultimately asks whether it’s possible for a person - specifically a woman - to fully and successfully inhabit all of the roles she is expected to play in a life.
Do it all and do it well. Don’t slow down. Don’t obsess.
Katie Kitamura is an author who expects a lot from her readers and I love that. I’ll read everything she writes.
Things In Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li
“There is no good way to say this - when police arrive, they inevitably preface the bad news with that sentence, as though their presence had not been ominous enough. The first time I heard the line, I knew already what was about to be conveyed. Nevertheless, I paid attention to how the news was delivered: the detective insisted that I take a seat first. I sat down at the dinner table, and he moved another chair to the right distance and sat down himself. No doubt he was following protocol, and yet the sentence - there is no good way to say this - struck me as both accurate and effective. It must be a sentence that, though nearly a cliché, is not often used in daily conversation; its precision has stayed with me.
The second time, having guessed the news about to be delivered, I did not give the sentence a moment’s thought. I did not wait for the detective to ask me to sit down, either. I indicated a chair where my husband could sit and took the other chair in the living room. My heart already began to feel that sensation for which there is no name. Call it aching, call it wrenching, call it shattering but they are all wrong words, useless in their familiarity. This time, the four policemen all stood.”
I’ve been struggling to describe this book to people for months.
Yiyun Li is a mother with two sons who died by suicide and this is the memoir she wrote for her second son after he died. When I first heard about this book, I determined that I would not read it. I assumed that the sadness would be overwhelming, that I would need to inhabit a devastating landscape that I simply did not want to imagine, that the secondhand grief would be too much.
I’m so glad that I changed my mind, that I read this book. Yiyun Li is a brilliant thinker, and spending time in her mind is fascinating and devastating. This is not a grief memoir that purports to explain how a person gets through a tragedy like the one Li is living through.
This is an accounting of a mother’s days after the loss of her son. She’s writing not for the reader, but for herself, and for her son. It’s one of the most raw, intense, beautiful reading experiences I’ve ever had.
Waiting for the Long Night Moon by Amanda Peters
“My mother died pushing me into the world. Her blood spread out on the ground around her, the dirt a coppery red and the smell of lightning in the air. I don’t know if I saw her face or if she saw mine. Only that, by the first crack of thunder, she was gone.
It isn’t a particularly nice tree, the one where my mother died. The roots exposed like ugly veins popping out of the earth. It leans over, some of the heavier branches touching the top of the pond. When the seasons change, the tree doesn’t. The leaves just sit on top of the water or fall to the ground, brown and slippery. But none of that matters, Grandmother tells me, because this tree holds our stories. THis tree presides over our entry into this world. It makes mothers out of women and fathers out of men. No one else can see it, but I swear, when the sun is creeping through the branches and kissing the ground, the roots glow red.
‘This year, you’re going to start helping me welcome the babies. Your mother caught a few babies before she crossed over. Now it’s your turn.’
-from “The Birthing Tree”
I know some people struggle with short story collections. I really love them. I think that short stories are particularly hard to write well, so when I find one that is consistently fantastic, I get very excited..
Amanda Peters’s short story collection is wonderful. I personally enjoyed it more than The Berry Pickers, which I liked very much last year - and I know a lot of you did too.
She manages to write stories about just about everything: colonialism, trauma, addiction, love, grief, birth. I was surprised by her ability to balance all of these things well over the course of her stories. There really is a little bit of everything. The heaviness is balanced beautifully with the loveliness of life.
“In the cities, buildings stood whole. Some new or freshly renovated, some worse for wear but functional, complete with floors, walls, ceilings. When a hand turned on a tap, water poured from it. A flick of a switch, and light flooded a room. The parks also lay whole, grass stretched uninterrupted. Residents lived and residents died, in balance. Animals too lived and died in balance, mostly inside the buildings; those who roamed the streets in search of their owners were few. Beyond the cities, fields. Yellow and brown, pockmarked by farmhouses, sliced by trenches for irrigation. Beyond the fields, sky. A sturdy, solid blue, like a freshly painted ceiling. Not much fell from it yet, the occasional bird. Once, a fragment of comet, catching the breaths of those who witnessed in terror the flash of light - but when it was over, they clapped at the miracle.”
Phew. Endling is an astonishing novel; a project unlike anything I’ve ever read. I have been thinking about this book since the moment I finished turning pages. It has endured through months of books. I love it.
The cast of Endling is so fascinating and lovable - A scientist searching for one very specific snail all over Ukraine and two sisters committed to bringing down the marriage industry in the hopes that they will attract the attention of their mother. It is by turns devastating and hilarious. The first thirty pages of the book are about snails and I was completely riveted.
Then, the war starts and everything explodes apart. Carefully crafted narratives fall to pieces as Reva’s characters grapple with the literally shifting landscape underneath their mobile science lab.
I’ll never stop thinking about Reva’s decision to write the war into the book she was writing when it started in real time. The authorial intrusion that follows is like nothing I’ve ever read. This is a must-read.
Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor
“That summer, they threw bombs and made signs for peace.
They went into the streets and the parks and the squares, the same as they had done two years before, and three years before that, and six years before that, and three years before that, which of course meant that they had never really left the streets and the parks and the squares in the first place.
There was a president in Washington and nine Supreme Court justices. There was a war in Europe. There was not yet a war in America because America fought its wars elsewhere. On the news, they spoke of complications and complexities. They spoke of gas prices and networks of risk. They spoke of supply chains and the specter of scarcity.
It was not an extraordinary year in a remarkable time. Disgusted, not surprised was the slogan of their era.
Still, they went into the streets and the parks and the squares. They lifted their signs. They shouted. They marched. They organized. They sued. They settled. Some wondered if the streets and the parks and the squares were themselves merely other settings for the unfolding of a vast play. But was this cynicism not merely an excuse for a lack of resolve? They had to believe in the possibility of change. The very possibility of freedom was freedom itself. So, they went into the streets and the parks and the squares. They smoked outside bars. They argued over what tomorrow might bring. The lesser among them, the timorous, the doubtful, the wavering, stood back, watching, waiting for some greater sign, savoring their doubts.
It was a hollow time. It was a dull time. It was summer, and Manhattan steamed between two rivers.”
Brandon Taylor is one of my favorite writers working today, and this is my favorite of his novels. And to say that is not simple, as his first novel, Real Life, is one of my favorite books of all time. I just so deeply loved this book, and so it will join the ranks of my favorites ever.
In Minor Black Figures, Wyeth is a Black visual artist grappling with the fact that the art that he most loves to make, that most moves him, is not Black art, whatever that means. The animating questions of this novel center art and identity. The book is a prolonged discussion about why we like the things we like and what those preferences say about who we are. I’m fascinated by this and absolutely loved a few sentences from page 191 that shined a flashlight onto a feeling I’ve always had but could never articulate: “What you liked was not more alive than what you did not like. You were simply less available to what made it live.”
These are the moments that I could live in forever.
Beyond that, what floored me about this book is Taylor’s ability to embody the work of a visual artist as a person whose primary medium is not visual art. How does he so adeptly write about the practice of painting? I know - research - but still. You have to read this to understand what I’m talking about. The passion, the practice, the embodiment of the act of painting are astounding.
I’m so thankful to be reading in a time when Brandon Taylor is writing.
“The sun was half bright, half warm, half full.
It was a morning in August and it was cold. I’d made the mistake of using a damp towel to seal the gap under the bedroom window, and now the fabric had frozen solid. I must’ve caught a cold, because I’d woken up with a stuffed nose and a painful lump in my throat. After having rubbed my legs as fast as I could for a few minutes, I got out of bed and boiled some hot water on the stove. I unclasped my lab coat from the rack, relieved to discover it was finally dry. The lab coat had felt too tight for some time now, ever since I started wearing my coat underneath, but I didn’t care enough to replace it with a larger size. Dong Ji had reminded me on many occasions that I looked like a gigantic steamed bun. She couldn’t understand why I never felt embarrassed looking so silly.”
An Yu is such an exciting writer. Each of her books is better than the last - and while I absolutely loved her previous book, Ghost Music, Sunbirth is really something special. It is the story of a land where the sun is disappearing, the story of a community coping with huge loss, the story of two sisters determined to survive.
There is such a tangible strangeness to this story. There are so many questions, so much uncertainty. That seems to be the point, as Yu seems preoccupied by all that we cannot know. And yet, love, commitment, humanity endures in the face of unknowable truth.
This fact transforms the desolate landscape of this book into something unspeakably warm. Instead of being trapped under the weight of hopelessness, this book is an unexpected call to more toward the light.
During such dark times, Sunbirth is an essential balm, encouragement to endure.
Other 2025 Contenders for Favorite Books:
The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers & Daughters by Sasha Bonét
Moderation by Elaine Castille
When the Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén
Discontent by Beatriz Serrano
The El by Theodore Van Alst, Jr.
Palaver by Bryan Washington
Favorite Backlist Books I Read in 2025 (books published in previous years):
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
Fair Play by Tove Jansson
They Were Her Property: White Women As Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet
The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall