My Favorite 2025 Fiction Releases
I feel like my best reads of 2025 really came from backlist titles, which you'll see in a few days when I talk about my personal favorites of 2025 spanning front list and backlist.
So, without further ado, here's the 2025 releases I want to put on your radar at the end of the year. For more details on each book, click the title to read my full review.
9. Liquid: A Love Story by Mariam Rahmani
This is the first book of 2025 that really captured me when I picked it up in March. Based on the Goodreads review, I'd say the marketing and the subtitle might have drawn in the wrong audience for the novel. Don't go into this book looking for a love story. The narrator decides that she'll solve the problem of academia's instability by marrying rich as she comes to the conclusion of her years as a graduate student at UCLA. In the true fashion of a researcher, she decides that do be successful, she needs a large sample size and a clear organization system, so she vows to go on 100 dates over the course of the summer. There's a side of romantic tension with her best friend and great LA vibes. The book does switch course almost completely in the second half as the main character is diverted to Tehran to care for her father post-heart attack. While there is plenty of value to derive from this section, it is a major diversion from the initial narrative promises and just doesn't quite live up to the opening. Still, the book lingered with me long after reading it.
8. Universality by Natasha Brown
This is a recent read for me, one of the two I managed to get to from the Booker Longlist. This wasn't exactly a satisfying read, but it was an interesting one. It opens with a long magazine feature, provided to the reader with zero context and taking up 35% of the book. Then we move through around four chapters examining the journalist who wrote the piece and a few of the subjects. While I don't think the book fully lived up to its potential and left me more confused about my feelings than anything, it did present an interesting play with form and a quick read. It's worth considering.
7. Tilt by Emma Pattee
This novel was extremely hyped for me by the Book Riot Podcast. Again, this was a book I enjoyed (and more so than I expected) but wasn't fully mind blowing. The book overcame a lot of hurtles with me. It's about a woman who is reluctant to become a mother at the end of her pregnancy (not usually my favorite topic) and it's told in direct address to the unborn baby (a gimmick I didn't expect to be able to tolerate). Also, it's set in an alternate reality where the long awaited "big one" earthquake hits Portland. What I liked about the novel is the way that Pattee keeps all the plates spinning, gets deeply real and honest about the facets of motherhood no one wants to acknowledge, and creates a convincing alternate future world to inhabit. While I wish she'd taken a different course with the ending, it was still a thoughtful, worthwhile novel on both the contemplation of motherhood and the mounting climate disaster.
6. Gunk by Saba Sams
I really did love this one. Another book that I was entirely skeptical about based on premise but fell for in a combination of cover and the reputation of the author (would love to read Send Nudes soon). I'm so glad that I overrode my skepticism and gave this a try. This book is a moving character portrait set in Brighton following a handful of characters in a truly strange and unlikely but deeply human situation. While the ending slipped a little for me, I found myself quite moved by this novel.
5. Audition by Katie Kitamura
This was an early read, and I think its positioning in this list is more a product of my existing fondness for Kitamura's work than it is particular care for Audition. Kitamura's prose is still undeniable, and her sense of craft is strong. My pervading issue this year seems to be liking the first half of many of the novels much more than I like the second and that lingering disappointment for what I felt like the book could've been has clouded my feelings on the year overall.
4. Atavist by Lydia Millet
This was the second book after Liquid that fully captured my attention this year, and I haven't seen it talked about anywhere. I randomly picked it up at the library towards the end of the summer and was taken by this collection of somewhat connected short stories. While no character is at the center of a story twice, they do recur across each other's stories, and it all takes place in the same LA neighborhood. I loved how this gave a connection point to the collection and allowed it to be read as a highly fragmented novel while still having the breadth that makes short story collections interesting. There are also just some truly phenomenal sentences here.
3. Perfection by Vincent Latronico
There's a major theme of experimentation among the major novels of this year. Perfection is no exception as it dispenses of the singular element that makes a novel unique, interiority, and yet somehow makes it work. This is a portrait from a bird's eye view of the stereotypical digital nomad expat couple that's cropped up from the remote creative industry world that's come into being in recent years. What's interesting is that we watch this couple without getting inside their heads, and we also pass judgement on them without Latronico forcing his authorial hand. While not my favorite novel by any stretch, it's a fascinating conversation starter. Noting that it's included here because while the novel originally came out in 2022, the English translation is new this year.
2. The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine
This was a last minute slide in to the list. I'd wanted to read this one off the immense early praise it had received and my knowledge of Erskine as an already accomplished short story writer, but I was unsure enough about the premise that I decided to wait for my library hold to come in. I received it 4 days before leaving the country on Christmas break, but thumbing through the library copy convinced me I needed to go out to the bookstore and buy it. I read it on the plane ride home utterly blown away. This is one of those disorienting novels that demands the reader work. There's a new narrator with no clear idea of how they're all linked together for the first seventy pages. The plot from the summary doesn't become apparent until halfway through the novel. But the prose is so beautifully but starkly compelling that Erskine easily inclines the reader to trust her. It's an expansive novel that attempts to capture a multitude of voices and people navigating a complex, awful situation, and she does it with grace. Full review to come (that's how last minute this was!).
1. Thirst Trap by Gráinne O'Hare
This is a classic case of seeing a book and just knowing I was going to love it and having that prediction come true. I'd been counting down the days until I got to Ireland just so I could buy this book. It didn't come out until much later in the US. For starters, the cover is perfection, but what's inside is even better. O'Hare offers a coming of age story for those of us that realize we'll be coming of age over and over until we're dead. It centers on a group of housemates entering their thirties grappling with the idea of the future and how to move forward. It's one of the best, most well balanced novels on friendship I've read. A much lighter pick than my favorites tend to be, but that's a good change. Don't want to believe me? My very picky creative writing professor shocked me by giving this one an adamant stamp of approval.
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