New Fiction To Read in 2025

A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: A socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter’s wedding. Told with deep sensitivity and a tart sense of humor, full of the joys and heartbreaks of love and marriage and family life, Three Days in June is a triumph, and gives us the perennially bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer at the height of her powers.

Lila Kennedy has a lot on her plate. A broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart, and an elderly stepfather who seems to have quietly moved in. Her career is in freefall and her love life is … complicated. So when her real dad — a man she has barely seen since he ran off to Hollywood thirty-five years ago — suddenly appears on her doorstep, it feels like the final straw. But it turns out even the family you thought you could never forgive might have something to teach you: About love, and what it actually means to be family.

An epic and intimate tale of one couple across 60 years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland.

A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in this breathtaking saga, an epic story of love, faith, and defiance. Inspired by the real life of a 16th-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.

The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom. In this sweeping, evocative novel, Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.

In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem excited to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all. Discover the extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance.

An intimate and lyrical celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices we make for both. An homage to New York City, to romance, and even to loss, This Is a Love Story tenderly and suspensefully captures deep truths about life and marriage in radiant prose. It is about love that endures despite what life throws at us, or perhaps even because of it.

From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavor to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data — something easily categorizable and predictable — Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Eowyn Ivey returns to the mythical landscapes of Alaska with an unforgettable dark fairy tale that asks the question: Can love save us from ourselves? Black Woods, Blue Sky is a novel with life-and-death stakes, about the love between a mother and daughter, and the allure of a wild life — about what we gain and what it might cost us.

When a daring art heist takes place at the Regency Grand, Molly’s life is threatened. The question is who’s out to get her, and why? Long-buried secrets will be revealed in this intriguing and heart-warming novel.

Seven struggling customers are given the opportunity to take home a “blanket cat” … but only for three days, the time it’ll take to change their lives. But like all their kind, the “blanket cats” are mysterious creatures with unknowable agendas, who delight in confounding expectations. And perhaps what their hosts are looking for isn’t really what they need. Three days may not be enough to change a life. But it might just change how you see it.

A funny, fiercely intelligent, and moving collection exploring marriage, friendship, fame, and artistic ambition — including a story that revisits the main character from Curtis Sittenfeld’s iconic novel Prep.

It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. The guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs — and the results kick off a partnership that will span years. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.

An unforgettable story of hardship and hope, courage and resilience, that follows one young woman’s journey through war-torn Italy. A remarkable tale of friendship, motherhood, and survival, One Good Thing is a tender reminder that love for another person, even amidst darkness and uncertainty, can be reason to keep going.

A dazzling novel about love, family, and the art of sushi that asks: What if you could return to the point of a fateful choice, wiser than before, and find the courage to forge a new path? A highly entertaining and poignant story about second chances and self-discovery, I Leave It Up to You navigates loss, love, and the absurdity of finding one’s footing after the ground gives way.

In this Civil War love story, inspired by a real-life friendship across enemy lines, the wife of a missing Confederate soldier discovers a wounded Yankee officer and must decide what she’s willing to risk for the life of a stranger. A vivid and sweeping story of two people navigating the boundaries of love and humanity in a landscape of brutal violence, The Jackal’s Mistress is a heart-stopping new novel, based on a largely unknown piece of American history, from one of our greatest storytellers.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young — young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day — partner, parent, creator, muse — and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

A gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town. Russell’s novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting — enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been — and what still could be.

In this collection of one novel and three novellas, Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing. Acidly funny and breathtaking in scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.

A biting examination of millennial adulthood, the often fraught conversations around fertility and reproduction, and the painful quest to forge an identity. A darkly funny, vertiginous novel about the dilemmas of procreation, pregnancy, and parenting, Goddess Complex is a twist-filled psychological thriller and a feminist satire of our age of GirlBosses turned self-care influencers, optimization cults, internet mommy gurus, egg freezing, and much more.

A young journalist, reeling from loss, investigates a mysterious cult in the California redwoods, only to be drawn in by its charismatic leader in this addictive novel that asks why people give up control and what it takes, ultimately, to find one’s place in the world.

After six years of a stolen hour here, another there, tonight is going to be different — very different — for Nick Holloway and Jenny Parrish. They’ve booked a room in a new luxury hotel in Manhattan, where they’ll spend the entire night together for the first time. Expectations are running high for this brief reprieve from ordinary life: They both need a good bout of ravishing sex and witty conversation. But that’s not what they get … Two people, one hotel room, and all the choices and complications that make up a life.

Atmosphere is set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle program and the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits. Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere transports readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.

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 new novel from Emily Henry.

To the world, they were a scandal. To each other, an obsession. An epic love story set in the sparkling, savage sphere of elite figure skating, starring a woman determined to carve her own path on and off the ice.

A poignant and heart-wrenching coming-of-age story that follows the friendships, hopes, fears, and struggles of a group of Native high school students from Winnipeg, Manitoba’s North End, illuminating what it’s like to grow up in the heart of an Indigenous city.

The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans, in this sharp and touching novel about coming of age at the intersection of ambition and assimilation.

Spanning fifty years and set against the backdrop of a rapidly warming Montana, Dream State explores what it means to live with the mistakes of the past — both our own and the ones we’ve inherited. Written with humor, precision, and enormous heart, both a love letter and an elegy to the American West, Dream State is a thrillingly ambitious ode to the power of friendship, the weird weather of marriage, and the beauty of impermanence.

A woman learns the astonishing truth of her family’s ties to a vanished American Kingdom in this riveting new novel. Inspired by true events, Happy Land is a transporting multi-generational novel about the stories that shape up and the dazzling courage it takes to dream.

Francine Stevenson’s chance encounter with a ten-year-old who shows up at her doorstep after her mother’s sudden death spirals into an adventure for the ages. A tale of found family and hijinks, Francine’s Spectacular Crash and Burn will wiggle deep into even the most resistant hearts.

Set in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each other’s lives. Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms.

In San Francisco in 1866, an Irish nun, abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman. A riveting tale of self-discovery and love from one of the most masterful storytellers of our time, My Name Is Emilia del Valle introduces a character who will never let hold of your heart.

Two women haunted by their sisters’ unsolved disappearances band together in this captivating mystery from the host of the #1 true crime podcast Crime Junkie.

In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off to register her son’s birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she’d like to call the child, Cora hesitates … Spanning 35 years, what follows are three alternate and alternating versions of Cora’s and her young son’s lives, shaped by her choice of name.

In this dazzling debut, Stegner Fellow Jemimah Wei explores the formation and dissolution of family bonds in a story of ambition and sisterhood in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.

A propulsive and nostalgic coming-of-age novel about the relationship between two teammates on a rural high school basketball team, from the Lambda Award-winning author of I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself.

Two sisters living on Martha’s Vineyard during World War II find hope in the power of storytelling when they start a wartime book club for women — a spectacular novel inspired by true events.