The Ultimate Best Books of 2025 List

HydraGT7 hours ago

0 14 5 minutes read

Happy List Season, children. I hope you’ve been good. Just like every year, I have arrived to present to you the Ultimate List, otherwise known as the List of Lists—in which I read all (or at least many) of the Best Of lists on the internet and count which books are recommended most.

Is consensus the same as quality? Not always. Is this basically a popularity contest? Sure. But if you want to know which books The Critics are talking about, this is one way to do it. (Three of my own personal favorite books of the year made it to the top five below, which I can only assume means I am either a) boring or b) correct or c) both??)

This year, I processed 58 lists from 49 outlets, which collectively recommended more than 1,300 different books (…help). 90 of those books made it onto 5 or more lists (weirdly this is the exact same number as last year, despite there being more books recommended in total this year), and I have collated these for you here, in descending order of frequency.

21 lists:

Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

20 lists:

Katie Kitamura, Audition

15 lists:

Susan Choi, Flashlight
Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea

14 lists:

Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness

13 lists:

Daniel Kehlmann, tr. Ross Benjamin, The Director
R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow
Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness

12 lists:

S.A. Cosby, King of Ashes
Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Han Kang, tr. e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, We Do Not Part

11 lists:

Chloe Dalton, Raising Hare
Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive?
Karen Russell, The Antidote

10 lists:

V.E. Schwab, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
Miriam Toews, A Truce That Is Not Peace
Sarrah Wynn-Williams, Careless People

9 lists:

Allegra Goodman, Isola
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel
Jill Lepore, We the People
Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

8 lists:

Scott Anderson, King of Kings
Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days
Caroline Fraser, Murderland
Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood
Adam Johnson, The Wayfinder
Vincenzo Latronico, tr. Sophie Hughes, Perfection
Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore
Imani Perry, Black in Blues
Torrey Peters, Stag Dance
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere
Patrick Ryan, Buckeye
Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

7 lists:

Stephen Greenblatt, Dark Renaissance
Nnedi Okorafor, Death of the Author
Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley

6 lists:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count
Margaret Atwood, Book of Lives
Ron Chernow, Mark Twain
Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping
Melissa Febos, The Dry Season
John Green, Everything is Tuberculosis
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Theft
Mick Herron, Clown Town
Jonas Hassen Khemiri, The Sisters
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance
Ian Leslie, John & Paul
Ed Park, An Oral History of Atlantis
Xenobe Purvis, The Hounding
Lucas Schaefer, The Slip
Patti Smith, Bread of Angels
Vauhini Vara, Searches: Selfhood in the Visual Age
Frances Wilson, Electric Spark

5 lists:

Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day
Tash Aw, The South
Alison Bechdel, Spent
Leo Damrosch, Storyteller
Lyse Doucet, The Finest Hotel in Kabul
Neko Case, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You
Virginia Evans, The Correspondent
Kate Folk, Sky Daddy
Amity Gaige, Heartwood
Caleb Gayle, Black Moses
Sophie Gilbert, Girl on Girl
Sarah Hall, Helm
Seamus Heaney, The Poems of Seamus Heaney
Emily Henry, Great Big Beautiful Life
Florence Knapp, The Names
Beth Macy, Paper Girl
Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything
Suzanne O’Sullivan, The Age of Diagnosis
Olga Ravn, tr. Martin Aitkin, The Wax Child
Mary Roach, Replaceable You
Adam Ross, Playworld
Eli Sharabi, Hostage
Brandon Taylor, Minor Black Figures
Stephanie Wambugu, Lonely Crowds
Bryan Washington, Palaver
Charmaine Wilkerson, Good Dirt
Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally

*

List of Lists Surveyed:

HydraGT7 hours ago

0 14 5 minutes read