The 14 Best Books of 2025 So Far

Time​ Magazine

06-06-2025

There's no better time than the start of summer to take a pause and reset your priorities. And, if we may be so bold, one of those priorities really should be to dig into one of the many great new books that have been published this year. It's only June, and yet we've already been blessed with a wealth of heart-rending memoirs, absorbing novels, and mind-expanding nonfiction. Meander through the beguiling mind of a theater actress, take a siblings road trip that challenges the very notion of family, or delve into a deep, personal secret. Here, the 14 best books of the year so far.
The Antidote, Karen Russell
It feels like the U.S. has lived 100 lifetimes since Karen Russell's much-lauded 2011 debut Swamplandia!, but it's safe to say that her highly anticipated follow-up The Antidote was worth the wait. An American epic that takes place in the 1930s in the fictional town of Uz, Neb., the story centers on a prairie witch who calls herself 'the Antidote.' A healer of sorts, the Antidote, like other prairie witches, is a keeper of others' thoughts—a memory vault who absorbs the heaviness of people's grief so they may have a chance at feeling lightness again. But when a dust bowl devastates the town, it takes the witch's memory deposits with it and leaves her fearful for her safety. What will happen to her when people can no longer unload their worst—and have to actually live with themselves? Told from the vantage point of multiple inhabitants of Uz, The Antidote is a sprawling yet meticulous story that implores us to see American history in its fullness, scars and all.— Rachel Sonis
Audition, Katie Kitamura's taut and incisive follow-up to Intimacies, begins on a rich premise. The narrator, a successful actress navigating a difficult new role, goes to a Manhattan restaurant to meet a younger man, Xavier, who claims he's her son. It's impossible. The actress, who goes unnamed, has never given birth or been a parent. But the strange encounter isn't their last; Xavier begins working on the same play, and his bold assertion prompts her to unravel the many choices and performances that have brought her to this particular moment, on stage and in life. Halfway through, Audition changes realities, completely redefining the relationship between the two. Kitamura's tantalizing novel asks a lot of the reader, offering multiple versions of the same life that circle around an idea raised by the protagonist herself:'As you get older things become less clear.' —Mahita Gajanan
In his second novel, Ocean Vuong sheds the epistolary conceit of his acclaimed debut, 2019's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. The result is a more sprawling yet direct coming-of-age tale animated by the specificity of its characters. When we meet 19-year-old Hai, he's standing ominously on a bridge in his depressed hometown of East Gladness, Conn. His first love is dead of a fentanyl overdose and his mom believes the flimsy lie that he's at medical school, leaving Hai with a craving for opioids and nowhere to go. Before he can do anything drastic, he's spotted by a dementia-stricken elderly woman, Grazina, who must sense his fundamental gentleness, because she says he can move into her place if he'll care for her. Along with his misfit coworkers at a fast-food joint, Grazina anchors the lost boy, even as her own mind drifts from its moorings. A premise that a lesser writer might churn into inspiration porn becomes, in Vuong's hands, a vivid, funny, emotionally realistic case study in the life-altering potential of community.— Judy Berman
There are many debut novels about young people finding love and seeking purpose, but few are as perceptive about the connection between those pursuits as Naomi Xu Elegant's ruminative Gingko Season. Stubbornly fixated on a college boyfriend who broke her heart, 20-something narrator Penelope Lin works at a Philadelphia museum, pores over the city's history, and maintains a modest social life, largely disconnected from her family. When she meets a guy, Hoang, who has just confessed to freeing mice marked for death at the lab where he works, their excruciatingly slow-moving courtship pushes Penelope to think harder about her own principles and priorities. Elegant's writing is as unassuming as her heroine, yet the questions she raises about how to live with integrity in a compromised world can be startlingly profound.— Judy Berman
The argument that flows from this book is simple: rivers, for all of the essential nutrients, biodiversity, and transportation possibilities they provide, deserve to be treated with the same respect as other living organisms. Robert Macfarlane visited three rivers, starting with the River of the Cedars in an Ecuadorian cloud forest, recently threatened by mining companies. He surveyed waterways in Chennai, India, which flood streets with crocodiles and catfish after cyclones. And he visited Mutehekau Shipu in Quebec, the first Canadian river to be given rights, including the right to be pollution-free. The author of Underland lends his expertise to raise awareness about a part of nature that is often taken for granted. Readers see that while rivers can be easily wounded, they can also quickly heal—if given the right care.— Olivia B. Waxman
Ron Chernow, the author of the best-selling tomes Alexander Hamilton and Grant, offers a frank assessment of Mark Twain, the first major literary celebrity in the U.S. and a leading pundit of the Civil War era whose writings helped Americans make sense of life after slavery. While his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn became classics, Twain made poor financial decisions that bankrupted him and forced him to flee the country and spend nearly a decade in exile. Chernow's biography gives the encyclopedic treatment to the writer, boasting about 1,200 pages based on his books, letters, and unpublished manuscripts. —Olivia B. Waxman
In this dystopian speculative fiction novel, Vietnamese Americans are shipped to internment camps following a terrorist attack, with their civil rights and dignity stripped in the name of national security. While the premise could result in an overly dour or preachy book, Nguyen's novel zips forward with page-turning suspense, humor, and nuance. The book revolves around four half-siblings as they each confront difficult ethical choices and navigate their relationships with an oppressive state, cultural expectations, and each other. While parts of the novel are carefully grounded in history—especially in the experience of Japanese-American incarceration during World War II—the book also crackles with modern culture and proves gaspingly relevant in an era of division and heightened surveillance.— Andrew R. Chow
At the center of Nicole Cuffy's O Sinners! is Faruq Zaidi, a Brooklyn-based journalist grieving the recent death of his devout Muslim father. After learning about a cult called 'the nameless,' whose followers abide by teachings like "create beauty" and "do not despair at death," Faruq—a skeptic who has felt disconnected from faith and religion since he was a teenager—travels to their compound in the California Redwoods to report a story. But as he grows closer to the group's inscrutable leader, a Black Vietnam War veteran called Odo, Faruq begins to question more than just the secret inner-workings of the cult itself. O Sinners! is driven by three alternating narratives: Faruq's present day work trip, Odo's tour of duty in Vietnam, and the screenplay of a documentary about a legal battle between the cult and a fundamentalist church in Texas. In weaving together these stories, Cuffy explores the varying shapes that grief, belief, and belonging can take. —Erin McMullen
In late October 2023, Omar El Akkad started to outline his feelings about the war in Gaza, and how it feels to be a person unanchored from home. In his urgent nonfiction debut, the writer—who was born in Cairo, grew up in Doha, moved to Canada, and now lives in rural Oregon—wrestles with his disillusionment with the West and its institutions, particularly given the indifference he's observed in so many as the war rages on. This memoir-manifesto could be seen as hopeless, and there is certainly no shortage of carnage in its pages. But, in the determination of those standing up for their beliefs, El Akkad manages to find hope amid the fantasy of Western liberalism.— Meg Zukin
In Kevin Wilson's latest novel, Mad spends her days working on a farm with her mom. She hasn't seen her dad in two decades and she's settled into a routine that's not particularly fulfilling, but she's made her peace with that. Then, a stranger appears at her front door and announces that he's her older half-brother, and that their father pulled a disappearing act on not just him and Mad, but other families too. He convinces her to join him on a cross-country road trip to round up their other siblings and find their father. What ensues is an often hilarious and sometimes devastating exploration of what really makes a family. Like Wilson's other fiction, including Nothing to See Here and Now Is Not the Time to Panic, Run for the Hills gently tugs at the heart.— Annabel Gutterman
Sky Daddy is a love story, but one we're willing to bet is unlike any love story you've previously encountered. Drawing inspiration from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Kate Folk's debut novel revolves around one woman's pursuit of her own white whale: finding her aircraft 'soulmate.' That's really the premise: our eccentric protagonist, Linda, wants to fall in love with a plane—and, in a morbid twist, she wants to 'consummate' that relationship by dying in an aviation accident. Linda is a San Francisco transplant who makes $20 an hour moderating hate comments for a video-sharing platform and devotes as much of that meager salary as possible to exploring the aircraft dating pool by catching flights. Linda is determined to keep her unusual proclivities a secret, but after her work friend, Karina, invites her to a monthly 'Vision Board Brunch' with some old college friends, Linda's attempts to manifest her idea of romantic bliss end up setting her on a path to radical self-acceptance. Sky Daddy is as poignant as it is bizarre— Megan McCluskey
The Tell, Amy Griffin
Rarely, if ever, has a book been endorsed by all three titans in the celebrity book club world—Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, and Jenna Bush Hager—but Amy Griffin's The Tell is no ordinary memoir. For readers of Tara Westover's Educated or Chanel Miller's Know My Name, The Tell is one of those deeply personal stories that manages to feel universal at the same time. Griffin was thriving as a businesswoman and happily married mother of four in New York City when a session with an MDMA therapist flooded her mind with long-buried memories. Suddenly, she remembered the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of a teacher starting when she was 12 years old. Shattered and enraged, Griffin struggled to reconcile her past with her carefully constructed self-image and grappled with the weight of carrying such a harrowing secret. Her memoir retraces her steps through her private grief and isolating pursuit of justice, and, ultimately, her powerful realization that to tell is to heal.— Lucy Feldman
After her teenage son James dies by suicide, Yiyun Li begins writing. It's what she knows how to do. The prolific author has, tragically, been in this position before. Her older son, Vincent, died by suicide in 2017. In her transcendent new book, she writes that she does not ruminate on grief, because to grieve suggests a process to which there is an end. She knows that to continue living is to accept that she will be a parent to her children for the rest of her life. In sparing prose that cuts deeply, Li examines the relationship between language and loss, honoring the sons who she carries with her, always.— Annabel Gutterman
Emma Pattee's Tilt is an apocalyptic nightmare come to life. Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping at Ikea when Oregon is hit with 'the big one'—the earthquake that people in the Pacific Northwest have been anticipating for years. Pattee's thrilling debut tracks Annie's journey through rubble, chaos, hope, and despair as she searches for her husband amid the disaster. Tilt is a propulsive account of survival, and how humanity shows up under the pressure of a catastrophe. As she treks across Portland, Annie flashes back to moments that shed light on her life choices thus far. Her marriage and career are thrust under a microscope as she encounters others in crisis: the wounded, the searching, the lost, and the desperate. Best read in one sitting, Tilt is a raw examination of motherhood and its most extreme demands.— Meg Zukin