Our upcoming annual Top 20 list will show subscribers’ favorite books of the year, but in the meantime, we thought you might enjoy knowing about our favorites. So, for the first time ever, each member of the BookBrowse editorial team shared a top pick of 2025 along with some runners-up to create our own loosely structured “best of” list. Unsurprisingly, we found there was a lot of overlap between the books we featured in our digital magazine this year and the ones we chose here, though this overlap wasn’t complete. (What we feature depends on a variety of factors, including prepub reviews and the books individual reviewers decide to cover.) Here’s your chance to get a glimpse of our personal tastes and an inside look at BookBrowse editors as readers. We’re happy to share the books we loved with you, and hope you have fun reading about them!
The Antidote: A Novel
by Karen Russell
Paperback Mar 17, 2026. 432 pages
Published by Vintage
“I was a fan of Karen Russell’s 2019 story collection Orange World so I was looking forward to The Antidote (reviewed by Kim Kovacs). More so when I saw the early, glowing reviews. It did not disappoint. My favorite novel of 2025 is set in an alternate history version of the Dust Bowl in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, where a series of murders is being covered up by a dastardly sheriff with an aggressive reelection campaign. Among others, we follow Antonia Rossi, a professional ‘Vault’ who serves clients under the pseudonym ‘The Antidote.’ When you tell her your most shameful secrets, she forgets them immediately, as do you, thus unburdening yourself of guilt. But after a bad dust storm, the Antidote loses her ability to forget, and learns of the sheriff’s misdeeds. As the plot unfolds, she attempts to find justice for the victims, along with a ragtag group of friends including a 15-year-old basketball star and a photographer traveling the country seeking documentary evidence to support Roosevelt’s New Deal. Under the surface of this plot thrums the real secret: the land this drama unfolds on is stolen, and drenched in Pawnee blood. Russell throws open the vault of American history, weaving the story of Native displacement and genocide into nearly every page of The Antidote, making this exceptional, magical story also a reckoning, a memorial, and an ode to the Pawnee Nation’s survival and endurance.
In addition to The Antidote, I want to give honorable mentions to Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood (which I reviewed; if Lockwood has a book out, it’s guaranteed to make it to the top of my “best of the year” list); Endling by Maria Reva (reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin), which is so daring in its execution, reaping incredible rewards for its risk-taking; and Where Are You Really From by Elaine Hsieh Chou (reviewed by Letitia Asare), which is the rarest of things—a truly flawless collection of short stories from beginning to end.” —Lisa Butts
Theory & Practice: A Novel
by Michelle de Kretser
Hardcover Feb 2025. 192 pages
Published by Catapult
“A book I loved this year and that made a deep impression on me was Australian author Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice (which I reviewed, and which was originally published in 2024, then released by Catapult in the United States in 2025). It’s a novel about a Sri Lankan-born graduate student in 1980s Melbourne, an admirer of Virginia Woolf who critiques Woolf’s racist and imperialistic worldview in her thesis. De Kretser’s style flirts with nonfiction, at times reading like an essay or memoir, and the book becomes an exploration not just of the main character’s relationship with Woolf and academia but also her understanding of herself as a writer and actor in the world. Two other favorite books of mine from this year are also novels that mix experimental, playful, and humorous approaches with uncompromising, human-centered critiques of colonialism: Maria Reva’s Endling, which starts as a quirky comic story and turns into a disconcerting and brilliant work of metafiction about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s The Creation of Half-Broken People (reviewed by Kim Kovacs), which brings exquisitely layered storytelling, along with a gothic undercurrent, to the subject of colonialism in Zimbabwe. These books are all many things, but all three of them are creative, bold reminders of something that isn’t often acknowledged by the language of power: how difficult it actually is to assimilate someone—even a flawed, impressionable, uncertain someone—into a mindset of domination once they’ve let themselves see that mindset for what it is.” —Elisabeth Cook
Ruth: A Novel
by Kate Riley
Hardcover Aug 2025. 256 pages
Published by Riverhead Books
“My favorite book of 2025 was Kate Riley’s novel Ruth (I reviewed this book, along with the other titles mentioned below), which follows a woman growing up—and, later, getting married and having children—in a religious commune. Ruth finds it difficult to obey the seemingly arbitrary rules of the commune and to truly accept Jesus Christ into her heart, but she stays in the community anyway, feeling like an outsider and making awkward jokes; her curiosity and eye for the group’s oddities make her a delightful, but never judgmental, guide through a world that most readers will find foreign and spellbinding.
The other book I loved was The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers, about a woman secretly fantasizing about having an affair with her male friend, a fellow new parent in her small town in the Hudson Valley. As her fantasy life becomes more involved—trysts in hotel rooms; lies to spouses; a pregnancy; an abortion—her real life becomes more entwined with his, until the two couples are vacationing together and podding together during the Covid lockdown. Both Ruth and The Ten Year Affair are very funny, the kind of quiet humor that belies apparent effort, although Riley’s prose is slightly zanier—more sui generis—and Somers’ is perhaps more sardonic and more Internet-inflected. Both novels feature smart female protagonists who chafe at convention but not in a moral, ideological way—precisely the opposite. They are not neurotic, at least not on the page: they don’t self-analyze, plunge the depths of their own psyches. Instead, they remain partly mysterious to themselves and to the reader. They’re two very different books with very different preoccupations, but I’d recommend both to readers interested in unique, slightly aslant portraits of domestic life. Lastly, check out Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (translated by Polly Barton), which was longlisted for the International Booker and the National Book Award for Translated Literature. It’s a short, raunchy, but poignant romp about a severely physically disabled woman who wants to experience pregnancy and abortion, and the disaffected male nurse—possibly the only person who’s really been paying attention to her—who offers to have sex with her (for a lot of money).” —Chloe Pfeiffer
No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity
by A. Kendra Greene
Mar 2025. 304 pages
Published by Tin House Books
“As someone who typically reads fiction more than 80% of the time, I was somewhat surprised to realize that three of my favorite titles of 2025 fall in the nonfiction category. At the top of that list is A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity. As the title suggests, this is a collection of short pieces, most of them grounded in the natural world, and all of them beautifully making the case for remaining curious, imaginative, and open to being surprised by joy or wonder. Greene, who’s spent much of her career as a writer- or artist-in-residence at various zoos and natural history museums, includes her own artwork throughout this splendidly illustrated collection. Other favorite nonfiction titles of the year—perhaps even more surprising since I essentially never read true crime—both fall under that genre. Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Fraser’s Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers (reviewed by Jordan Lynch) is an absolutely engrossing blend of memoir and reportage, compellingly making the case that unregulated environmental toxins might partly explain the horrific actions of some of our country’s most notorious criminals. And Candace Fleming’s Death in the Jungle: Murder, Betrayal, and the Lost Dream of Jonestown (also reviewed by Jordan Lynch), although ostensibly written for teens, is enlightening reading for anyone whose knowledge of Jonestown starts and ends with ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ (spoiler alert: it’s much more complicated and appalling than that).” —Norah Piehl
