Dear BookBrowsers,

In this issue, we’re excited to announce our Top 20 Books of 2025 and the four Award Winners among them. We also have extensive coverage of write-in nominees this year, with seven new reviews to share. Thank you to everyone who voted!

The winner of our Best Fiction award is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, a charming story of aging and relationships told through the letters of its curmudgeonly main character.

Our award for Best Nonfiction goes to Geraldine Brooks’ poignant memoir Memorial Days, which explores her grief after the sudden loss of her husband, the writer Tony Horwitz.

Allen Levi’s bestselling Theo of Golden, an inspirational novel about a man who develops a connection with the townspeople of Golden, Georgia, takes this year’s honor for Best Debut.

And Best YA is awarded to Ann Bausum’s White Lies, a critically acclaimed examination of false narratives about the Civil War written for young people.

Newly reviewed titles in this issue include the first three books above, along with Niall Williams’ Time of the Child, the extraordinary tale of an infant’s mysterious arrival in a small Irish town, Wally Lamb’s The River Is Waiting, a tragic, intriciately drawn narrative of addiction, Clare Leslie Hall’s Broken Country, focusing on a fraught love triangle in rural England, and Everything Is Tuberculosis, popular YA author John Green’s account of the social factors contributing to the persistence of a curable disease.

The Top 20 also includes One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad’s National Book Award-winning work based on a tweet responding to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Maria Reva’s Booker-nominated Endling, a one-of-a-kind metafictional novel about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Princess Joy L. Perry’s impressive debut This Here Is Love, addressing slavery and indentured servitude in 17th-century Virginia, among other books.

The last issue of the year also means it’s Big Holiday Wordplay time! Try to solve the clues for a chance to win a one-year membership. Plus, enter our giveaway of Allegra Goodman’s historical novel Isola, see Our Best 2025 Discussions & First Impressions Features, and more.

Thanks for supporting BookBrowse this year. We look forward to bringing you more great books in 2026!

— The BookBrowse Team

Read This Issue

Dear BookBrowsers,

In this issue, we’re excited to announce our Top 20 Books of 2025 and the four Award Winners among them. We also have extensive coverage of write-in nominees this year, with seven new reviews to share. Thank you to everyone who voted!

The winner of our Best Fiction award is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, a charming story of aging and relationships told through the letters of its curmudgeonly main character.

Our award for Best Nonfiction goes to Geraldine Brooks’ poignant memoir Memorial Days, which explores her grief after the sudden loss of her husband, the writer Tony Horwitz.

Allen Levi’s bestselling Theo of Golden, an inspirational novel about a man who develops a connection with the townspeople of Golden, Georgia, takes this year’s honor for Best Debut.

And Best YA is awarded to Ann Bausum’s White Lies, a critically acclaimed examination of false narratives about the Civil War written for young people.

Newly reviewed titles in this issue include the first three books above, along with Niall Williams’ Time of the Child, the extraordinary tale of an infant’s mysterious arrival in a small Irish town, Wally Lamb’s The River Is Waiting, a tragic, intriciately drawn narrative of addiction, Clare Leslie Hall’s Broken Country, focusing on a fraught love triangle in rural England, and Everything Is Tuberculosis, popular YA author John Green’s account of the social factors contributing to the persistence of a curable disease.

The Top 20 also includes One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad’s National Book Award-winning work based on a tweet responding to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Maria Reva’s Booker-nominated Endling, a one-of-a-kind metafictional novel about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Princess Joy L. Perry’s impressive debut This Here Is Love, addressing slavery and indentured servitude in 17th-century Virginia, among other books.

The last issue of the year also means it’s Big Holiday Wordplay time! Try to solve the clues for a chance to win a one-year membership. Plus, enter our giveaway of Allegra Goodman’s historical novel Isola, see Our Best 2025 Discussions & First Impressions Features, and more.

Thanks for supporting BookBrowse this year. We look forward to bringing you more great books in 2026!

— The BookBrowse Team

Read This Issue

Dear BookBrowsers,

In this issue, we’re excited to announce our Top 20 Books of 2025 and the four Award Winners among them. We also have extensive coverage of write-in nominees this year, with seven new reviews to share. Thank you to everyone who voted!

The winner of our Best Fiction award is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, a charming story of aging and relationships told through the letters of its curmudgeonly main character.

Our award for Best Nonfiction goes to Geraldine Brooks’ poignant memoir Memorial Days, which explores her grief after the sudden loss of her husband, the writer Tony Horwitz.

Allen Levi’s bestselling Theo of Golden, an inspirational novel about a man who develops a connection with the townspeople of Golden, Georgia, takes this year’s honor for Best Debut.

And Best YA is awarded to Ann Bausum’s White Lies, a critically acclaimed examination of false narratives about the Civil War written for young people.

Newly reviewed titles in this issue include the first three books above, along with Niall Williams’ Time of the Child, the extraordinary tale of an infant’s mysterious arrival in a small Irish town, Wally Lamb’s The River Is Waiting, a tragic, intriciately drawn narrative of addiction, Clare Leslie Hall’s Broken Country, focusing on a fraught love triangle in rural England, and Everything Is Tuberculosis, popular YA author John Green’s account of the social factors contributing to the persistence of a curable disease.

The Top 20 also includes One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad’s National Book Award-winning work based on a tweet responding to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Maria Reva’s Booker-nominated Endling, a one-of-a-kind metafictional novel about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Princess Joy L. Perry’s impressive debut This Here Is Love, addressing slavery and indentured servitude in 17th-century Virginia, among other books.

The last issue of the year also means it’s Big Holiday Wordplay time! Try to solve the clues for a chance to win a one-year membership. Plus, enter our giveaway of Allegra Goodman’s historical novel Isola, see Our Best 2025 Discussions & First Impressions Features, and more.

Thanks for supporting BookBrowse this year. We look forward to bringing you more great books in 2026!

— The BookBrowse Team

Read This Issue

Dear BookBrowsers,

In this issue, we’re excited to announce our Top 20 Books of 2025 and the four Award Winners among them. We also have extensive coverage of write-in nominees this year, with seven new reviews to share. Thank you to everyone who voted!

The winner of our Best Fiction award is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, a charming story of aging and relationships told through the letters of its curmudgeonly main character.

Our award for Best Nonfiction goes to Geraldine Brooks’ poignant memoir Memorial Days, which explores her grief after the sudden loss of her husband, the writer Tony Horwitz.

Allen Levi’s bestselling Theo of Golden, an inspirational novel about a man who develops a connection with the townspeople of Golden, Georgia, takes this year’s honor for Best Debut.

And Best YA is awarded to Ann Bausum’s White Lies, a critically acclaimed examination of false narratives about the Civil War written for young people.

Newly reviewed titles in this issue include the first three books above, along with Niall Williams’ Time of the Child, the extraordinary tale of an infant’s mysterious arrival in a small Irish town, Wally Lamb’s The River Is Waiting, a tragic, intriciately drawn narrative of addiction, Clare Leslie Hall’s Broken Country, focusing on a fraught love triangle in rural England, and Everything Is Tuberculosis, popular YA author John Green’s account of the social factors contributing to the persistence of a curable disease.

The Top 20 also includes One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad’s National Book Award-winning work based on a tweet responding to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Maria Reva’s Booker-nominated Endling, a one-of-a-kind metafictional novel about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Princess Joy L. Perry’s impressive debut This Here Is Love, addressing slavery and indentured servitude in 17th-century Virginia, among other books.

The last issue of the year also means it’s Big Holiday Wordplay time! Try to solve the clues for a chance to win a one-year membership. Plus, enter our giveaway of Allegra Goodman’s historical novel Isola, see Our Best 2025 Discussions & First Impressions Features, and more.

Thanks for supporting BookBrowse this year. We look forward to bringing you more great books in 2026!

— The BookBrowse Team

Read This Issue

Dear BookBrowsers,

In this issue, we’re excited to announce our Top 20 Books of 2025 and the four Award Winners among them. We also have extensive coverage of write-in nominees this year, with seven new reviews to share. Thank you to everyone who voted!

The winner of our Best Fiction award is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, a charming story of aging and relationships told through the letters of its curmudgeonly main character.

Our award for Best Nonfiction goes to Geraldine Brooks’ poignant memoir Memorial Days, which explores her grief after the sudden loss of her husband, the writer Tony Horwitz.

Allen Levi’s bestselling Theo of Golden, an inspirational novel about a man who develops a connection with the townspeople of Golden, Georgia, takes this year’s honor for Best Debut.

And Best YA is awarded to Ann Bausum’s White Lies, a critically acclaimed examination of false narratives about the Civil War written for young people.

Newly reviewed titles in this issue include the first three books above, along with Niall Williams’ Time of the Child, the extraordinary tale of an infant’s mysterious arrival in a small Irish town, Wally Lamb’s The River Is Waiting, a tragic, intriciately drawn narrative of addiction, Clare Leslie Hall’s Broken Country, focusing on a fraught love triangle in rural England, and Everything Is Tuberculosis, popular YA author John Green’s account of the social factors contributing to the persistence of a curable disease.

The Top 20 also includes One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad’s National Book Award-winning work based on a tweet responding to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Maria Reva’s Booker-nominated Endling, a one-of-a-kind metafictional novel about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Princess Joy L. Perry’s impressive debut This Here Is Love, addressing slavery and indentured servitude in 17th-century Virginia, among other books.

The last issue of the year also means it’s Big Holiday Wordplay time! Try to solve the clues for a chance to win a one-year membership. Plus, enter our giveaway of Allegra Goodman’s historical novel Isola, see Our Best 2025 Discussions & First Impressions Features, and more.

Thanks for supporting BookBrowse this year. We look forward to bringing you more great books in 2026!

— The BookBrowse Team

Read This Issue

Dear BookBrowsers,

In this issue, we’re excited to announce our Top 20 Books of 2025 and the four Award Winners among them. We also have extensive coverage of write-in nominees this year, with seven new reviews to share. Thank you to everyone who voted!

The winner of our Best Fiction award is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, a charming story of aging and relationships told through the letters of its curmudgeonly main character.

Our award for Best Nonfiction goes to Geraldine Brooks’ poignant memoir Memorial Days, which explores her grief after the sudden loss of her husband, the writer Tony Horwitz.

Allen Levi’s bestselling Theo of Golden, an inspirational novel about a man who develops a connection with the townspeople of Golden, Georgia, takes this year’s honor for Best Debut.

And Best YA is awarded to Ann Bausum’s White Lies, a critically acclaimed examination of false narratives about the Civil War written for young people.

Newly reviewed titles in this issue include the first three books above, along with Niall Williams’ Time of the Child, the extraordinary tale of an infant’s mysterious arrival in a small Irish town, Wally Lamb’s The River Is Waiting, a tragic, intriciately drawn narrative of addiction, Clare Leslie Hall’s Broken Country, focusing on a fraught love triangle in rural England, and Everything Is Tuberculosis, popular YA author John Green’s account of the social factors contributing to the persistence of a curable disease.

The Top 20 also includes One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad’s National Book Award-winning work based on a tweet responding to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Maria Reva’s Booker-nominated Endling, a one-of-a-kind metafictional novel about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Princess Joy L. Perry’s impressive debut This Here Is Love, addressing slavery and indentured servitude in 17th-century Virginia, among other books.

The last issue of the year also means it’s Big Holiday Wordplay time! Try to solve the clues for a chance to win a one-year membership. Plus, enter our giveaway of Allegra Goodman’s historical novel Isola, see Our Best 2025 Discussions & First Impressions Features, and more.

Thanks for supporting BookBrowse this year. We look forward to bringing you more great books in 2026!

— The BookBrowse Team

Read This Issue

Dear BookBrowsers,

In this issue, we’re excited to announce our Top 20 Books of 2025 and the four Award Winners among them. We also have extensive coverage of write-in nominees this year, with seven new reviews to share. Thank you to everyone who voted!

The winner of our Best Fiction award is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, a charming story of aging and relationships told through the letters of its curmudgeonly main character.

Our award for Best Nonfiction goes to Geraldine Brooks’ poignant memoir Memorial Days, which explores her grief after the sudden loss of her husband, the writer Tony Horwitz.

Allen Levi’s bestselling Theo of Golden, an inspirational novel about a man who develops a connection with the townspeople of Golden, Georgia, takes this year’s honor for Best Debut.

And Best YA is awarded to Ann Bausum’s White Lies, a critically acclaimed examination of false narratives about the Civil War written for young people.

Newly reviewed titles in this issue include the first three books above, along with Niall Williams’ Time of the Child, the extraordinary tale of an infant’s mysterious arrival in a small Irish town, Wally Lamb’s The River Is Waiting, a tragic, intriciately drawn narrative of addiction, Clare Leslie Hall’s Broken Country, focusing on a fraught love triangle in rural England, and Everything Is Tuberculosis, popular YA author John Green’s account of the social factors contributing to the persistence of a curable disease.

The Top 20 also includes One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad’s National Book Award-winning work based on a tweet responding to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Maria Reva’s Booker-nominated Endling, a one-of-a-kind metafictional novel about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Princess Joy L. Perry’s impressive debut This Here Is Love, addressing slavery and indentured servitude in 17th-century Virginia, among other books.

The last issue of the year also means it’s Big Holiday Wordplay time! Try to solve the clues for a chance to win a one-year membership. Plus, enter our giveaway of Allegra Goodman’s historical novel Isola, see Our Best 2025 Discussions & First Impressions Features, and more.

Thanks for supporting BookBrowse this year. We look forward to bringing you more great books in 2026!

— The BookBrowse Team

Read This Issue

Dear BookBrowsers,

In this issue, we cover fresh releases by winners of the Booker and Man Booker Prizes. Arundhati Roy’s illuminating memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me chronicles a difficult mother-daughter relationship, and Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which puts her on the shortlist for this year’s Booker, too, is a memorable tale of familial and romantic love.

We also review the latest from Patricia Lockwood, whose debut novel was a 2021 Booker finalist. Will There Ever Be Another You, her dazzling new work of autofiction, takes on the early years of the pandemic and features a writer struggling with Long Covid.

Other recent and upcoming fiction by established authors includes Lily King’s college love triangle story Heart the Lover, the title of which comes from a semi-fictionalized card game played by the characters, Dan Chaon’s One of Us, inspired by America’s history of sideshows and circus “freaks,” and R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis, a fantastical satire of academia that riffs on classic journeys to the underworld.

We also bring you Addie E. Citchens’ buzzy debut Dominion, an intense family drama that shows how the actions of women within patriarchal power structures matter.

Would you like to own a beautiful, limited edition hardcover of your favorite Kristin Hannah book? Read our article on the increasing popularity of deluxe editions—not just for fantasy and YA, but literary and historical fiction, too.

Plus, enjoy additional reviews and articles, previews of upcoming releases, book club recommendations, and more.

Thanks for being a BookBrowse member!

— The BookBrowse Team

Read This Issue

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 

Dear BookBrowsers,

In this issue, we cover fresh releases by winners of the Booker and Man Booker Prizes. Arundhati Roy’s illuminating memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me chronicles a difficult mother-daughter relationship, and Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which puts her on the shortlist for this year’s Booker, too, is a memorable tale of familial and romantic love.

We also review the latest from Patricia Lockwood, whose debut novel was a 2021 Booker finalist. Will There Ever Be Another You, her dazzling new work of autofiction, takes on the early years of the pandemic and features a writer struggling with Long Covid.

Other recent and upcoming fiction by established authors includes Lily King’s college love triangle story Heart the Lover, the title of which comes from a semi-fictionalized card game played by the characters, Dan Chaon’s One of Us, inspired by America’s history of sideshows and circus “freaks,” and R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis, a fantastical satire of academia that riffs on classic journeys to the underworld.

We also bring you Addie E. Citchens’ buzzy debut Dominion, an intense family drama that shows how the actions of women within patriarchal power structures matter.

Would you like to own a beautiful, limited edition hardcover of your favorite Kristin Hannah book? Read our article on the increasing popularity of deluxe editions—not just for fantasy and YA, but literary and historical fiction, too.

Plus, enjoy additional reviews and articles, previews of upcoming releases, book club recommendations, and more.

Thanks for being a BookBrowse member!

— The BookBrowse Team

Read This Issue