The best books of 2025 — The Times Critics’ Picks
*NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A publishing event ten years in the making—*a searing, exquisite new novel by the bestselling and award-winning author of Americanah and *We Should All Be Feminists—*the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires
A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from The Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Elle, Oprah Daily, Readers Digest, The Seattle Times, LitHub, The Chicago Review of Books, BET, and Radio Times**
Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.
In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.
A Quintet of Stories
From internationally renowned, award-winning author Salman Rushdie, a spellbinding exploration of life, death, and what comes into focus at the proverbial eleventh hour of life
“An inventive and engrossing collection of stories which, though death-tinged, are never doom-laden. With luck this master writer has more tales to tell.”—Los Angeles Times
Rushdie turns his extraordinary imagination to life’s final act with a quintet of stories that span the three countries in which he has made his work—India, England, and America—and feature an unforgettable cast of characters.
“In the South” introduces a pair of quarrelsome old men—Junior and Senior—and their private tragedy at a moment of national calamity. In “The Musician of Kahani,” a musical prodigy from the Mumbai neighborhood featured in Midnight’s Children uses her magical gifts to wreak devastation on the wealthy family she marries into. In “Late,” the ghost of a Cambridge don enlists the help of a lonely student to enact revenge upon the tormentor of his lifetime. “Oklahoma” plunges a young writer into a web of deceit and lies as he tries to figure out whether his mentor killed himself or faked his own death. And “The Old Man in the Piazza” is a powerful parable for our times about freedom of speech.
Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? Do we spend our “eleventh hour” in serenity or in rage? And how do we achieve fulfillment with our lives if we don’t know the end of our own stories? The Eleventh Hour ponders life and death, legacy and identity with the penetrating insight and boundless imagination that have made Salman Rushdie one of the most celebrated writers of our time.
**BOOKER PRIZE LONGLIST • “A vibrant, heartstrings-tugging novel” (People) about a mother’s love, in all its forms, as a woman searches for the daughter she gave up for adoption, from the prize-winning author of Golden Child
“A beautiful story . . . explores what it means to be a woman and what it means to love.”—Amanda Peters, author of The Berry Pickers**
“Reads like a Claire Keegan story expanded by Elizabeth Strout.”—The Times, “Best Books to Take on Holiday This Summer”
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
For much of her life, Dawn has felt as if something is missing. Now, at the age of fifty-eight, with a divorce behind her and her two grown-up sons busy with their own lives, she should be trying to settle into a new future for herself. But she keeps returning to the past and to the secret she’s kept all these years. At just sixteen, Dawn found herself pregnant, and—as was common in Trinidad back then—her parents sent her away to have the baby and give her up for adoption.
More than forty years later, Dawn yearns to reconnect with her lost daughter. But tracking down her child is not as easy as she had thought. It’s an emotional journey that leads Dawn to retrace her steps—from Trinidad to Venezuela and then to London—and to question not only that fateful decision she’d made as a teenager but every turn in the road of her life since.
Love Forms is a powerfully moving story of a woman in search of herself—a novel that rings with heartfelt empathy through the passages of a mother’s life, depicting the enduring bonds of love, family, and home.
**The long-awaited and highly anticipated conclusion to Philip Pullman’s bestselling The Book of Dust sequence . . .
‘A masterpiece for all eternity… Powerful, profound and utterly unforgettable: a stunning trilogy conclusion.’** - The Telegraph
‘Pullman’s uncanny ability to conjure place is once again in full evidence . . . And when we reach it, the novel’s final showdown is a fantastically nail-biting ride.’ - The Guardian
‘But for all its intricate interweavings of alchemy and folk tales, ballads and poetry, the book has the pacing of a thriller.’ - The Times
‘Lyra: what will you do when you find this place in the desert, the opening to the world of the roses?’
‘Defend it,’ Lyra said. ‘Die defending it.’
When readers left Lyra in The Secret Commonwealth she was alone, in the ruins of a deserted city. Pantalaimon had run from her – part of himself – in search of her imagination, which he believed she had lost. Lyra travelled across the world from her Oxford home in search of her dæmon. And Malcolm, loyal Malcolm, too journeyed far from home, towards the Silk Roads in search of Lyra . . .
In The Rose Field, their quests converge in the most dangerous, breathtaking and world-changing ways. They must take help from spies and thieves, gryphons and witches, old friends and new, learning all the while the depth and surprising truths of the alethiometer. All around them, the world is aflame – made terrifying by fear, power and greed.
As they move East, towards the red building that will reunite them and give them answers – on Dust, on the special roses, on imagination – so too does the Magisterium, at war against all that Lyra holds dear.
**Marking thirty years since the world was first introduced to Pullman’s remarkable heroine Lyra Belacqua in Northern Lights, The Rose Field is the culmination of the cultural phenomenon of The Book of Dust and *His Dark Materials.
'Ablaze with light and life . . . To read Pullman is to experience the world refreshed, aglow, in technicolour'*** - The Independent
**A wickedly funny and audacious debut novel following an academic who flees from heartbreak and lands in Iraq with a one-of-a-kind job offer—only to be forced to do the work of confronting herself.
*AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER*
*AN NPR BOOKS WE LOVE PICK*
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2025***
When Nadia Amin, a witty and bighearted PhD, publishes an article on deradicalization, everything changes. The United Nations comes calling with an opportunity to put her theory into practice and lead a rehabilitation program for women caught in the crosshairs of harmful ideology. And why not? Abandoned by her mother and devastated by unrequited love, she leaps at the chance.
In Iraq, Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. The UN is a mess of competing interests, and her team consists of Goody Two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an opportunity to remind Nadia of her objections; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman who has no qualms about perpetually scrolling through Grindr. But then Nadia meets Sara, a hilarious, foul-mouthed East Londoner who was pulled into radicalism at just fifteen. The two are kindred spirits, and Nadia vows to get Sara home.
As the rehabilitation program picks up traction, Sara reveals a secret that upends everything, forcing Nadia to make a drastic choice. In the fallout, Nadia’s brown-savior fantasies crumble, leaving her to wonder if she can save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.
A fierce, wildly funny, and razor-sharp exploration of radicalism, family, and the quest for belonging, Fundamentally boldly inspects one of the defining controversies of our age and introduces a fearless new voice in contemporary fiction.
**From the Booker prize–winning, bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday, a genre-bending new novel full of secrets and surprises; an immersive exploration, across time and history, of what can ever be truly known.
"It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing. . . . It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order." —*The New York Times
"Brilliantly, and surprisingly, plotted."—The Washington Post • "A novelist of consummate skill."—The Wall Street Journal • "Elegantly structured and provocative."—Los Angeles Times*
2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, ‘A Corona for Vivien’. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery.
2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian’. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem’s discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.
What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
**GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder—now a hit Netflix series—returns with her first novel for adults: an “irresistible” (The Washington Post) thriller about a young woman trying to solve her own murder, “full of the writer’s signature twists and turns” (People).
“This truly unique premise snowballs into a roller-coaster ride of page-turning suspense and knock-out twists!”—Freida McFadden, author of The Housemaid**
In seven days, Jet Mason will be dead.
Jet is the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Woodstock, Vermont. Twenty-seven years old and back home, she’s still waiting for her life to begin. I’ll do it later, she always says. She has time.
Until Halloween night, when she is violently attacked by an unseen intruder, suffering a catastrophic head injury. Doctors are certain that within a week, the injury will trigger a fatal aneurysm. To her parents’ dismay, Jet rejects an extremely risky operation in order to guarantee herself at least a few more days.
Jet never thought of herself as having enemies. But now, in the one week she has left, she looks at everyone in a new light: her family, her former best friend turned sister-in-law, her ex-boyfriend.
As her condition deteriorates, she reconnects with her childhood friend Billy, the only one willing to help her. With Billy at her side, she’s absolutely determined to finally finish something:
Jet is going to solve her own murder.
THE TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025
The late 17th century saw the rise of a new phenomenon that would transform Britain forever: party politics.
Beginning with a furious dispute over whether to allow a Roman Catholic - James II - to become king, the division between Whig and Tory marked the chief political battlelines of a ferociously polarised country for several tumultuous generations.
The Rage of Party traces the thrilling story of how these two parties - one representing the established social forces of squire, church and monarchy; the other the rising forces of financial power and Protestant Dissent - settled the defining debates of the age, culminating in a dramatic fight to the death over peace, piety and the Protestant Succession in the age of Queen Anne. Their bitter disputes over religion, economics and the constitution profoundly influenced many of the forces and institutions that shaped the modern world, ranging from the City of London and the Bank of England to the Union between England and Scotland and the British Empire.
From vicious pamphlet wars and some of history's most corrupt and riotous elections through a revolution, multiple assassination attempts and enough scandals to make even the most louche modern politician blush, this brilliantly researched book shows how a motley crew of rakes, hypocrites, cunning tricksters and scheming clergymen engaged in not only a political confrontation that threatened a second civil war, but a culture war that still finds echoes in 21st-century Britain.
'This is a lucid and exciting account of high and low politics in the crucial years of Whig and Tory battles following the Glorious Revolution, when Great Britain was created, and a new world of money, war and empire dawned. George Owers grippingly recounts the culture wars, paranoia, self-seeking and skulduggery that are "both recognisable and strange". Recognizable because "we are all still, in our heart of hearts, either Whig or Tory", and we are still grappling with their legacy' - Robert Tombs, author of The English and their History
'This book is a delight. Written with vivacity and veracity it sheds light on the miracle of English party politics' - Maurice Glasman
'We tend to think of our current age as uniquely fractious but as George Owers shows in his engrossing new book, it is a kindergarten compared to the "Rage of Party'' this country experienced in the late seventeen and early eighteenth centuries. The story he tells so vividly has it all: political divisions, religious strife, immigration controversies, fake news, arguments over foreign policy, Anglo-Scottish tensions - polarisation all round!' - Brendan Simms, author of Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present
'A highly readable account of the beginnings of the party system in Britain, with insights that are relevant for understanding of politics in any era. George Owers's vivid recreation of the conflict of Whigs and Tories illuminates what was a crucial period in the rise of Britain as a major European and global power' - David Hayton, editor of The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1690-1715
'Today's party politics absorbs us. When did British party politics begin and how? George Owers's book provides a compelling analysis, brilliantly interweaving vivid vignettes into a masterly narrative' - Mark Goldie, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Cambridge
The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s (SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2025)
The Times critics have selected the most outstanding books of 2025 — a carefully curated list of novels, histories, memoirs, biographies and standout non-fiction. These titles reflect the year’s most talked-about ideas, unforgettable storytelling and exceptional writing, chosen by one of Britain’s m...
