Best Fiction of 2025
We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination, and above all a powerful indictment against forgetting. These beautiful pages form much more than a novel - they illuminate a traumatic memory, buried for decades, that still resonates today.
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?
Swept Away is the epic new romance from the million-copy bestselling author of The Flatshare and The No-Show about your one-night stand becoming your one and only lifeline. Sharp, funny and breathtakingly intense, this standout novel is set to capture readers' hearts next spring.
Calling himself the go-between, Ayumi lays down strict rules around the meetings between the living and the dead- the deceased cannot have been summoned by anyone else; they may refuse; and they must meet under a full moon.
In these twelve dazzling stories, Sittenfeld skewers our assumptions about fame, marriage and celebrity. Laying bare on the page what we're all thinking but hesitate to say, she explores women's lives at the intersection of sex, love, ambition and the entangled pursuit of a fulfilling life.
The Emperor of Gladness
A masterful story of friendship and how much we're willing to risk to possess one of life's most treasured mercies- a second chance
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
Ocean Vuong returns with an achingly beautiful novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive
One summer evening in the town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on a bridge, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond.
The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which our lives are changed by the most unexpected of people. When Hai takes a job at a diner to support himself and Grazina, his fellow workers become the family he didn't expect to find. United by desperation and circumstance, and existing on the fringes of society, together they bear witness to each other's survival.
'Some of the most beautiful writing I've experienced in my lifetime' OPRAH WINFREY
'Perfectly tuned... May well be the first millennial Great American Novel' ArtReview
'A fine-grained social panorama driven by the developing camaraderie of an ensemble cast bonded in precariousness and pain' Observer
'His most vivid, ambitious work yet' Dazed
'A poetic, dramatic and vivid story. It has an epic sweep but it also handles intimacy and love with delicacy and deep originality' COLM T IB N
'This stunning book moved me so much, I fell in love with its characters and grieved their absence in my life when I turned the last page' CAITR ONA BALFE
'Tender and moving' REBECCA SOLNIT
'A masterwork' BRYAN WASHINGTON