The Guardian · 2025

The Best Books of 2025

The Best Books of 2025 is a 2025 best-books selection from The Guardian, featuring 82 titles. Below is the full list with our Consensus Score for each book.

SHORTLIST archives the fact of each title's inclusion on The Guardian's 2025 selection; our commentary is our own and we link to the original list.

Source: The Guardian — original list ↗

Shadow Ticket
Thomas Pynchon
The Eleventh Hour
Salman Rushdie
What We Can Know
Ian McEwan
Dream Count
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Kiran Desai
Helm
Sarah Hall
Flesh
David Szalay
The Book of Records
Madeleine Thien
Dream State
Eric Puchner
Flashlight
Susan Choi
Saraswati
Gurnaik Johal
The South
Tash Aw
The Tiger's Share
Keshava Guha
Audition
Katie Kitamura
Gunk
Saba Sams
Seascraper
Benjamin Wood
The Pretender
Jo Harkin
Slags
Emma Jane Unsworth
Havoc
Rebecca Wait
Endling
Maria Reva
Eden's Shore
Oisin Fagan
The Names
Florence Knapp
Fundamentally
Nussaibah Younis
The Benefactors
Wendy Erskine
Nova Scotia House
Charlie Porter
Open, Heaven
Sean Hewitt
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
Colwill Brown
To Rest Our Minds and Bodies
Harriet Armstrong
Rejection
Tony Tulathimutte
Every One Still Here
Liadan Ni Chuinn
Book of Lives
Margaret Atwood
How to End a Story
Helen Garner
Mother Mary Comes to Me
Arundhati Roy
Fly, Wild Swans
Jung Chang
Matriarch
Tina Knowles
We Did OK, Kid
Anthony Hopkins
Vagabond
Tim Curry
A Mind of My Own
Kathy Burke
Bread of Angels
Patti Smith
Truly
Lionel Richie
The Uncool
Cameron Crowe
Frankly
Nicola Sturgeon
A Different Kind of Power
Jacinda Ardern
Death of an Ordinary Man
Sarah Perry
I Deliver Parcels in Beijing
Hu Anyan
Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li
A Truce That Is Not Peace
Miriam Toews
Lifeblood
Mina Holland
Mark Twain
Ron Chernow
Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found
Andrew Graham-Dixon
Electric Spark
Frances Wilson
Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
Francesca Wade
Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life
Gerri Kimber
Josephine Baker's Secret War
Hanna Diamond
The Acid Queen
Susannah Cahalan
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite
Ian Penman
The Revolutionists
Jason Burke
The Alienation Effect
Owen Hatherley
The Finest Hotel in Kabul
Lyse Doucet
Homeland
Richard Beck
A Historian in Gaza
Jean-Pierre Filiu
What Is Free Speech?
Fara Dabhoiwala
Friends in Youth
Minoo Dinshaw
Minority Rule
Ash Sarkar
Wages for Housework
Emily Callaci
Motherland
Julia Ioffe
Those Passions
T.J. Clark
Abundance
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
Original Sin
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
Ungovernable
Simon Hart
Get In
Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
Vanished
Sadiah Qureshi
Is a River Alive?
Robert Macfarlane
Ends of the Earth
Neil Shubin
The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad
Simon Parkin
Super Agers
Eric Topol
The Age of Diagnosis
Suzanne O'Sullivan
Our Brains, Our Selves
Masud Husain
Proto
Laura Spinney
Crick
Matthew Cobb
Destroyer of Worlds
Frank Close