We’re going into September 2025, and January feels like forever ago. So many things have changed since the beginning of the year, but the length of my TBR hasn’t. It’s always sitting somewhere around 450 books.
Books are being published every week, and as a reviewer, it’s easy to get caught up in upcoming releases, but there are a ton of books that I didn’t get to write about. I really want to prioritize these titles in the upcoming months for consideration for the best books of 2025.
Here are 12 books published in 2025 that are currently on my TBR, how many are on yours too? If you’ve read any of these and feel that I should move one to the top of my list, please let me know!!
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Unassimilable: an Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the 21st Century by Bianca Mabute-Louie
Description from the publisher: A scholar and activist’s brilliant socio-political examination of Asian Americans who refuse to assimilate and instead build their own belonging on their own terms outside of mainstream American institutions.
Why it’s on my radar: Lots of bookstagrammers have recommended it, and the topic sounds really interesting!
Where are you really from? by Elaine Hsieh Chou
Description from the publisher: A mail order bride from Taiwan is packed up in a cardboard box and sent via express shipping to California, where her much older husband awaits her. Two teenage girls meticulously plan how to kill and cook their downstairs neighbor. An American au pair moves to Paris to find herself, only to find her actual French doppelgänger. A father reunites with his estranged daughter in unusual circumstances: as a background actor on the set of her film. A writer’s affair with a married artist tests the line between fact and fiction, self-victimization and the victimization of others.
In these six singular stories and a novella that pivot from the terrible to the beautiful to the surreal, Elaine Hsieh Chou confronts the slipperiness of truth in storytelling. With razor-sharp precision and psychological acuity, she peels back the tales we tell ourselves to peer beneath them: at our treacherous desires, our self-deceptions and our capacity for cruelty, both to ourselves and each other. Expansive and provocative, “Where Are You Really From” is a visionary achievement.
Why it’s on my radar: I loved Chou’s last book, “Disorientation.” I’m intrigued by authors who publish novels first and then do short story collections. I feel like it’s usually the other way around, but I’m ready for this!
What a time to be Alive by Jade Chang
Description from the publisher: A deeply moving and often hilarious novel following a woman who becomes an internet folk hero in the most unexpected way, catapulting her into fame and influence just as she’s finally beginning to reckon with her complicated past.
Why it’s on my radar: After sudden influencer/fame books like “Yellowface” and “Julie Chan is Dead,” I’m hype for this. Now, working in social media, I have a different perspective on internet fame. This is actually my current read!
Flashout by Alexis Soloski
Description from the publisher: A thrill-seeking young woman joins a radical theater troupe in this taut, suspenseful novel of art, seduction, and the deadly limits of liberation.
New York, 1972. A cloistered college student slips out of the dorms to attend a performance by a legendary experimental performance troupe. Within months, she has left campus life behind and joined the company, infatuated by its charismatic leader and his promises of absolute freedom.
California, 1997. A theater teacher at an exclusive private school receives an unsettling letter. With her job at risk and her past clawing at her carefully constructed present, what will she do to protect the life she has made?
Riveting and atmospheric, Flashout is a coruscating coming-of-age story and an immersive thriller exploring the enchantments and perils of art.
Why it’s on my radar: Just binge read “Here in the Dark” and ready for another thriller!
Home for the Happy by Jordan Lahaye Fontenot
Description from the publisher: On January 16, 1983, Aubrey LaHaye’s body was found floating in the Bayou Nezpique. His kidnapping ten days before sparked “the biggest manhunt in the history of Evangeline Parish.” But his descendants would hear the story as lore, in whispers of the dreadful day the FBI landed a helicopter in the family’s front lawn and set out on horseback to search for the seventy-year-old banker.
Decades later, Aubrey’s great-granddaughter Jordan LaHaye Fontenot asked her father, the parish urologist, to tell the full story. He revealed that to this day, every few months, one of his patients will bring up his grandfather’s murder, and the man accused of killing him, John Brady Balfa, who remains at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola serving a life sentence. They’ll say, in so many words: “Dr. Marcel, I really don’t think that Balfa boy killed your granddaddy.”
For readers of Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts and Emma Copley Eisenberg’s The Third Rainbow Girl, Home of the Happy unravels the layers of suffering borne of this brutal crime—and investigates the mysteries that linger beneath generations of silence. Is it possible that an innocent man languishes in prison, still, wrongly convicted of murdering the author’s great-grandfather?
Why it’s on my radar: Close to home and actually a true story! Many local booksellers have read and recommended this book, I just didn’t get around to it earlier this year.
Luminous by Silvia Park
Description from the publisher: In a reunified Korea of the future, robots have been integrated into society as surrogates, servants, children, and even lovers. Though boundaries between bionic and organic frequently blur, these robots are decidedly second-class citizens. Jun and Morgan, two siblings estranged for many years, are haunted by the memory of their lost brother, Yoyo, who was warm, sensitive, and very nearly human.
Jun, a war veteran turned detective of the lowly Robot Crimes Unit in Seoul, becomes consumed by an investigation that reconnects him with his sister Morgan, now a prominent robot designer working for a top firm, who is, embarrassingly, dating one of her creations in secret.
On the other side of Seoul in a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through scraps looking for robotic parts that might support her failing body. When she discovers a robot boy named Yoyo among the piles of trash, an unlikely bond is formed since Yoyo is so lifelike, he’s unlike anything she’s seen before.
While Morgan prepares to launch the most advanced robot-boy of her career, Jun’s investigation sparks a journey through the underbelly of Seoul, unearthing deeper mysteries about the history of their country and their family. The three siblings must find their way back to each other to reckon with their pasts and the future ahead of them in this poignant and remarkable exploration of what it really means to be human.
Why it’s on my radar: I’m not usually a huge sci-fi reader, but I think that Korea is an interesting fertile ground for it. Park also grew up in Seoul, and I miss it there sometimes.
Cat Fight by Kit Conway
Description from the publisher: Former zoologist Coralie King now reigns over a different sort of animal kingdom as Queen Bee of Sevenoaks, a wealthy suburb of London. When her husband Adam spots a panther on the hood of his car at one of her exclusive dinner parties, Coralie is quick to reassure her guests that they’re in no real danger. She sees the sighting as the perfect opportunity to revive her career and promote her own ecological endeavors.
New neighbor Emma Brooks doesn’t believe for a second that there’s a big cat in their midst but is all too willing to use the concern as a distraction from her home remodel application that’s been facing scrutiny. Meanwhile, former punk musician Twig Dorsett doesn’t know what to believe. She never thought she’d return to Sevenoaks and be living in her childhood home, but after her daughter became sick, she and her wife traded their Bohemian life in Bali for the security of London suburbia.
As the summer heats up, the frenzy around the big cat sighting reaches a fever pitch when gnawed bones, pawprints, and scratches are discovered. But is the real predator a big cat on the prowl or is the true threat more of the domestic variety? Filled with gasp-worthy twists and turns, Cat Fight is a wickedly entertaining novel of suspense that examines the lengths to which some women will go when they feel caged.
Why it’s on my radar: Put on my radar by one of my favorite book publicists, and I trust her judgment. Maybe a fun read when traveling to the UK? (Which I hope to do soon!)
Sweet Heat by Bolu Babalola
Description from the publisher: Twenty-eight-year-old Kiki Banjo hosts the popular podcast The HeartBeat, solving romantic conundrums and dishing out life advice. But behind the mic, career setbacks and a devastating breakup have left her hanging on by a thread. As she’s preparing to be the Maid of Honor in her best friend’s wedding, everything starts to unravel, and Kiki is left wondering if she ever had the answers.
Then Kiki finds herself face-to-face with the Best Man, her ex-boyfriend, Malakai—the smooth-talking, absurdly handsome, annoyingly perceptive man who stole her heart and then shattered it. While Kiki’s approaching rock bottom, Malakai’s been on the rise as a filmmaker, and now they have no choice but to play nice until the wedding is over. Both are hell-bent on ignoring the smoldering chemistry between them, but as they navigate the chaos of wedding plans, career ambitions, and Kiki’s growing fears about the future, they can’t ignore the spark that’s only getting hotter.
They just have to get through the summer. So why does it feel like playing with fire?
Why it’s on my radar: “Honey and Spice” was a breath of fresh air in the romance space when I reviewed it at the Boston Globe. Excited to see what Babalola has in store for us.
Nothing Serious by Emily J. Smith
Description from the publisher: Edie Walker’s life is not going as planned. At thirty-five, she feels stuck: in her career, in her love life, and in her tiny San Francisco studio apartment. It doesn’t help that her best friend, Peter Masterson, is basically the über successful male version of her—and she’s hopelessly, unrequitedly in love with him. But when Peter breaks up with his girlfriend of seven years, Edie thinks her life might finally be turning around. He’ll discover how toxic dating app culture is and realize that Edie has been right for him all along.
Except Peter almost immediately lands a date with Anaya Thomas, a gorgeous, whip-smart professor and writer of feminist literature who even Edie—reared in the culture of tech bros—is smitten by. Unlike the women Peter has dated before, Anaya is like an alternate reality version of Edie—one with shampoo commercial hair and a meaningful career, who definitely doesn’t spend her weekends scrolling social media alone in her apartment. It’s only a matter of time before Peter falls head over heels for this woman; Edie herself is infatuated—maybe even a little obsessed—after one meeting.
Then, Anaya is found dead in her apartment. Right after a date with Peter.
Driven by her near-fanatic love of Anaya’s work and a desperate need to prove Peter’s innocence, Edie begins searching for clues to what really happened that night. As her fixation on the investigation grows, so do her doubts in Peter. When the truth finally comes to light, Edie must decide where her loyalties lie, who deserves justice—and who deserves to be punished.
Provocative, tense, and compulsively readable, Nothing Serious is a shrewdly observed, astonishingly heartfelt debut combining a darkly funny takedown of online dating with an honest examination of the challenges women face every day—but don’t dare discuss—from a brilliant new voice in contemporary fiction.
Why it’s on my radar: I’ve had my own hesitations and thoughts about online dating (I even wrote a whole story one this), so I’m curious to see how this book explores this.
The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King
Description from the publisher: Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer, journaling the details of her ordinary life and coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online. A self-proclaimed recluse, she’s always struggled to make friends and, as a college freshman, finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. They are now in their nineties, and Monica worries about them constantly—especially her grandmother, Yun, who survived two wars in China before coming to the States, and whose memory has begun to fade.
Though Yun rarely speaks of her past, Monica is determined to find the long-lost cousin she was separated from years ago. One day, the very program Monica is helping to build connects her to a young woman, whose gift of a single pencil holds a surprising clue. Monica’s discovery of a hidden family history is exquisitely braided with Yun’s own memories as she writes of her years in Shanghai, working at the Phoenix Pencil Company. As WWII rages outside their door, Yun and her cousin, Meng, learn of a special power the women in their family possess: the ability to Reforge a pencil’s words. But when the government uncovers their secret, they are forced into a life of espionage, betraying other people’s stories to survive.
Combining the cross-generational family saga and epistolary form of “A Tale for the Time Being” with the uplifting, emotional magic of “The Midnight Library,” Allison King’s stunning debut novel asks: who owns and inherits our stories? The answers and secrets that surface on the page may have the unerasable power to reconnect a family and restore a legacy.
Why it’s on my radar: I like the comps (titles that the book is compared to). I always look at the comps in pitches. I read every pitch I get! If you’re a book publicist reading this, please let me know if there’s a book I need to know about!
The Unmapping by Denise S. Robbins
Description from the publisher: There is no flash of light, no crumbling, no quaking. Each person in New York wakes up on an unfamiliar block when the buildings all switch locations overnight. The power grid has snapped, thousands of residents are missing, and the Empire State Building is on Coney Island—for now. The next night, it happens again.
Esme Green and Arjun Varma work for the City of New York’s Emergency Management team and are tasked with disaster response for the Unmapping. As Esme tries to wade through the bureaucratic nightmare of an endlessly shuffling city, she’s distracted by the ongoing search for her missing fiancé. Meanwhile, Arjun focuses on the ground-level rescue of disoriented New Yorkers, hoping to become the hero the city needs.
While scientists scramble to find a solution—or at least a means to cope—and mysterious “red cloak” cults crop up in the disaster’s wake, New York begins to reckon with a new reality no one recognizes. For Esme and Arjun, the fight to hold the city together will mean tackling questions about themselves that they were too afraid to ask—and facing answers they never expected. With themes of climate change, political unrest, and life in a state of emergency, The Unmapping is a timely and captivating debut.
Why it’s on my radar: I’m so intrigued by the premise, and I’ve been craving a good magical realism for my tbr this year. In the last few years, some of my favorite books have been magical realism. I’ll be real, this has been on my TBR for a while. I hope to get to it soon!
Cults like Us by Jane Borden
Description from the publisher: Since the Mayflower sidled up to Plymouth Rock, cult ideology has been ingrained in the DNA of the United States. In this eye-opening book, journalist Jane Borden argues that Puritan doomsday belief never went away; it went secular and became American culture. From our fascination with cowboys and superheroes to our allegiance to influencers and self-help, susceptibility to advertising, and undying devotion to the self-made man, Americans remain particularly vulnerable to a specific brand of cult-like thinking.
With in-depth research and compelling insight, Borden uncovers the American history you didn’t learn in school, including how we are still being brainwashed, making us a nation of easy marks for con artists and strong men. Along the way, she also revisits some of the most fascinating cults in this country—including, the Mankind United and Love Has Won—presenting them as integral parts of our national psyche rather than aberrations.
Why it’s on my radar: After reading “Jesus and John Wayne,” I’ve been really interested in the way religion and other related ideas have shaped American culture in ways that are largely invisible to us today. Work like this which reflects on what we value as a culture and how it’s shaped us is so necessary these days.
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