Did you make a New Year’s Resolution to read more in 2025? Are you already woefully behind or maybe haven’t even started reading yet? Fear not! I asked some of my favorite writers to let me know what their favorite recent must-reads are so you can add them to your TBR and help you hit your reading goals.
Lena Valencia, author of Mystery Lights
One of my favorite reads of 2024 was Eleanor Catton’s eco-thriller Birnam Wood. I’m a sucker for novels about intentional communities, the more dysfunctional the better, and Birnam Wood delivers the goods. While scouting an abandoned farm in New Zealand as a potential space for crops, the founder of a guerilla gardening group has a chance run-in with an American billionaire who is (allegedly) building a bunker on the land. So begins a shaky alliance that puts the future of the collective in question. The book is a plotty page-turner, driven by masterfully rendered characters whose misguided decisions ultimately steer the narrative from satire to something much darker. It also features some of the best-written dialogue I’ve read in recent memory.
Charlee Dyroff, author of Loneliness & Company
A friend gifted me Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore years ago and I picked it up again in 2024. It’s about a woman traveling with her husband, reflecting back on a very specific friendship from her childhood. The book captures the ache of nostalgia and the nuances of female friendship. It’s a small book—which can be kind of nice sometimes—but I think it’s perfect for anyone craving something beautifully written in 2025.
Chin-Sun Lee, author of Upcountry
It’s impossible to designate “best” out of all the great books I read last year, but one that hooked me from the first page and lingered long after the last is Hot Springs Drive by Lindsay Hunter. Inspired by a real-life murder case (look up Dateline’s “Secrets on Hot Springs Drive” to go down that rabbit hole), Hunter turns what could be cheesy and sordid into a riveting examination of female friendship, rivalry, and some truly effed-up parenting. I loved the nonlinear structure and unflinching prose, depicting violence with care and pathos. And boy can she write about sex!—those parts were so raunchy, hot, and hilarious, I cackled out loud more than once.
Temim Fruchter, author of City of Laughter
2024 had me feeling rich with TBR delights! So many fantastic debuts, alongside exciting releases from authors I’ve long loved. Marie-Helene Bertino is one of the latter. I discovered her debut novel 2AM at the Cat’s Pajamas entirely by accident when I found a copy at my local library used book sale years ago, and my lifelong fandom was immediate. Beautyland, her latest novel, came out this year, and I feel like it’s essential reading for… well, for being human. The story—at once beautiful, heartbreaking, funny, strange, deeply existential, and lovingly defamiliarizing—follows intrepid and gentle alien Adina, as she tries to capture the messy truths about human existence, and fax them back to her home planet. Marie’s writing surprises and surprises, even as it gives me a sense of home so familiar it feels like my own skin. This book will have you crying and cackling and believing in things you didn’t even know had names.
Ruben Reyes Jr., author of There is a Rio Grande in Heaven
Veena Dinavahi has accomplished something spectacular here. She tells a story of joining and leaving a cult without sensationalizing. There is a masterful balance between the minutia of her life, and the underlying forces–mental health, patriarchy, racism–that ruled it. And the voice! Darkly funny, and beautifully heartfelt. Fearlessly empathetic yet always unflinching, this is everything a memoir should be. The True Happiness Company is a triumph. [Editor’s note: The True Happiness Company comes out May 20, 2025 – you can preorder it now]
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, author of Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare
How to do justice to all that this novel means to me? Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad is a powerful rendering of present-day Palestine and evinces the significance of artmaking under war and occupation. The book follows actress Sonia Nasir, whose brief return to Haifa is interrupted by the request that she play Gertrude in a West Bank production of Hamlet. Written in incisive, lyrical, and masterfully restrained prose, Enter Ghost explores Sonia’s involvement in theater as political protest and her poignant journey of self-discovery in her ancestral home. This is a novel with staying power, one I suspect I will return to again and again.
Samantha Paige Rosen, editor of the forthcoming A Home for Tomorrow
I know Rhaina Cohen’s The Other Significant Others was my favorite read of 2024 because more than once I pulled my car over while listening to the audiobook to text friends that they had to pick up a copy – and discuss it with me it afterwards. The Other Significant Others tapped into a feeling I’ve had for most of adulthood: that there’s an imbalance between the weight our society gives to romantic relationships vs. other relationships. But I didn’t know what was possible in a practical sense until I read this beautiful exploration of building a life around friendship. Rhaina examines close historical friendships and shares her own experience with a transformative platonic connection before offering adeptly-reported stories of different ways friends have prioritized one another, from buying a home together to co-parenting to caring for one another through illness. Despite how difficult it can be to challenge a dominant cultural narrative (there are so many “shoulds”), Rhaina’s writing makes me feel a sense of freedom around the alternative, more intentional and fulfilling kinds of lives any of us could lead. I love her work so much that I even asked her to write about the home she and her husband share with friends for my forthcoming anthology on communal living! Seriously, reading The Other Significant Others has changed my approach to friendship for the better, and I suspect it will change yours, too.
Naheed Phiroze Patel, author of Mirror Made of Rain
I spent most of 2024 re-reading favorites for craft strategies and carrying out research on Zoroastrianism and the Sasanian empire. A book I’m glad I made time to read was Aruni Kashyap’s The Way You Want to be Loved, his dazzling, poignant collection of short stories that highlight the beauty, mystery and pathos of India’s Northeast, a culturally distinct region obscured on purpose from the Western gaze. At certain times folkloric and whimsical, and at other times transgressive and darkly humorous, Kashyap’s writing is a rare, poetic witness to the everyday horror of state-sanctioned violence and the indigenous lives forever altered by its menacing presence.