The 10 Best Books of 2025: Critics Highlight a Year of Reissues, Bold Debuts, and AI Reflections

Ten books defined 2025 for critics, pairing reissued classics with bold new voices and nonfiction that probes memory, technology, and society. The year offered everything from sprawling love stories to speculative visions, with wind-swept Beirut, a century-spanning Mitford tax on history, and debates about privacy and artificial intelligence threaded through the shelves. The selection explored love across decades, challenged conventional narratives, and tested how fiction and nonfiction converse with the present. At its core, the list reflects a year in which literature kept address books open: to memory, to loss, to what it means to create in a world saturated by screens and sound bites.

The standout title The True True Story of Raja the Gullible earned its place as a National Book Award winner while also=capturing the warmth and complexity critics associate with Alameddine’s prose. The novel follows Raja, a 63-year-old English teacher living in a Beirut apartment with his aging, formidable mother. As Raja’s true (true) story unfolds, he navigates a residency offer in America that he suspects is less about his past work than a kind of dream deferred. Across a loose braid of memories—his coming of age, the family history of Beirut, and the city’s upheavals, from civil war through economic collapse and catastrophe—Raja’s voice remains winsome, self-aware, and gently wry. The mother who refuses to be consigned to parentalhesis anchors the narrative, creating a counterpoint to Raja’s self-deprecating humor and sharp memory.

Disinheritance, a new collection of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s short stories, follows the author’s long-standing interest in exile, India, and the frictions of marriage and class. The volume assembles stories that skew toward the intimate, revealing how couples navigate extended families, social expectations, and the distance between idealized partnerships and lived experience. Jhabvala’s narrator-less, affectless sentences carry a poised bite that exposes the pretenses of bourgeois life while granting sympathy to the vulnerable. The prose remains precise and chillingly polite, a stylistic counterpoint to the moral tensions that run through the tales. The result is a work that reads as if a century of diasporic longing and constraint were distilled into a handful of paragraphs, each quietly devastating in its recalibrations of loyalty and desire.

What We Can Know, Ian McEwan’s futuristic meditation on memory and privacy, shifts the frame to 2120, a world reshaped by floods and a society obsessed with reconstructing the past from digital traces. The narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is an English scholar fixated on a lost poem that was read once in 2014 at a dinner party before vanishing. He reconstructs the event from the digital detritus left by those who attended, but the story threatens to remember too much. McEwan plays a familiar game with time and culpability, inviting readers to question whether the past belongs to those who remember it or to those who can recreate it with perfect fidelity. The novel’s final act shifts to a discovered manuscript, weaving a twist that reframes what came before as a harrowing test of how history is formed, archived, and used.

Heart the Lover, Lily King’s immersive, two-part novel, is described as both a prequel and a sequel to Writers and Lovers, while standing entirely on its own. The book catalogs a 1980s college love triangle filled with longing and misread signals, then shifts decades later to a hospital room where the lovers reconnect. King writes with a surgical clarity about desire and vulnerability, rendering the specifics of first love—the conspiratorial whispers, the thrill of stolen moments, the lingering ache—into something universal and unsentimental. The result is a sprawling, intimate epic that unfolds with the precision of a real-time diary but the emotional breadth of a novel that lingers in the reader’s memory long after the last page.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the 1925 fame-turned-classic that helped shape American literary myth, returns in a Modern Library edition. The diary-novel of Lorelei Lee tracks a bold, calculating young woman who uses charm, wit, and a sharp eye for opportunity to move through New York, the Atlantic, and Europe on the strength of her own wiles. The text rewards close reading as it reveals the social satire hiding behind a glittering surface, and it demonstrates how a seemingly light, breezy narrative can carry a sharper critique of gender and power than many heavier works. The reissue invites a contemporary readership to see the novel’s elegance and its wit as weapons—tools with which Lorelei navigates a male-dominated orbit and asserts autonomy with deft, even gleeful, calculation.

What We Can Know sits alongside other late-capitalist inquiries as a standout example of how fiction can incorporate technology into the moral imagination. The novel’s premise—a near-future discourse on memory, privacy, and what constitutes “knowing”—offers a structured reflection on data, surveillance, and the intimacy of daily life as mediated by networks and devices. McEwan’s narrative strategy turns the 22nd century into a mirror for the 21st, asking readers to consider what they would do if the past could be reconstructed with imperfect fidelity, and what the cost would be to human agency when every memory can be logged and archived.

Do Admit!, Mimi Pond’s vivid graphic biography of the Mitford sisters, adds a playful, visual counterpoint to the more somber strains on the list. Pond’s drawings render the Mitfords as archetypes of wit, extravagance, and scandal, while also highlighting the human vulnerabilities that undergird their public personas. The book’s brisk, punchy lines and bold color work turn history into a living conversation about how women’s lives are narrated, celebrated, or dismissed across generations. Pond’s approach makes the Mitfords legible to new readers who might otherwise encounter the family through rumor, TV adaptations, or biographical pulp, offering a portrait that is as generous as it is unflinching.

Victor, the wild boy of the late 18th century, is the subject of Roger Shattuck’s concise study, first published in 1980 and reissued to new readers this year. The account recounts a boy found in the south of France who could not speak and seemed to live apart from civilization. The book emphasizes the social bonds that shaped Victor’s development and the caregivers who sheltered him, illustrating how humanity’s social nature can be observed through relationships rather than through language alone. Read today, the volume reads as a meditation on belonging, society, and the fundamental need for communal ties as a defining element of what it means to be human.

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart marks a return to dystopia with a sharper, more humane focus on a child’s point of view. The novel unfolds in a post-democracy United States where state systems monitor bodily autonomy and the child Vera navigates a world filtered through the anxieties and curiosities of a girl growing up amid surveillance and social pressure. The narrative follows Vera’s inner life as she questions what it means to belong, to be seen, and to grow into a future that feels both oppressive and ripe with possibility. Shteyngart’s signature texture—sharp social satire woven into poignant character study—renders a future that feels uncomfortably near and deeply recognizably human.

Minor Black Figures, Brandon Taylor’s latest novel, centers on a single Manhattan summer and a young Black painter named Wyeth who navigates art, race, and desire in a moment of political unrest. The book examines how a creator’s work intersects with public memory and private longing, challenging readers to consider how representation is negotiated in a sphere where art is both a refuge and a mirror. The prose is elegant, with a rhythm that matches the heat and tension of the season it portrays, and it situates Taylor as a novelist who can make art feel like a living, breathing force in the lives of his characters.

In Searches, Vauhini Vara writes about the friction between human privacy and corporate power, using a structure that blends memoir, reportage, and speculative analysis. Vara follows the arc of the big tech era—from Google and Facebook to OpenAI—while interrogating how digital platforms shape our sense of self and community. The book incorporates the author’s own interactions with AI, including passages produced by ChatGPT, and asks readers to confront the ethics of algorithmic influence. The result is both a personal meditation and a broader critique of a technological present that feels increasingly deterministic.

Taken together, the 2025 list captures a year that welcomed both the comfort of familiar forms and the tension of new experiments. The works range from intimate character studies to high-concept fables, from historical portraits to future-facing fables. They share a preoccupation with how memory—individual, collective, and digital—reconfigures identity and values, and they push readers to consider how literature can illuminate the friction between past and present.

As readers wrap up year-end lists and prepare to dive into backlogs or bold new releases, the collection offers a map of a year that treated books as both refuges and instruments: spaces to revisit old loves, and laboratories for imagining different futures. The authors’ ambitions run from the warm, humane center of Raja’s Beirut and Lorelei Lee’s world to the cold, precise line between memory and data in What We Can Know and Searches. In every case, the books invite readers to pause, reflect, and listen for what stories can still teach us about ourselves, our histories, and the possibilities that lie ahead.