The 10 best books of 2025 reflect a year of diverse storytelling across fiction, memoir and AI-inflected forms

Vox Culture has published its list of the 10 best books of 2025, a year that delivered a wide-ranging slate of fiction, nonfiction and graphic storytelling. The lineup includes reissued classics alongside ambitious new works, with titles that explore love and legacy, history and forward-looking speculation, and even collaborations with artificial intelligence in narrative form.

At the heart of the list is Rabih Alameddine’s The True True Story of Raja the Gullible, the National Book Award winner whose charm and depth have drawn early praise from readers and critics alike. The novel follows Raja, a 63-year-old gay English teacher who lives in Beirut with his indomitable 85-year-old mother. When a writing residency in America appears on the strength of a previous book, Raja dutifully promises a few stories before he proceeds, only to find that memory itself becomes the central subject. Across Beirut’s fraught history—from the civil war to the 2019 economic collapse, the Covid years, and the 2020 port explosion—Raja blends memory, satire and quiet resilience. Alameddine’s prose is described as winsome, warm-hearted and funny, yet formally sophisticated as it moves between tenderness and trauma.

The list also foregrounds Disinheritance, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s collection of stories that underscores a sense of exile and fracture. The essays and narratives, many set in or around India, skew toward social friction and intimate power dynamics, often exposing the vulnerabilities of bourgeois life. Jhabvala’s sentences are noted for their crisp, paradoxically polite rhythm that belies the ironies and fury simmering beneath. The volume invites readers to consider how belonging, class and desire thread through diasporic experience, and it does so with a sharp eye for human frailty.

A complementary entry is Mimi Pond’s Do Admit!, a graphic biography that reimagines the Mitfords—the celebrated and notoriously fraught British family—through bold blue ink, punchy caricature and playful formal invention. Pond renders the sisters as larger-than-life personae whose ambitions illuminate the 20th century’s most perilous crossroads, from fascism to journalism. The book is described as playful and delightful, in a form that makes historical complexity feel intimate and human.

Another notable entry is What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, a speculative near-future novel set in 2120 after catastrophic floods. The narrator, a nostalgic English scholar, reconstructs a vanished dinner party from 2014 by assembling digital traces and private histories. A twist late in the novel reframes what the reader has consumed, turning a meditation on memory and privacy into a cautionary tale about the reliability of reconstructed history in a world of data trails. McEwan’s latest work has been praised for its engaging plotting and its provocative questions about how we remember what we have chosen to forget.

The list highlights classic-adjacent pleasures as well, including a Modern Library reissue of Edith Wharton’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. First published in 1925, the novel follows Lorelei Lee, a brilliant diarist who uses charm and wittiness to navigate romance and social ambition across continents. The charm of Lorelei’s voice rests in its apparent naiveté, which gradually reveals a sly awareness of her own power—a reminder that pleasures can be both frothy and pointed.

Ian McEwan’s contemporary counterpart in the year’s canon sits alongside other major literary voices. The novel What We Can Know sits alongside entries like The Mitfords, as well as Paolo-focused or globally minded studies that reinforce the year’s interest in cross-cultural narratives and the way memory, media and power shape identity. Publisher notes emphasize that the year’s reading ranges from the tactile to the digital, with a number of works explicitly examining how technology alters authorship and reception.

Other entries center on vivid character studies and generational reckonings. In Vera, or Faith, Gary Shteyngart imagines a near-future America grappling with surveillance, gender and race through the eyes of Vera, a brilliant, anxious child who navigates a world in which data trails and political controls press in from all sides. Shteyngart maintains his signature blend of humor and tenderness while skewering the era’s dystopian anxieties.

Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures marks a shift away from campus-bound settings toward a single, sunbaked Manhattan summer as a Black painter wrestles with art’s political charge. Wyeth’s struggle to make meaningful, personal work amid social tumult becomes a meditation on risk, desire and the responsibilities of representation. The novel’s lush prose and sensibility have earned it a place among this year’s most enduring reads.

Vauhini Vara’s Searches, a hybrid work that blends essay, reportage and AI dialogue, surveys the arc of social media and tech power—from Google and Facebook to OpenAI—while also interrogating the privacy costs of these platforms. Vara coaxes ChatGPT to respond to the chapters about these companies, offering a self-reflective exploration of how algorithms shape our thinking. The book positions itself at the intersection of culture and technology, a hallmark of the year’s conversation about what counts as literature in a data-driven age.

Several other entries round out the list with inventive forms or historical breadth. The Great Reissues program includes a thoughtful look at Victor, a short, incisive study by Roger Shattuck about the famous “wild child” Victor of Aveyron, exploring what the story reveals about human sociability and our reliance on community. The book’s humane focus on relationships—rather than a strict narrative of triumph or failure—sheds new light on a classic experiment and its enduring relevance to debates about nature, nurture and civilization.

Rounding out the selection are more personal, intimate works, including a debut-to-consolidate look at the ways memory, family and art intersect in an era defined by upheaval. The year’s reading also includes a rare graphic biography of the Mitfords and other works that balance historical reportage with vivid, accessible storytelling. The convergence of prose, image, memoir and speculative form speaks to a year that favored experimentation while still honoring the enduring appeal of a well-told story.

As Vox Culture notes, the 2025 list is not merely a tally of favorites but a map of where culture stands at this moment: a blend of archival reverie and forward-looking experimentation, a willingness to interrogate the present through the lens of history, and a sense that narrative form itself is evolving. The selection embraces both the tactile pleasures of a well-made novel and the urgent questions raised by digital life, AI collaboration and cross-cultural exchange. The result is a reading slate that rewards patient attention and rewards readers who approach each book with curiosity about how memory, power and art intersect in our time.

Ultimately, the year’s best books offer a mosaic of voices and textures: the charm and social critique of a modern classic reissued, the intimate ache of a contemporary coming-of-age, a graphic biography that reframes a dynasty, and experiments that invite readers to test the boundaries of what storytelling can be in an era of data and dialogue. They invite readers to linger, to reflect, and to see how literary form can illuminate the complexities of love, memory, culture and technology in 2025.

As the year closes, readers can turn to a list that captures both the pleasures of reading and the larger questions that shape the culture and entertainment landscape. These ten works stand as a record of a moment when literature experimented with form as it engaged with history, politics and the digital world, offering both comfort and provocation in equal measure.