The Best Books of 2025 So Far: Exceptional Literary Works That Defined the Year
BY FASLA FADHI
10 November, 2025
As we enter the final quarter of the year, 2025 is solidifying its place as a grand procession of exceptional literary works. Many celebrated authors have returned to the literary world this year. Writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kiran Desai, and Dan Brown have once again proven that the world of literature would not be complete without their contributions. From intimate stories of longing to sweeping historical reckonings, authors across all genres have created masterful work that stands out.
In a year of fluctuating digital engagement, young readers have increasingly turned to platforms like BookTok, Bookstagram, and annotated editions, which have helped them gain wider attention. Below is a list of some of the most celebrated books of 2025 that have received widespread recognition and appreciation. Compiling this collection has been a labour of love, offering an exceptional selection across multiple genres. Of course, this is not a comprehensive list, and the best may yet be to come, so prepare your book stack for these brilliant new additions.
Theft – Abdul Razak Gurnah
Set between the shimmering shores of Zanzibar and Dar- E- Salaam in Tanzania, this tale unfolds through the eyes of three young souls: Karim, Badar and Fouzia. They are striving to escape the ruthless realities of post-colonial Tanzania, haunted by an emotional displacement born of fractured homes and silent wounds. Each carries the ache of a shattered childhood, familial issues, and a deep sense of displacement within them.
Karim, a bright young man who was abandoned by his mother after his parent’s separation, is reunited with her once he achieves academic success. His life takes a significant turn when he meets Badar, a disgraced orphan ushered into enslavement. Badar finds a home under Karim’s roof, and their friendship, which began in sympathy, later deepens into a tender, symbiotic companionship -two youngsters nurturing their bruised humanity.
Meanwhile, Karim encounters Fouzia, a teacher who has conquered the restless spirits of her own childhood sleeplessness. As years unravel, their destinies get entwined, mirroring the flow of how their nation redefined itself from Cold War intrigue into a glittering playground where foreigners corrode local lives.
Gurnah’s prose meanders like a river at twilight, revolving around each life before merging them into a luminous mosaic. As a Nobel laureate, he carries the heavy weight of readers’ expectation, yet through this brilliant novel, he proves himself worthy once more. This book elucidates through meditation, on loss and reclamation.
Theft emerges as a living metaphor, echoing every life it touches: the theft of faith, the theft of love and the theft of a homeland. For a passionate reader the rhythm of this novel may feel unhurried but for those who surrender to its flow, it blossoms into something deeply profound. Within these pages, destiny and defiance dance, and the author explores the dusk of sorrow and the dawning light of possibility.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny- Kiran Desai
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this book presented a dilemma through its contrasted style of storytelling. The narrative, which unfolds between the 1990s and the early 2000s, focuses on the lives of Indians in America and gradually transforms into a rediscovery of the emotional and cultural contours of their homeland.
The story revolves around a struggling journalist and a passionate aspiring writer. Their destinies crossed together first on a night train bound for Allahabad, only to collide later in life – a journey where they have already rejected each other as potential marriage partners. Sonia, an aspiring writer, meets Ilan, an older artist seeking muse and intimacy. In this relationship, she endures several physical and mental abuses that leave lasting scars. In parallel, Sunny is in a live- in relationship with his girlfriend, struggling at the Associated Press while wrestling with existential doubts about meaning and purpose of life. Their paths cross again when both find themselves at the lowest point of their lives.
While love between Sonia and Sunny lies at the centre of the novel, the narrative extends far beyond them. The loneliness of a Westernised Indian and the longing they feel for their homeland, discrimination they face based on their race, class, and nationhood and the quiet ache of loneliness bind them all. The novel travels through all possible emotions of each character, forming an intimate odyssey of two individuals learning how to move toward each other against all odds.
Kiran Desai’s prose glides effortlessly, spanning regions of the philosophical, the humorous, the elegiac and the tender; she maintains elegant control over tone and texture. In some ways, this novel is commentary on the evolving space of Indian literature in the global arena.
Flash Light- Susan Choi
Susan Choi, a maestro of narratives, sows puzzles destined for revelation. She explores world- shaking convulsions, detailing the political affairs of nations, and the long shadow of wars between North and South Korea, Japan, China, and the American colossus. The novel presents complex characters, an accelerating plot, and gripping suspense.
It is an engulfing tale spanning four generations of a Korean, Japanese, and American dynasty. At the story’s heart lies Louisa, daughter of Anne and Serk (originally Seok). She is addressed by neighbours as “half breed”, while their adopted child, Tobias, is considered as their biological son. Louisa moves to Japan at the age of nine, a shift that exposes her to profound cultural shock.
The story begins with a haunting scene: a child left alone on the Japanese beach where her father vanishes. In that last moment, the only thing he tells her is to pretend to love her mother, saying that in the future she will realise her worthiness. Yet, life steers Louisa towards resentment; her hatred for her mother is born from pain, while her hatred for her father stems from coping with his distance.
Choi presents Japan as a country facing hardships and difficulties, though the Japanese economy was blooming during the years she mentions. This seems like an artistic choice to reflect the characters’ emotional outburst and disappointment.
Each chapter of this novel beats with a distinct heart; every individual role is conjured anew, enduring in its essence without betrayal. The novel is a prism, reflecting the human condition in tragedy and in ordinariness – a wondrous voyage through the reader’s heart. Time itself is a living spirit here, one walks beneath marriage, parenthood, immigration and the ache of displacement.
The Names – Florence Knapp
An elegant and electrifying release of this year, the story circles around a single point: names. The novel profoundly reveals the importance of naming a child, showing how this simple act can alter not only the child’s personality but also the lives of those around him, ultimately molding the entire course of a life.
What weight does a name truly carry? In 1985, psychologists identified that people instinctively favour the letters of their own initials, extending this preference to brands, products they use and even their partners. Indeed, even evidence consistently suggests our names have a tangible force over our psychological, social and even financial destinies. This novel depicts the story of a boy who receives three different names across three sections of life: Gordon, Bear, and Julian and how these names change his entire life up to the age of 35.
The narrative begins with a domestic ritual, where a mother and daughter walk in to the registrar’s office to record the birth of a newborn. Cora, the mother, shackled in an abusive marriage, wants to name her child Julian-meaning “sky father”, hoping it might bring him happiness. However, her domineering husband insists the boy carry his name, a symbol of lineage and authority. Cora opposes this, fearing that his name would bring the same darkness and aggression, shaping her son’s spirit before he has a chance to choose his path. Meanwhile, their daughter Maia, wants to name her younger brother Bear, which she means as loving yet strong. The act of naming the child becomes both rebellion and reckoning, a fragile attempt to save the child from the shadow of his father.
The novel unfolds in a triptych pattern; it’s like three novels coexisting in one.
Flesh - David Szalay
David Szalay shatters conventions through this novel. He doesn’t get preoccupied with rules and regulations of literature, and the result is magnetic and encompassing.
The protagonist, Istvan, a Hungarian youth, is an exceptionally taciturn person who lets things happen to him rather than making choices; his internal responses remain elusive. The first time we encounter him in this novel is as someone who reluctantly assists his aged neighbour who deliberately seduces him, provoking muddled feelings.
Yet, each segment advances him further. He becomes a chauffeur for a wealthy lawyer in London, a development that effectively launches his rise toward success. Still, Istvan remains detached, never striving and never exulting in his luck. He accepts his fate without complaint, his muted demeanour occasionally broken by flashes of real humanity.
The story explores his tangled relationships with his employers, partners, family and offspring. Within this structure, there is a strong sense of allegory, a cautionary fable about the endless pursuit of improvement and the fragile nature of worldly success.
Readers’ empathy with Istvan fluctuates in each segment. He is not an archetypal hero, but a character swept along by economic tides and political shifts in Europe. Szalay’s portrayal of sexuality and personal discovery is stark, exposing how pivotal episodes of life shape adult self.
Y2K, How The 2000s Became Everything - Colette Shade
Y2K , How The 2000s Became Everything is a short reflection on the late ‘90s and the dawn of the new millennium. It wanders through both immense and intimate subjects: a shattered ecosystem, the haze over digital desire, bodies learning to live under scrutiny, and the shifting tectonics of American consciousness.
The early 2000s have become a new kind of history – they fostered lip gloss, flip phones and MySpace profiles. It’s an era that began with the dot-com boom and ended with a pink slip of foreclosure notice. In between those two bubbles, lived Millennial adolescence. The relics are of a world that believed the future was Chrome and eternal, then, came the destruction- towers, markets and systems, the collapse that peeled culture’s varnish. For those who were raised in that shimmer between the old world and the algorithm the nostalgia feels both electric and poisoned.
Shade’s prose insisted that politics was not innocent at all; they made Millennials believe that capitalism had won, the planet was healing and equality was history’s final chapter, but it was just the beginning of world destruction: the cost of comfort. She revisited the collapse from inside, her adolescence from suburbia became a miniature of national conflicts. By the book’s end nostalgia curdles into clarity: where nostalgia meets defiance.
Shattered Lands Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia - Sam Dalrymple
Shattered Lands chronicles the storm that remade the map, sculpted new nations, and left behind dust, silence, and exile. The book explores the five waves of partition that shattered the Indian imperial mirage, once a heavenly array of lands, stretching from Yemen to the hills of Nepal.
The process began when Burma slipped away in 1937, followed by Aden and then the gulf territories. In 1947, India and Pakistan tore apart, and finally, in 1971, East Pakistan broke free to create the nation of Bangladesh, born in blood and tide. These five sunderings yielded twelve nations: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, The Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait – all once bound in the name of the Raj, united by the sea route, coin and decree.
The tale begins when the first fracture widened with the partition of Burma, a line drawn not merely on paper but across communities, trade, and faith. What followed were the breaking of Aden and Arabia, the Radcliffe line that rendered divides overnight, and finally, in 1971, the riverain birth of Bangladesh, the last breath of a dying empire.
In an era of governments erasing history, Dalrymple’s chronicle restores contour to memory, showing how young, fragile, and fevered these borders still are. In Shattered Lands, he unfolds the truth like an atlas breaking earth; this is not an ancient rift but a fresh wound that unstitched within living memory. His filmmaker’s lens gives the saga motion, and his prose flows like a voyage through forgotten archives – from Aden’s coast to Assam’s tea hills. As someone rooted in Indian soil he carries the tremor of first-hand voices, presenting diaries that whisper forgotten aches, and melodies that hummed in refugee tongues.
Stag Dance - Torrey Peters
“In the future, everyone will be trans.” This statement summarises the work of Torrey Peters, renowned as one of the world’s best trans writers, a title she gained prominence with during the Covid-19 pandemic. Her collection, Stag Dance, features three novellas and one novel, with a major focus on queer theory. In “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones”, Peters depicts an apocalyptic near-future Seattle where a pandemic prevents humans from producing sex hormones, driving home the urgency and restlessness this brings among people. “The Chaser” portrays a boy who begins questioning his own sexuality in the wake of an ill-fated relationship with his boarding schoolmate.
The novel Stag Dance features Baby Bunyan, a large, unattractive lumberjack, who decides to attend the winter camp’s stag dance as a woman, becoming a rivalry for the younger dancers. The final novella, “The Masker”, portrays a character named Krys who is forced to confront her own identity because the other attendees appear wearing a full-body silicone suit.
Peters’ work blazes through the tangled thickets of desire and becoming. She drags the audience to the heartwood of the trans world of experience which is raw, luminous, and alive. At the centre of the book stands Stag Dance, its namesake tale, an extravagant story of finding femininity in a lumberjack, which is ultimately consumed by envy, hunger, and unraveling. It offers a vision of gender not chosen, but conjured. Under this blazing core, the three novellas revolve like rogue lunar bodies. Each world, though different, syncs in the marvel of the maker’s confident pulse and leaves the reader shuddering in its aftermath.
Mother Mary Comes to Me - Arundhati Roy
The deliberately chosen cover page is itself a bold self-declaration: a picture of a bidi-smoking Arundhati that seems a metaphor for her braveness. The tag of “memoir” might lead some to expect a sentimental and heart-wrenching account, but neither the author nor the reader finds that here.
This memoir is written to introduce the mother, Mother Mary – a formidable feminist, and an inspiring educator who transmitted courage and conviction to her children. Mrs. Roy wasn’t a conventional mother; she was not a “son-worshipper”, but in a land where sons are revered, she often vented her frustrations about men in her life to her son.
The relationship between mother and daughter was neither simple nor sentimental; Arundhati seldom received kind words or gestures of affection from her mother. But, with each passing year, their bond seems to strengthen with every abrasive interaction.
To society, Mary Roy was an intimidating woman: a divorcee, an opinionated individual, the builder of a school, and someone who was financially independent through her own hard work. She also played a pivotal role in filing and winning a case against the Travancore Christian Succession Act in the Supreme Court. However, for her children she was at times a cruel mother.
Though Arundhati loved her unconditionally, she felt fortunate to be her daughter rather than the daughter of someone who bows before a man, yet she doesn’t conceal the bruises of that connection. The memoir is an honest and steadfast portrayal of two women. In the end, the mother and daughter find their way back to each other, depicting a connection unlike any other.
Derrida In JNU - Nigitha John
“Retrogression through the writings of Derrida and where do we reach, in the love affair of Das and Diva because it is nonetheless and nevermore. An almost success, an almost failure, and almost everything.”
At the soul of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), an extraordinary love unfolds. A novel that recollects the memories of the university – a corridor where politics is knotted with the pulse of youthful desires-centering on Das and Diva. As they circle each other through argumentative periods and turbulent nights, their love becomes the epitome of Derrida’s ideologies.
This isn’t merely a love story; rather, it’s a constructed structure of dialogues between politics and passion. Their story is a montage of affection, confusion, betrayal, and ephemeral delight; their passion echoes through the labyrinth of academia. The author turns philosophy into poetry; blending rebellion with tenderness and reasoning with sensuality. It’s a fusion of postmodern reflection with magical realism.
Nigitha John presents her characters as poised yet unguarded; at one time, she portrays their weakness and then their valour – a negotiation of vulnerability. Beyond its philosophical narrative it examines how love deconstructs its own meaning. A love story written in the language of rebellion and resistance, making the reader wonder whether passion can ever be separated from politics.