Our Favorite Books of 2025

Writers love lists, and book nerds love them even more. So what could be more natural than a list of best books for 2025? Of course, any round-up is necessarily woefully incomplete. I’m sure you’ll find yourself saying, “but Erin, what about this one…?” Well, you can come on in and say it to my face — I’m at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers every Thursday through Saturday. But before you do, please know that you’re right, and I agree with you. However, the nature of constraint being what it is, I’ve picked my books all the same. Here they are, presented in alphabetical order by last name for a veneer of impartiality:

Flashlight, by Susan Choi

This Booker-prize-shortlisted novel tackles the complexity of the Korean diaspora through a single family’s own compelling and mysterious family history. The puzzle of the opening, in which a 10-year-old protagonist is involved in a life-altering but murky event resulting in the disappearance of her father, sets the tone for this intricate, globe-spanning narrative. Whether the layers of memory and meaning can be illuminated by the book’s titular torch, you’ll just have to read to find out.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, by Kiran Desai

Those of us who have been in bookselling long enough to remember the phenomenon that was The Inheritance of Loss (back when the Booker Prize translated directly into book sales) were deeply thrilled to get a new novel by Desai, after a break of almost two decades. And we were not disappointed — it’s an epic of a love story spanning all the historical and contemporary forces that alter our lives forever. This massively ambitious work earns every one of its nearly 700 pages.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad

If the title doesn’t go right to your gut, then I don’t know what will. Written as a direct response to Gaza after October 7, 2023, El Akkad lays the genocide at our feet, and won’t let us look away. His anger strikes at the heart of our performative outrage and belated sympathies, reaching back beyond the crisis in Gaza to his experiences covering twenty years of injustice in the U.S. and the West more broadly. A powerful, urgent argument against complicity.

Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, by Eve L. Ewing

This book will resonate with anyone who has been through the meat-grinder of American public education, but especially if you’re a person of color, or the parent of one. Far from patting ourselves on the back as a country that offers opportunity to all, this book highlights exactly what the cost of that “free lunch” is: the reinforcement of a system designed to keep racial stratification in place, to the benefit of those who created the system and those who wield its power. Ewing’s book, originally published this February, only continues to be more relevant as book bans and curriculum challenges escalate all over the US.

Sons and Daughters, by Chaim Grade, translated by Rose Waldman

It’s not every day, or even every year, that we get a Yiddish novel newly translated into English, especially by one of our great twentieth century Yiddish novelists. Originally appearing in serial form in the New-York-based Yiddish press of the 1960s and 70s, Sons and Daughters is now in English for the first time. Alternately mournful and funny, this family saga perfectly captures both the traditions and the tumult of pre-war European Jewish life, a life that would soon be systematically destroyed. If you want to know what the world can look like right before it tips over into fascism, look no further.

Love is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems, by Essex Hemphill

Long out of print, passed from hand to hand or by word of mouth, a landmark queer Black poet is finally widely available. Lovingly edited by John Keene and Robert F. Reid-Pharr, it’s more than a book of poems: it’s the document of an era, and a love letter from a generation that didn’t get the luxury of growing old. Hemphill is an ancestor to so many poets working today, and now, thankfully, he’ll be an even more accessible influence for poets to come.

Is A River Alive?, by Robert Macfarlane

The blatant animism of the title isn’t an accident: it’s Macfarlane’s thesis, and once you get past the cuteness of this question, you realize how serious it actually is. Like picking the perfect local guide or bringing the right expert with him, putting people into place is Macfarlane’s path to making us care — to making change. And when his philosophy approaches the idealistic, you let it, because he’s done the work to get you there. Macfarlane wants to talk about rivers in this book, sure. But what he really wants to do is to put the throat of the river between your hands, to see if you’ll still squeeze.

The Summer House, by Masashi Matsuie, translated by Margaret Mitsutani

This elegant novel is a tribute to intentionality, and a deeply analog relief from our hyper-digital world. Architecture is a heavy theme, but treated with such deftness that the frequent descriptions of the built world seem as natural to the narrative as describing a character’s appearance, or even their emotional state. Beauty and care, aging and legacy are all entwined in this radically quiet and patient book.

We Survived the Night: An Indigenous Reckoning, by Julian Brave NoiseCat

NoiseCat’s rollicking memoir-hybrid, told as a coyote tale, encompasses everything from his own intimate family story to colonization’s wide-sweeping violent legacy. Blending history and reportage with a much more personal quest, he follows the arcs of Indigenous lives across North America. This immensely successful book finds its power in the tension between what we expect from a memoir and what we want from a myth. By creating his own form, NoiseCat’s narrative unfolds as an antidote to erasure.

You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine, translated and edited by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor

There are at least three excellent Palestinian poetry anthologies this year (shout out to Heaven Looks Like Us and Enemy of the Sun), but You Must Live takes the top spot due to its almost shocking immediacy. Both the logistical feat and the literary care with which this anthology came to be simply shouldn’t have been possible, and we’re lucky to have it. Read this book first for its urgency, but more importantly, for its beauty in the face of that urgency.