Barnes & Noble revealed its lists of the best books of 2025 so far.
The bookstore chain’s list of the best fiction of the year so far includes Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere, which was published Tuesday by Ballantine, alongside Holly Brickley’s Deep Cuts, Clare Leslie Hall’s Broken Country, Emilia Hart’s The Sirens, Sarah Penner’s The Amalfi Curse, Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore, Charmaine Wilkerson’s Good Dirt, Emma Knight’s The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, Fredrik Backman’s My Friends, and Ron Currie’s The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne.
Making the cut in the literary fiction category were We Do Not Part, written by Han Kang and translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris; Three Days in June by Anne Tyler; Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; My Documents by Kevin Nguyen; The Usual Desire To Kill by Camilla Barnes; Audition by Katie Kitamura; Flesh by David Szalay; The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong; Flashlight by Susan Choi; and The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami.
In history, the picks were Zeinab Badawi’s An African History of Africa; Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This; Rick Atkinson’s The Fate of the Day; Imani Perry’s Black in Blues; Kostya Kennedy’s The Ride; William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road; Keith Houston’s The Book; William Geroux’s The Fifteen; Julian Borger’s I Seek a Kind Person; and Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain.
All of Barnes & Noble’s lists of the best books of 2025 so far are available on its website.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
