The New York Times has unveiled its list of the best books of 2025, with five fiction and five nonfiction titles selected by the editors of the newspaper’s book review section.
Kiran Desai made the list for her novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the Booker Prize. Another Booker Prize finalist, Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, made the list, with the editors praising it as “exquisite.”
The other fiction titles were Angel Down by Daniel Kraus; The Director, written by Daniel Kehlmann and translated by Ross Benjamin; and The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri.
Two nonfiction books shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize made the Times’ best-of-the-year list: Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, and Sophie Elmhirst’s A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck.
Also making the nonfiction list were Brian Goldstone for There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America; Kevin Sack for Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church; and Sue Prideaux for Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin.
Last week, the Times unveiled its list of 100 notable books of 2025, which included titles such as Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter; Lily King’s Heart the Lover; Caleb Gayle’s Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State; and Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
