The winners of the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards, voted on by users of the book review and recommendation site, have been revealed.
The fiction prize went to My Friends, written by Fredrik Backman and translated by Neil Smith. Goodreads noted in a news release that Backman almost won the 2020 fiction prize for Anxious People but ended up losing to Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library by five votes.
John Green won the nonfiction award for Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection; he previously took home the nonfiction prize for The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet. Taylor Jenkins Reid scored her fourth Goodreads Choice Award, this time in the historical fiction category, for Atmosphere.
V.E. Schwab won in the fantasy category for Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, while Rebecca Yarros was named the romantasy and audiobook winner for Onyx Storm. The science fiction winner was Aisling Rawle for The Compound, and Grady Hendrix won the horror prize for Witchcraft for Wayward Girls.
Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life was named the romance winner, and the mystery and thriller award went to Holly Jackson for Not Quite Dead Yet. SenLinYu won the debut novel award for Alchemised. The young adult fiction winner was Lynn Painter for Fake Skating, and the young adult fantasy and science fiction prize went to Suzanne Collins for Sunrise on the Reaping.
Shari Franke won the memoir award for The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom, and Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell prevailed in the history and biography category for How To Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy’s Guide to Silencing Women.
The Goodreads Choice Awards were established in 2009. Previous winners include Emma Donoghue for Room, Colson Whitehead for The Underground Railroad, and Matthew Desmond for Poverty, by America.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
