My favorite books of 2025 Archives

Crooks

by Lou Berney

This crime novel was outside my usual wheelhouse and I'm glad I took a chance on it! If you’re a Mercurio, crime is in your blood. In 1961, patriarch Ray and matriarch Lillian fell in love in Vegas—at the scene of a crime. They marry and have five children who they bring up in the family business. Across fifty years, in Oklahoma City, Vegas, Hollywood, and even Moscow, we see how each child is shaped by their criminal upbringing and then comes to struggle against it. Don’t get me wrong: this noir-ish literary suspense is plenty gruesome in parts—but it reads as unexpectedly lighthearted and tender, with ample moments of welcome humor, and I was surprised by how hard I was rooting for these characters by the end.

Heart the Lover

by Lily King

This late September 2025 release is both follow-up and prequel to King's 2020 novel Writers and Lovers: here we see Casey, during her college years, first discovering she wants to be a writer, and then again many years after the events of Writers and Lovers, so we can see where life has taken her. The first line in this first-person narrative is, "You knew I'd write a book about you someday;" the "you" is her first love. The tone is reflective and compassionate as Casey—having received jolting news that sends her mind barreling back to events from decades before—reflects on old friendships and a formative romantic relationship, past decisions that altered the course of her life, and the potential to both give and receive forgiveness. This felt wistful and wise as Casey examines the issues that matter most to her, and incidentally, to me—partnership, parenting, calling. Bonus: so many books are referenced in these pages; I loved that it inspired me to read so much under-the-radar literature.

Audition

by Katie Kitamura

What did I just read? I have theories that would be so much fun to discuss—please read it so we can talk about it! The publisher calls this “a mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.” In this carefully constructed and compulsively readable experience, Kitamura presents two competing narratives, both delivered in the first person by a talented actress who fears she peaked long ago. An unnerving change of perspective mid-novel shifts everything the reader thought they understood about the characters’ relationships, as Kitamura explicitly calls us to consider the interplay between artistry and life. For lovers of family dramas, voice-y narratives, and quietly tense novels. I expect readers will either love or hate this open-ended story; I loved it.

Cover Story

by Mhairi McFarlane

Run for the Hills

by Kevin Wilson

Wilson deftly combines the heavy and the light in this found family story of four scattered half-siblings who meet for the first time and pile into an old PT Cruiser to go find the father who abandoned them long ago. Wilson’s stories often feel larger than life, yet the emotional heart feels real and relatable. Quirky, warm, and bighearted, with a multigenerational cast and road trip hijinks galore. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s no spoiler to say I found this coast-to-coast adventure to be an utter delight.

These Heathens

by Mia McKenzie

Small-town teenager Doris was Mrs. Lucas’s star student before family demands compelled her to drop out. When she finds herself in the family way, she persuades Mrs. Lucas to take her to Atlanta for an abortion, where the two mingle with celebrities she’s seen in Ebony, civil rights leaders like Coretta Scott King, and Mrs. Lucas’s queer Black friends. Their behavior is shocking—her mama certainly wouldn’t approve—except they treat Doris with marked kindness and seem to have good hearts and common sense. Cheering Doris on through her life-changing weekend was one of my favorite reading experiences this year. I ate up the voice, the style, the story.

The Bright Years

by Sarah Damoff

This debut portraying love and redemption over four generations of a Texas family captured me from the opening scene, when twenty-something Lillian is reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in the library and is interrupted by Ryan, the man who becomes the love of her life. They are perfect for one another. But Lillian soon learns that the more you love someone, the more they can break your heart. Her new husband desperately wants them to have a baby, not knowing she already has a son. And she knows Ryan is a child of addiction, but never dreams he will soon be swallowed by it himself. Devastating and beautiful; get your Kleenex ready.

How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir

by Molly Jong-Fast

Political writer Jong-Fast calls this deeply personal memoir “the story of the worst year of my life.” As she recounts, it was never easy being bestselling writer Erica Jong’s daughter. But in her 40s, Jong-Fast hit a terrible trifecta: her mother was diagnosed with dementia, her stepfather with Parkinson’s, and her husband with pancreatic cancer. As she sees her mother slipping away, Jong-Fast is compelled to make sense of their relationship, which has always been difficult: her mother was alcoholic, narcissistic, and utterly unavailable to her daughter. This is sad, yes, yet I was transfixed by Jong-Fast’s persistence in grappling with her dysfunctional family dynamics and their ongoing impacts. The through line of fame and its dangers was also fascinating.

Heft

by Liz Moore

I picked up this 2012 release because I've come to love Liz Moore's work and am toying with the idea of becoming a completist. It's been on my TBR list for many years, yet the uncomfortable descriptions of one protagonist's fatness almost led me to put down the book in the opening pages. (I appreciated this interview with Moore, in which she puts words to her own discomfort at how these descriptions were written, and what she would do differently were she to write this book today.) I'm glad I stuck with it, because I was quickly swept up in the story of three lonely and struggling characters who seem to have nothing in common, but who are brought together by fate and circumstance to maybe, hopefully become a family to one another. The title of the book refers to many things: addiction, compulsive behaviors, the burdens we carry, and the near-impossible weight of the burdens placed on us by our parents. But who might help us deal with these hardships, and carry these burdens? That is the question Heft seeks to answer.

The Lack of Light: A Novel of Georgia

by Nino Haratischvili

In this sweeping platonic love story, four female friends first meet as grade schoolers in a Tblisi apartment courtyard in the late 1980s. In alternating timelines, we see how these women’s lives tangle with and are impacted by their home city and its political upheaval, invasions and civil war, and violence of organized crime over the course of twenty years. This was a hard read—both challenging to me as a reader and utterly heartbreaking—but my time here was well spent. Translated from the original German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin.

The Everlasting

by Alix E. Harrow

I was emotionally hooked on this story even before the opening line, thanks to the perfect epigraph from a Rilke poem. This is the unlikely love story of two people who never should have met. Una Everlasting was a medieval lady knight, legendary warrior, and patron saint of the nation of Dominion. Owen Mallory is a tweedy scholar obsessed with Una’s legend. But then Dominion’s new chancellor sends Owen back in time to meet Una and write her definitive tale, so that the story may inspire the beleaguered nation. When he first meets her, he’s in awe and can barely believe she’s real. But then he falls in love with her—with disastrous consequences for them both. I don’t want to say too much—but I was completely entranced by this emotional, epic, and achingly intimate love story that unfolds across time and whose outcome will determine the fate of a nation. I’ve loved Harrow’s work in the past, but this is my new favorite by a mile.

Mercy

by Joan Silber

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” A daughter’s late-night question to her father sets this story in motion, and quickly takes us back to the gritty East Side of 1970s NYC and the night Eddie would regret for the rest of his life. The implications of that night ripple through the rest of the novel, which unfolds as a series of interconnected short stories laden with themes of abandonment, betrayal, and mercy. In rotating points of view, Silber takes us into the minds of a half dozen people directly or tangentially connected to Eddie’s biggest regret, exploring how both our decisions and pure coincidence entwine our fates with others. I inhaled this in an afternoon.

My favorite books of 2025

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summer reading starts May 16th