The 20 Best Books of 2025 Still Worth Buying in 2026

Banu Mushtaq has been writing in Kannada since the 1970s, mostly about women inside Muslim households in her part of Karnataka, and she has spent her working life as a lawyer and reporter in the same districts. Deepa Bhasthi selected twelve of those stories and put them into an English that leaves the Kannada and Urdu words standing instead of sanding them flat. The pieces are domestic and short. Nothing detonates. A husband takes a second wife, a mother quietly stops eating, a young woman works out how much of herself she is allowed to keep, and the pressure builds inside a kitchen until you notice your own jaw is clenched.

Istvan is fifteen, living in a Hungarian housing block with his mother, when a neighbour takes an interest in him. What follows is roughly forty years of a life: violence, prison, the army, a driving and security job in London, then money he did not earn and cannot enjoy. Szalay writes it in short flat scenes with a lot of white space, and his main character answers most questions with a version of okay. That sounds unbearable and is somehow the opposite. Because you are never told what Istvan feels, you spend the whole book working it out, and the guesses you make say more about you than about him.

Sonia and Sunny are both Indian, both drifting between India and America, both writers of a sort, and the novel keeps arranging for them to nearly find each other and then pulling the table away. Around that near miss Desai builds families, servants, visa queues, literary parties, a grandmother's house, and the particular humiliation of being the Indian in the room whom everyone finds interesting for the wrong reasons. It is long, the kind of long that needs a bookmark and a plan, and it moves the way a Sunday family lunch moves: slowly, everyone talking at once, and then one sentence lands and reorganises the whole afternoon.

Green went to a hospital in Sierra Leone for a different reason, met a teenager called Henry who had drug-resistant tuberculosis, and could not leave the story alone. The book alternates between Henry's treatment and the history of TB: how the nineteenth century made it romantic, how the cure was found, and how that cure was then priced and patented out of reach of the people who needed it most. It runs about two hundred pages in the same conversational voice as his novels, and it is angry in a way his fiction has never been.

Sarah Wynn-Williams was a New Zealand diplomat who talked her way into a job at Facebook and spent about seven years there, ending up in global policy. The book is her account of that stretch: chasing Mark Zuckerberg around Davos, watching a company work out that it had political power well before it worked out what to do with it, and the specific way an office can make clever people behave badly. It reads like a novel because she is genuinely funny, which is disorienting given the subject. Meta publicly contested her account after publication and moved to stop her promoting the book.

This is the fifth Hunger Games book and it covers the fiftieth Games, the one Haymitch won as a sixteen-year-old from District 12. Anyone who read the trilogy knows the outcome, and Collins is fine with that, because the book is about how the Capitol builds a story around a victor and how a boy slowly works out what has been taken from him. It is faster and meaner than the Snow prequel. Collins writes propaganda better than almost anyone working in adult fiction, and the passages about how a broadcast gets edited will follow you back to your own feed.

Hai is nineteen, an addict, lying to his mother about being in medical school, standing on a bridge in a dying Connecticut town when an elderly Lithuanian widow named Grazina shouts at him from her porch. He ends up living with her and working at a fast-food restaurant alongside people the American economy has finished with. Vuong writes sentences that stop you, sometimes because they are gorgeous and sometimes because you have to read them twice to work out what actually happened. This novel has more jokes than his first one and many more people in it.

Alice Scott and Hayden Anderson are both journalists, both summoned to a Georgia island by Margaret Ives, an elderly heiress from a family that used to be American tabloid royalty. She gives each of them a month to prove they should be the one to write her life, and she feeds the story out in pieces, to both, in a way that may or may not be true. So there are two books here: the present-day rivalry, which is the Emily Henry you came for, and the twentieth-century family saga, which is the part I did not expect to like more.

Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are magick students at Cambridge whose professor dies in a lab accident, taking their academic futures down with him. So they descend into an underworld built out of logic problems, paradoxes and philosophy, which is exactly the joke: Kuang's hell runs on the same currency as a graduate department. The two of them argue their way down through circles that punish specific kinds of intellectual sin. If you have ever been inside a system that told you suffering was the price of being taken seriously, the allegory will not be subtle and it will still land.

Joan Goodwin teaches astronomy in Texas and applies to NASA in 1980, when the shuttle programme has just started taking women. The novel runs on two tracks: her training years with the other candidates, and a night in December 1984 when something goes wrong on a mission and the ground team can hear it happening live. In between there is a love story she cannot be open about in Reagan-era Houston, and a niece she is half-raising. Reid does what she always does, which is make you care about a group of professionals doing a job you know nothing about.

Karim, Fauzia and Badar are the three points here. Badar arrives in a household as a servant boy and is treated as something between family and furniture, Karim is the charming one who does well, Fauzia is the one with epilepsy who has been told her whole life what she cannot do. Gurnah lets them grow up across a couple of decades while Zanzibar fills with hotels, foreign money and visiting do-gooders. The theft of the title is not one event. It is a long list of small ones, each of which somebody was able to explain away at the time.

Dominic Salt and his three children run a research base on Shearwater, an island somewhere between Australia and Antarctica, where a global seed bank is being evacuated because the sea is taking the land. They have eight weeks left. Then a woman called Rowan is found on the shore, alive, with no good explanation for how she got there and clear reasons not to answer questions. It is a thriller in structure and an ecological novel in intent, and McConaghy is good enough at both that the join barely shows.

Samantha and Xavier meet the way romance novels arrange these things, get on immediately, and then the book does something most of the genre will not: it makes the obstacle real, boring and unfixable. Her mother has early-onset Alzheimer's and Samantha is the one who handles it. Jimenez writes caregiving with the details that people who have done it recognise, the calendar of it, the guilt, the way a good day is worse than a bad one because you let yourself hope. It is still a funny book, and that is the whole trick.

Violet Sorrengail and the surviving cadets leave Navarre to look for allies and answers, which means this instalment is mostly travel, negotiation and new political factions, with the dragons and the romance roughly where you left them. Yarros writes propulsive chapters and cliffhangers that work on your brain like a slot machine. If you loved Fourth Wing you bought this months ago. If you did not, nothing here will convert you, because the prose has not changed and the world-building is still doing the bare minimum with a very large map.

Scarlett is a platform diver at Stanford whose confidence broke along with her body after a fall, and Lukas is a swimmer on the same athletics floor with a reputation and a rigid schedule. They arrange something transactional and it does not stay that way. Hazelwood, who has spent her career writing romances about scientists, has swapped the lab for a pool and turned the heat up considerably. More interesting than the heat is how much of this book is two people negotiating out loud, which is rarer in the genre than it ought to be.

Chiamaka is a travel writer stuck alone in America during the early pandemic, going back through the men she has loved and what each of them made of her. The novel then hands over to her friend Zikora, her cousin Omelogor, and finally to Kadiatou, her housekeeper, whose section draws on a real assault case that made international news in 2011. Adichie is writing about how women narrate their own lives and how little of that narration survives contact with other people's versions. Kadiatou's section is the best thing here by a distance, and it arrives very late.

A New York stage actress in her forties has lunch with a much younger man. In the first half she is a woman being pursued, or perhaps manipulated, by a stranger who claims a connection to her. In the second half the same people are rearranged into a different set of facts, and the novel never tells you which version is the real one. Kitamura writes in a controlled, watchful style where nobody ever says the important thing. It runs under two hundred and fifty pages and is built to be argued about on the way home.

Cora sets out in a storm in 1987 to register her baby. Her husband, a doctor who is violent at home, expects the boy to be named after him. She has three options, and the novel takes all three: Gordon, Julian, Bear. Each version runs forward in seven-year jumps to the present, so you watch one family become three different families depending on a single word written in a register. Knapp keeps the three strands close enough together that the differences land, which is much harder to pull off than it sounds.

This covers the years up to the earliest Microsoft days: a stubborn, argumentative boy, parents who sent him to a therapist rather than trying to break him, a school that happened to own a computer terminal, and the friendship with Paul Allen that turned into a company. Gates is more open than I expected about being difficult to be around and about how much luck was involved. He is far less open about anything that came afterwards, which is a choice, and the book ends before the parts most readers actually want.

The setup is 1025 CE, days after the Somnath temple has been sacked, and a band of Indian warriors decide the reply will happen at a time and place of their own choosing. Amish writes historical fiction the way a Sunday afternoon film is directed: broad characters, speeches, a clear villain, action set pieces, and a great deal of exposition delivered as dialogue. If you grew up on the Shiva Trilogy this is the same machine with a new coat of paint. It stands alone, so the earlier Indic Chronicles book is not required reading.