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There are a dozen reasons for reading a book, and a dozen and more to decide what makes really great. For me, it is not just about beautiful writing or a clever plot (although I love both). A great book is one that pierces the fourth wall – not between the author and the character, but inside MeThis is the kind of story that does not only offer to run away, but subtly tells how I see my life.
I did not prepare books with a particular subject this year. But it is interesting that how many of the “Best of” lists share a similar thread – a one that winds through history, memory and stories that we tell ourselves to survive. These are books that find out how the past currently leaks, how we selected selectively, and to take the lifeline forward and fix them, or just what to strengthen them.
You will find family plays here, yes, but a controversial exposure, a soul-barning memoir, the acts of resistance, and stories that blur the line between personal and political. These are stories that do not ask you to agree with them, but they will be with you. Not because they entertain, but because they mean something. These are books that reached beyond partition and pulled me in.
Feature image from our wake up call with Radhi Devalukia.
10 best books of 2025 so far
I do not misunderstand-I like a good page-turner. Those summer sisler and twist thriller are proof that the author can build the whole world and absorb us within them in a moment. But books of this list perform gender for a different reason. They are human in their own way, whether they are gradually come out or provide emotion with every chapter. Sometimes the point is not only to check your TBR list. This is to read a page, then read it again. Instead of receiving, absorb, and let the words drown.
Isola By Ellague Goodman
I loved Gudman’s work since the first discovery Cookbook Collector, And it is not a different. Inspired by the real 16th century story of Marguerite De La Rocque, Isola To fall in love, re -tells the life of a young Nobelwoman on a remote island. Left only to survive with his nurse and her lover, the routeroight ends everything that you will expect to separate – which accepts the internal changes inspired through physical and spiritual toilets.
Read it if: You love the historical stories contained in the female flexibility and tender metaphor.
Careless people By all the verses
This is a rare nonfiction pick that I had to include, because everyone is going to talk about it – if they are not already. A former Facebook executive, Wynn-Williams, offers an uncontrolled account of its time inside Big Tech, including some of its most resulting moments, highlighting the actual cost of disintegration. Part memoirs, part exposes, and part meditation on burnout, wynn-williams we challenge all of us to check how we are complicated in the system, but also that we give licenses to separate and imagine our new ways.
Read it if: You are taking a terrible look at the truth, power, and the world in which we live.
Flashlight By Susan Choi
Her father is left with more questions from the closure of ten -year -old Louisa after her father disappears on one beach in one evening. Her body is never found – and although she was with her that night, she could not remember one thing. As the story comes out, we reveal the life marked by his father’s North Korea to Japan and finally after the war, displacement and silence. Years later, her missing still hunts Louisa, shaping her identity in ways she cannot extend. Spreading continents and generations, Flashlight The water checks the Merchaest of the water: the memories that we take and the stories we tell ourselves are struggling for the truth.
Read it if: You are ready for multi -layered stories with a slow irritation, analyzing a thin line between remembering and imagination.
Antidot By Karen Russell
From the author of Swamplandia! Dust Bowl -Yuga Nebrasca has a brilliant strange novel set, where the disease is mysteriously cured and forgets. The center has a priesty witch known only as an antidote, a woman who stores the most painful memories of her customers, so they no longer have to bear them. But after a horrific dust storm, she finds out that she has completely disappeared memories. Including magical realism and sarcasm with vivid characters, this book examines America’s collective unconsciousness – given what we are ready to remember and what we do not do when we don’t lose.
Read it if: You like your story a little strange and provocative philosopher.
Good dirt By Charmaine Wilkarson
In Good dirtWilkarson offers a succulent, multi-geneled novel around the maternal heritage of the Freeman family. The story begins in 1803, when Kandia is kidnapped from her African village and enslaved in Barbados. After generations, AB is a witness to his brother’s murder, breaking a cirloom jar called “Old Mo”, then runs into France to reconstruct his life. The story weaves prominent women from time and place together as they process grief, identity and heritage – attaining trauma can still lead to changes and triumphs.
Read it if: You love epic stories that detect the strength of women in generations.
Emperor of Gladness By Ocean Wung
Wuong’s first novel is a poem in prose, which separates the delicate moments of life to reveal beauty. Emperor of Emperor The story of Hai is adrift after a young college dropout loss, and Grazina, an elderly woman who is an elderly woman with an industrial east glans, dementia in connecticut. Is, to live in exchange for a place becomes a careful, and his “found family” story gradually joins with its new colleagues. This hard work and ignorant people have a puffman on life defined, but also that we look at each other each when we stop and take care.
Read it if: You want to feel undone and keep back together by the language.
Dream count By Lima Edapornrange Edichi
Set against the backdrop of 2020 epidemic, Dream count The four women weave through the lives of women – Chiamka, Zikora, Kadiatau, and Omelogor – as they navigate each navigate loss, intimate and cultural expectations. While the plot points of each character do not neatly align, Edichi has captured the nuances that are calculated and reconstructed by mid-life. These women are so captivating, you will follow them anywhere.
Read it if: You love character-driven stories that expand your heart and your world vision.
audience By Maggi Steifer
In January 1942, the Rural West was set at the magnificent Avalon Hotel & Spa in Virginia, audience Paints is an intimate, atmospheric portrait of Wartime America. When the owners of the hotel aristocrats made a deal with the State Department, Axis diplomats are detained on the property – for the disintegration of the General Manager June and their employees, many of which have loved loving people fighting abroad. But it is not the only stress below the surface. The hotel sits over a mysterious spring, whose water is said to fix – or exposed – whatever is lie down.
Read it if: You want to find out the weight of moral complexity, resistance and silence in front of injustice.
Memorial Days By Geraldin Brooks
Hot Tech: We live in a culture that does not know what to do with sorrow. Perhaps this makes the brocoles’ Memorial Days So resonant; She does not shy away from the dirt that is moving ahead of this process. After the sudden death of her husband on Memorial Day in 2019, Brooks made the resulting anarchy in this memoir – three years later with a personal pilgrimage – when she continues to navigate new sufferings and old identity.
Read it if: You give importance to memoirs that do not romantic damage, but honor it with care and depth.
director By Daniel Kehlman
We have returned to World War II, but this time through the lens of real -life Austrian filmmaker GW Pabst, Daniel Kehlman was re -designed in a reversal novel directorCredit for discovering icons such as Greta Garbo and Lewis Brooks, Pabast survived Hollywood in the 1930s, later returned to Austria to help her sick mother. There, he gets caught by war and eventually working in Nazi propagation. Kehlman gradually creates stress, always humming in the background, as with wrestling with wrestling with wrestling with wrestling with wrestling. The questions he raises has no easy answer – but you must be thinking for a long time after the last page.
Read it if: You are fascinated by artists caught in impossible options.
