Looking for your next great read? We’ve compiled a list of some of the most compelling novels hitting shelves in 2025. From gripping historical fiction to insightful contemporary dramas, these books are already generating buzz. Dive in and discover your next favorite author!
1. The Director by Daniel Kehlmann (Translated by Ross Benjamin)
Daniel Kehlmann, known for blending fact and fiction, turns his attention to Austrian film director G.W. Pabst. As Malcolm Forbes noted in The Washington Post, Kehlmann’s latest, following the acclaimed Measuring the World, delves into the life of Pabst, who discovered stars like Greta Garbo. Pabst, forced to remain in Germany during World War II and direct Nazi-sponsored films after returning to visit his sick mother, found his reputation all but destroyed.
Nina Allan in The Guardian praised Kehlmann for fostering “aching sympathy” for Pabst, portraying him caught in a situation “beyond his control.” This “captivating” and “thoroughly satisfying” novel is considered “Kehlmann’s best work yet,” offering “glittering unease of a modern Grimms’ fairy tale.”
2. To Rest Our Minds and Bodies by Harriet Armstrong
Harriet Armstrong’s debut injects fresh life into the campus novel genre. Laura Hackett in The Sunday Times highlights how these tales have evolved from “funny ha-ha” satires to “funny weird” explorations of student life. Armstrong’s novel follows a psychology student grappling with an “unhealthy obsession with an older student.” Unlike Sally Rooney’s characters, Armstrong’s narrator is refreshingly relatable in her ordinariness, navigating essay anxieties, “nightmarish one-night stand[s],” and flashes of pomposity, creating a “highly convincing portrait of what it’s like to be 21.”
3. Albion by Anna Hope
The classic English country house novel gets a contemporary twist in Anna Hope’s Albion. Following their father’s death, three middle-aged siblings – Frannie, Milo, and Isa – must decide the fate of their family’s 1,000-acre estate. While The Times’ Laura Hackett praised the novel’s “shocking” and “well worth the wait” climax, Christopher Shrimpton in The Guardian found its handling of inherited wealth and “intergenerational justice” clumsy, overshadowing an otherwise “engaging” family drama. However, Lily Herd of Literary Review countered, deeming Albion “exquisitely put together” and commending Hope’s “expert[] handling” of complex ethical questions.
4. I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan
Róisín Lanigan’s “absorbing and eerie debut novel” is a horror story centered on the London rental market, as described by Emily Lawford in The Times. It follows Áine, an Irish twenty-something, as she moves into a mold-ridden flat and becomes convinced it’s haunted, a belief her rational boyfriend dismisses. The novel is “hugely enjoyable,” brimming with “wry observations about the status markers of modern life.”
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in The Guardian noted that “all rented properties are haunted” to an extent, making Lanigan’s premise resonate. Despite minor flaws, the book is praised for its “sharp satire,” intelligence, humor, and ability to “get under my skin in a way that made me shiver.”
5. The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
Ben Markovits’s “fluently written and effortlessly wise” 12th novel introduces Tom Layward, a 55-year-old American law professor whose life unravels after his younger daughter leaves for college. Twelve years after his wife’s affair, Tom, having promised himself he’d leave, abandons his life and drives west. Alex Preston in The Observer describes this as “less a road trip than an act of attrition” as Tom “drifts through the wreckage of his past,” besieged by health issues and a “professional implosion.”
Markovits is hailed by Marcel Theroux in The Guardian as “one of the most astute novelists of modern America,” delivering an “elegant, devastating” and “brilliant” portrait of life’s “difficult middle passage.”
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6. The Mouthless Dead by Anthony Quinn
Anthony Quinn tackles the infamous 1931 murder of Julia Wallace in his “intensely readable” historical novel, as described by Alexander Larman in The Observer. The case, where her husband William was initially convicted and then acquitted, has remained unsolved. Quinn’s “bold” narrative, according to Sue Gaisford in the Financial Times, sets the “main action” 16 years later on a transatlantic liner, where a retired detective recounts the case to a young couple eager to make a film. Interspersed with flashbacks, the novel builds to a “fearsome truth” and a thrilling conclusion that evokes “the encouraging shadow of Patricia Highsmith.”
7. Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett
Adam Haslett, celebrated for his “incandescently smart and elegant” writing, delivers a “complex portrait” of the fraught relationship between a mother and son in Mothers and Sons. Alex Preston in The Observer calls it a work of “quiet beauty” that feels “as deep and real as life itself.” John Self in the Financial Times details the story of Peter Fischer, a “gay, 40-year-old asylum lawyer” haunted by a childhood trauma, and his estranged mother, Ann, who left Peter’s father for a woman. Haslett “wears his novelist’s skills lightly,” weaving their stories “closer and closer” in a “symphonic and satisfying” tale.
8. Three Days In June by Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler’s 25th novel, Three Days In June, continues her tradition of exploring family life in Baltimore with her signature “clear-eyed but kindly” tone, as James Walton noted in The Times. The story unfolds around Gail, 61, whose daughter’s wedding rehearsal is thrown into disarray when she loses her job and her “unruly ex-husband,” Max, arrives. Rohan Maitzen in The TLS describes how the story of their divorce “gradually unspools,” leading to the “modest epiphanies of reconciliation” that define Tyler’s work. Readers can expect satisfaction in witnessing the inevitable unfold.
9. Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse (Translated by Damion Searls)
Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse’s “haunting two-part novella,” Morning and Evening, published in an “elegant translation by Damion Searls,” viscerally captures the “liminality of life,” according to Yagnishsing Dawoor in The Observer. The first part describes a child’s birth from the anxious father’s perspective. The longer second part follows the adult Johannes, now an old man, as he goes about his morning routine, experiencing an overpowering sense that “everything” is “different.”
Houman Barekat in the Financial Times reveals the eventual realization: Johannes has died and become a ghost. This “work of graceful, spine-tingling beauty” explores the “first and last days” of a man’s life in Fosse’s distinctive, minimalist prose.
10. Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante (Translated by Jenny McPhee)
Elsa Morante, a significant influence on Elena Ferrante, is finally receiving her due in Britain with the “artful” translation of her 1948 debut, Lies and Sorcery, by Jenny McPhee. Catherine Taylor in The Telegraph describes it as a “magnificent three-generation family saga.” Narrated by the “singularly eccentric” Elisa, the 800-page novel delves into the “staggering and absorbing” history of her grandmother, mother, and her own “pain-filled childhood” in a Sicilian courtesan’s household.
Despite its sometimes bewildering narrative of “mismatched marriages, lives constructed on false pretences,” and heartbreak, Francesca Peacock in The Spectator calls it “nothing short of a triumph,” while Vivian Gornick in The New York Times praises its “deep, dense and psychologically penetrating” writing, dubbing it a “door-stopper of an Italian soap opera.”
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