Best Books I Read in 2025 (Literary Fiction, Memoir & Quiet Masterpieces)

Hugo gives you Paris as a living, breathing argument: about beauty, about cruelty, about what a city does to the people it contains. The sadness of this novel isn’t sentimental. It’s structural. Everything in it is built toward what cannot be saved, and the prose earns every moment of it.

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Jones writes horror the way few writers can: with velocity and precision and a specific kind of dread that builds from the inside out. The storytelling here is relentless. The narration keeps you slightly off-balance in exactly the right way. I finished it in two sittings and thought about it for weeks.

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The premise sounds almost comic (cardinals locked in the Sistine Chapel, voting for a new Pope), but Harris turns it into a genuinely tense institutional thriller. The psychological maneuvering is meticulous, the irony is dark, and the ending lands harder than you expect. A novel that understands how power works inside closed systems.

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Epistolary novels live or die by their voices, and this one has excellent ones: warm, distinct, occasionally funny, shaped by occupation and loss in ways that accumulate quietly. It’s a book about how stories sustain people through impossible circumstances, told entirely through the letters of people who know that perfectly well.

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Hendrix is one of the few horror writers working today who understands that the most frightening things are social before they’re supernatural. This one is set in a 1970s home for unwed mothers, where the institution itself is the horror, long before anything else arrives. The characters are fully realized, the period detail is specific, and the ending doesn’t flinch.

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I reread this every year. Every year it’s a different book, or I’m a different reader, which amounts to the same thing. This year, what struck me most was Victor’s refusal: not the creation, but the abandonment afterward, and how everything that follows flows from that single failure of responsibility. Gothic storytelling and philosophical horror in the same sentence, and neither one weakens the other.

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Groff’s selections lean toward strangeness and compression: stories that do more in ten pages than most novels do in three hundred. The range of narrative technique across this collection is worth reading for craft study alone. I marked more pages in this than in almost anything else I read this year.

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A tightly constructed thriller about a college student investigating a decades-old murder to fulfill a class assignment — except the man convicted may not have done it. Eskens builds the story through character as much as through plot, and the redemption at its center is earned rather than sentimental. A book that moves fast and stays with you longer than it should.

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