It seems like just yesterday we were unveiling our Spring 2025 Preview and compiling lists of all the books we were excited to crack open in the year to come. Now the year is drawing to a close, and it’s time to look in the rearview mirror at those titles that really lived up to the hype, along with some terrific reads we didn’t see coming.

Yes, it’s time for our Best Books of 2025 coverage. Pull up a chair, because we have a lot of books to talk about: 600, to be exact. The party kicks off Monday, November 10, with adult fiction, followed by nonfiction on November 17. Editors Laurie Muchnick and John McMurtrie offer introductions to both lists, and then we hear from some of the authors whose works made the cut; look for Q&As with novelist Charlotte McConaghy (Wild Dark Shore), literary historian Stephen Greenblatt (Dark Renaissance), and food writer Betty Fussell (How To Cook a Coyote), among others. As always, we have many sublists derived from our master lists, including the Best Historical Fiction of 2025, Best Translated Fiction of 2025, and Best Biographies of 2025.

And we’re just getting started. In the coming weeks we roll out lists of the best children’s books (picture books and middle grade), young adult books, and Indie books, along with more author Q&As and sublists, plus a holiday gift guide with more than 200 suggestions for every kind of reader, young and old, in your life. To close out the year, we offer reconsiderations of book-to-screen adaptations, audiobooks, book news, and the authors we lost.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you toward some favorites from my own reading over the past 12 months. Rob Franklin’s Great Black Hope (Summit, June 10) is the kind of debut novel you dream of stumbling upon: a gripping narrative relayed in a voice whose confidence entrances you from the very first page. This story of a privileged young Black man and the recreational drug purchase that puts his life in a tailspin has stayed with me all year; I’m eager to see what this author does next.

Unlike Franklin, Ian McEwan is a veteran fiction writer with 20 books (and one Booker Prize) to his name. But the verve of his latest, What We Can Know (Doubleday, September 23) is undimmed—in fact, it may be his best book in years. At once a literary treasure hunt, a dystopian cli-fi tale, and a meditation on historical memory, it’s also an indisputable page-turner.

Finally, as a longtime fan of Arundhati Roy’s fiction, I reveled in her powerful memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me (Scribner, September 2), a Kirkus Prize finalist earlier this year. A writer’s life story isn’t always inherently interesting, but Roy’s larger-than-life mother and history of political activism, presented with a novelist’s flair, are mesmerizing.

We hope you’ll stay for the entire party, then raise a glass with us to the promising titles headed our way in 2026. Cheers!

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.