Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner (announced May 2025). Retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective; transformed from supporting figure to full-voiced protagonist.
#2
Intermezzo (Sally Rooney)
Rooney's fourth novel, published September 2024 and a defining literary read of 2025. Two grieving brothers, chess, and the relationships orbiting them.
#3
The Message (Ta-Nehisi Coates)
Coates's 2024-25 essay collection on writing, Senegal, Palestine, and the responsibility of public memory. Critically polarising; influential among writers.
#4
Nexus (Yuval Noah Harari)
Harari's 2024 history of information networks from Stone Age to AI. Argues that humanity's near-term challenge is governing AI-mediated reality.
#5
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Salman Rushdie)
Rushdie's 2024 memoir of surviving the 2022 stabbing. Direct, urgent, and (despite the subject) often unexpectedly funny.
#6
Supremacy (Parmy Olson)
FT Business Book of the Year 2024. The inside story of OpenAI vs DeepMind vs Anthropic in the race for AGI. Definitive contemporary AI-industry history.
#7
Co-Intelligence (Ethan Mollick)
Mollick's 2024 guide to working with LLMs as colleagues, not tools. The most-cited business book of 2024-25 in AI-adoption circles.
#8
The Coming Wave (Mustafa Suleyman)
Suleyman's 2023-24 case for containment of AI and synthetic biology. Continues to anchor policy conversations in 2025.
#9
The Anxious Generation (Jonathan Haidt)
Haidt's 2024 argument that smartphones rewired adolescence. Defining education-policy book of 2024-25; UK and Australia debating phone bans citing it.
#10
Slow Productivity (Cal Newport)
Newport's 2024 follow-up to Deep Work. Three principles: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality. Influential among knowledge workers.
#11
Sandwich (Catherine Newman)
Cape Cod family novel about midlife, grown children, ageing parents, marriage. Critically acclaimed 2024 release; long on quiet observation.
#12
Liberation Day (George Saunders)
Saunders's 2022 story collection that continues to dominate post-pandemic short-story discourse. Increasingly studied in MFA programs.
#13
Not the End of the World (Hannah Ritchie)
Ritchie's 2024 data-driven optimist take on climate, food, energy, biodiversity. Important counterweight to climate-doom narratives.
#14
Doppelganger (Naomi Klein)
Klein's 2023-24 reckoning with being confused with Naomi Wolf. Becomes a meditation on the mirror world of conspiracy and brand-self.
#15
Why Machines Learn (Anil Ananthaswamy)
2024 mathematical history of deep learning — from McCulloch-Pitts neurons to transformers. The most readable serious technical history of ML.
#16
The Singularity Is Nearer (Ray Kurzweil)
Kurzweil's 2024 update to The Singularity Is Near. Doubles down on 2029 AGI / 2045 singularity timelines; continues to influence accelerationist thinking.
#17
Elon Musk (Walter Isaacson)
Isaacson's 2023 biography is the reference work of the post-Twitter-acquisition Musk era. Heavily cited in any contemporary tech-history discussion.
#18
Hidden Potential (Adam Grant)
Grant's 2023-24 book on talent vs achievement. Argues skill development matters more than innate ability; influential in education and L&D.
#19
Excellent Advice for Living (Kevin Kelly)
Kelly's 2023 collection of 450 maxims accumulated over a lifetime. Compact, surprising, widely re-quoted on social.
#20
Determined (Robert Sapolsky)
Sapolsky's 2023 argument against free will. Difficult, rigorous, and one of the most widely-discussed neuroscience books of the year.
#21
The Wager (David Grann)
Grann's 2023 narrative history of a British naval disaster off Patagonia in 1741. Reads like a novel; the best historical non-fiction of 2023-25.
#22
Killers of the Flower Moon (David Grann)
Grann's earlier book continued its 2023-25 surge thanks to the Scorsese film. The Osage murders; the founding of the FBI.
#23
The Anxious Generation Workbook
Haidt + Lukianoff 2025 companion that gives schools and parents concrete steps from the original book.
#24
The Bee Sting (Paul Murray)
Murray's 2023 epic novel that won 2025 attention via Booker shortlisting and TV adaptation. Irish family unravelling at slow pace.
#25
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin)
Zevin's 2022 novel about videogame designers continues to be one of the most-read literary novels of 2023-25.
#26
Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver)
Kingsolver's 2022 Dickens-inspired Appalachian opioid-crisis novel. Pulitzer + Women's Prize winner; continues as a 2024-25 book-club favourite.
#27
Lessons in Chemistry (Bonnie Garmus)
Garmus's 2022 debut — feminist 1960s scientist-housewife novel that became an Apple TV+ hit. Still dominates book-club selections.
#28
Trust (Hernan Diaz)
Pulitzer-winning 2022 novel — four nested narratives about a fictional Gilded Age financier and his wife. Major HBO adaptation in development.
#29
The Covenant of Water (Abraham Verghese)
Verghese's 2023 multi-generational Kerala novel. Oprah's Book Club pick; one of the most-recommended literary novels of 2023-25.
#30
Babel (R. F. Kuang)
Kuang's 2022 alternate-history novel of translation, empire, and revolution at Oxford. Continues as one of the most-recommended literary-SFF novels.
#31
Yellowface (R. F. Kuang)
Kuang's 2023 satire of publishing, race, and online discourse. Reading-group fodder that's only become more relevant in 2024-25.
#32
Crook Manifesto (Colson Whitehead)
Whitehead's 2023 sequel to Harlem Shuffle. Crime trilogy continues; the third volume expected 2025-26.
#33
Birnam Wood (Eleanor Catton)
Catton's 2023 eco-thriller. Booker winner returns with guerrilla gardeners and a sinister tech billionaire.
#34
Western Lane (Chetna Maroo)
Maroo's 2023 Booker-shortlisted debut. Squash, grief, and family; spare and powerful.
#35
Prophet Song (Paul Lynch)
Lynch's 2023 Booker-winning novel of an Ireland sliding into authoritarianism. Becoming canonical reading in 2024-25.
#36
How to Say Babylon (Safiya Sinclair)
Sinclair's 2023 memoir of growing up Rastafarian in Jamaica. National Book Critics Circle winner; major 2024-25 audiobook.
#37
Master Slave Husband Wife (Ilyon Woo)
Pulitzer-winning 2023 biography of an enslaved couple's escape from antebellum Georgia by passing as white slaveholder and Black valet.
#38
Poverty, by America (Matthew Desmond)
Desmond's 2023 follow-up to Evicted. Argues that US poverty persists because affluent Americans benefit from it. Driving 2024-25 policy conversation.
#39
King: A Life (Jonathan Eig)
Eig's 2023 biography of Martin Luther King Jr. Pulitzer winner; the first major MLK biography in decades to use newly-available FBI files.
#40
Going Infinite (Michael Lewis)
Lewis's 2023 Sam Bankman-Fried book. Notoriously controversial reception — sympathetic at a moment of public revulsion. Read alongside Number Go Up.
#41
Number Go Up (Zeke Faux)
Faux's 2023 crypto-industry investigation. Counterweight to Going Infinite; tighter on the actual fraud machinery.
#42
Cobalt Red (Siddharth Kara)
Kara's 2023 investigation of cobalt mining in DRC. Driving 2024-25 supply-chain regulation conversations and corporate human-rights audits.
#43
Doppelganger (Naomi Klein, paperback)
Klein's 2024 paperback rolled with an updated afterword. Continues to be one of the most-discussed 2023-25 nonfiction books on identity and conspiracy.
#44
Build the Life You Want (Arthur Brooks & Oprah Winfrey)
Brooks/Winfrey's 2023 happiness/positive-psych book that became a 2024-25 phenomenon thanks to The Atlantic column franchise.
#45
Outlive (Peter Attia)
Attia's 2023 longevity manifesto. Continues to drive an enormous wellness-conversation in 2024-25 around 'Medicine 3.0' and Centenarian Decathlon.
#46
Same as Ever (Morgan Housel)
Housel's 2023 follow-up to The Psychology of Money. Argues that what doesn't change matters more than what does.
#47
The Creative Act (Rick Rubin)
Rubin's 2023 meditation on creativity. Continues to be one of the most-gifted books in creative-professional circles in 2024-25.
#48
Right Story Wrong Story (Tyson Yunkaporta)
Yunkaporta's 2024 indigenous-philosophy book on framing, sense-making, and the 'cognitive monoculture' of modern life.
#49
Shy (Mary Rodgers + Jesse Green)
Rodgers's 2022 oral memoir that achieved cult status in 2023-25 thanks to Jesse Green's enormous footnotes. Broadway lore at its richest.
#50
Cobalt Red — paperback (Kara)
2024 paperback edition that expanded distribution; cited heavily in EU Battery Regulation conformity assessments.
#51
The Maniac (Benjamín Labatut)
Labatut's 2023 novel about John von Neumann, AlphaGo, and the maniacal pursuit of knowledge. Acclaimed across European literary press.
#52
When We Cease to Understand the World (Labatut)
Labatut's 2020 predecessor to The Maniac continues to be widely read in 2024-25. Quantum mechanics history as literary terror.
#53
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (James McBride)
McBride's 2023 National Book Critics Circle winner. Pennsylvania immigrant-Jewish-and-Black community in the 1930s. Beloved across reading groups.
#54
Wellness (Nathan Hill)
Hill's 2023 follow-up to The Nix. Midlife marriage, algorithmic identity, post-truth America.
#55
The Fraud (Zadie Smith)
Smith's 2023 historical novel of the Tichborne case. Critical favourite; quieter commercial reception than expected.
#56
Held (Anne Michaels)
Michaels's 2024 novel — multi-generational meditation on memory, art, and love. Carries on the lineage of her Fugitive Pieces.
#57
Lazarus Man (Richard Price)
Price's 2024 Harlem-set novel of a building collapse and its aftermath. The kind of street-level novel only Price writes.
#58
Long Island (Colm Tóibín)
Tóibín's 2024 sequel to Brooklyn. Eilis returns to Enniscorthy 20 years later; among 2024's most-anticipated literary releases.
#59
Headshot (Rita Bullwinkel)
Bullwinkel's 2024 debut novel — eight teenage girl boxers in a Reno tournament. Booker-shortlisted; critically rapturous.
#60
Creation Lake (Rachel Kushner)
Kushner's 2024 Booker-shortlisted spy novel set in southwest France. Surveillance, eco-cults, prehistoric humans.
#61
All Fours (Miranda July)
July's 2024 novel — a 45-year-old artist breaks from her marriage for a fugue of self-discovery in a Best Western. Defining 2024-25 conversation novel.
#62
Tell Me Everything (Elizabeth Strout)
Strout's 2024 novel re-uniting Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge. A late-career masterclass in voice and structure.
#63
Pearl (Siân Hughes)
Hughes's 2023 Booker-longlisted debut. Loss, motherhood, an English village, the medieval poem 'Pearl'.
#64
How to Win Friends and Manipulate People (Henry Brody)
Brody's 2024 satirical takedown of self-help. One of the more interesting metaphysical comedy novels of the year.
#65
Cleopatra and Frankenstein (paperback) (Coco Mellors)
Mellors's 2022 New York novel continued to dominate young-literary fiction shelves through 2024-25.
#66
Blue Sisters (Coco Mellors)
Mellors's 2024 follow-up. Three estranged sisters returning to their childhood home after a fourth sister's death.
#67
Margo's Got Money Troubles (Rufi Thorpe)
Thorpe's 2024 novel — single mother, OnlyFans, professional wrestling. Comedy meets economic precarity.
#68
The God of the Woods (Liz Moore)
Moore's 2024 missing-children thriller set at an Adirondack camp. NYT bestseller; major audiobook reception.
#69
We Solve Murders (Richard Osman)
Osman's 2024 new series following the Thursday Murder Club. Bestseller in the UK; comfort-cozy mystery dominance continues.
#70
The Ministry of Time (Kaliane Bradley)
Bradley's 2024 debut — a time-travel-from-the-Arctic-1840s romance that became one of the most-shared literary books of the year.
#71
Service Model (Adrian Tchaikovsky)
Tchaikovsky's 2024 novel — a butler robot becomes the lone witness to civilizational collapse. SFF/literary crossover.
#72
The Tainted Cup (Robert Jackson Bennett)
Bennett's 2024 fantasy mystery — Sherlock-meets-Bas-Lag. First in a planned trilogy; the best-reviewed SFF novel of 2024.
#73
James (paperback) (Everett)
Paperback release of Percival Everett's Pulitzer-winning novel; expanded its already huge 2024-25 reach.
#74
Erasure (paperback re-issue, Everett)
Re-issued alongside the American Fiction film and James. Everett's 2001 satire of literary 'authenticity' is now widely read.