The best books I read in 2025

I read 50 books in 2025 and here are the ones I think you should read too.

Okay, I know this post is about a month late but I don’t care because time is a concept and book recommendations never go out of style.

I read 50 books in 2025 and the genres were pretty mixed — fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, poetry, memoir. I’ll read anything as long as it’s good.

I didn’t love everything I read (and there’s quite a few books I DNF’d) but others have stood out to me and continued to wriggle under my skin long after I’ve finished them.

The 10 best books I read in 2025 (in no particular order)

Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You by Candice Chung

I’ve reviewed this book previously, so you’ve probably already seen me rave about it, but Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You is a perfect book which meditates on the volatile relationship between food, self and love. It’s honest, authentic, playful, endearing and has so much heart. There's a line in Chung's memoir where she discusses a vulnerable moment and then writes: “It was a lot, I think, on an empty stomach.” I love this idea that the exchange of vulnerability needs to be organised around meals and food. It reminded me of recipe card introductions, which are so maligned because people are like “Get to the recipe already!” when it’s actually an integral part of sharing food is vulnerability!!!

The Tiny Things Are Heavier by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo

This visceral, empathetic, keenly observed novel is confronting in its earnestness and will make you uncomfortable in ways you’ll be grateful for. It follows a young Nigerian woman as she moves to the US for college and the way the relationships she makes there mould and shape her, as well as they complicate her thoughts of home. In some ways it’s a pessimistic novel, in the sense that it explores the often unspoken about (and really, unresolved) ways that power imbalances manifest in our lives, and the way colonial society’s can bring out the worst in us. Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo spoke to some of the most private parts of my psyche via her protagonist Sommy, and it hurt — but in a good way. Sometimes we need to be real with ourselves and the world.

Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah

To be a Muslim and/or Arab person in the media and arts is to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Ultimately, that’s the core of Discipline, which follows two characters — a journalist and an academic — as they try to live with themselves while working in institutions that manufacture consent for genocide. It might sound like a heavy premise, but Discipline is vibrant, funny and hopeful. There’s warm compassion in Randa Abdel-Fattah’s writing, and I think this is a must read for anyone who has worked in the arts in the last two years.

The Everlasting by Alix. E. Harrow

If you feel like most romantasy books are lacking then this sweeping, epic, tender, beautiful and oh so romantic love story is for you. The Everlasting is a time-loop fantasy romance novel between a knight and a scholar who studies her centuries after her death. It’s a story about a lot of things: ownership of stories, academic censorship, how propaganda builds and shapes a nation. It also gets to the heart of what makes knights so compelling: their undying loyalty to their ruler beyond reason, beyond rationale, beyond the crown. A loyalty that is obscene, perverted almost — poisoned. A loyalty that will be their undoing.

This is genuinely a perfect book, I devoured it and I have been aching for something similar ever since. Instead, I keep listening to Drag Path by Twenty One Pilots on repeat.

The Rot by Evelyn Arulean

This was my last read of 2025 — I literally read it while at a New Years Eve party — and it was a breath of fresh air. Witty, sharp and validating, this is a poetry collection for the burned out and cynical “girlypops” who are trying their best to keep their head over water amidst a burning world and self-destructive political system.

Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake

I can’t believe how good Girl Dinner was, TBH. It’s like Olivie Blake saw how disappointed I was with Bunny and Katabasis and wrote a new book for me personally that would address all of my irritations and then do feminist dark academia even better. The story weaves together and enmeshes to competing forms of feminism: the sheo girlboss white feminism of the 2010 Millennial, and the new, more racially diverse, more contradictory TikTok-esque choice feminism of Gen Z, all with a backdrop of cannibalism and cut-throat sorority politics. It doesn’t pull any of its punches, exploring race, sexuality, toxic homoerotic girl friendships, pregnancy and motherhood. It seriously has everything. I already want to read it again.

The Farm by Jessica Mansour-Nahra

Set against the backdrop of isolated NSW countryside, this gothic psychological thriller follows a woman who experiences a traumatic pregnancy loss and then recovers — or tries to — at her in-laws’ farm house. I don’t want to give too much away because this is a story best enjoyed without much context but it explores mental health, pregnancy, coercive control and the way women’s bodies never really belong to them. It’s a feminist anthem and I also plan to reread this one. Another perfect book!

Learned Behaviours by Zeynab Gamieldien

To describe Learned Behaviours as a crime novel feels crass because the story is far more sophisticated, restrained and introspective than the genre implies. Zeynab Gamieldien’s expertly woven mystery novel doubles as an unflinching and defiant interrogation of class and racial marginalisation. This is not a murder mystery that dehumanises the death central to its plot. (This review is an excerpt from my 2025 book column with Missing Perspectives.)

This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Another time-travel romance novel? You freakin’ bet! This lush, lyrical, dreamy love story is my favourite enemies-to-lovers of all time. Red and Blue — time-travelling agents of rival organisations — are enemies equal in skill, but on different sides of the war. They’re always playing a game of cat-and-mouse, and soon they begin to feel a thrilling and forbidden intimacy at how they are the only ones who are able to anticipate each other’s moves. Maybe they’re made for each other?

The scope of this gorgeous story is epic, traversing across time, space and dimensions with breathtaking speed. It’ll knock the wind out of you and you won’t be able to put it down. This one is in my hall of fame.

Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield

This tragic sapphic horror-romance is a deeply romantic and tragic ode to devotion, to love as both a prison and freedom, as creation and destruction. I’ve already reviewed it here but it’s made it into my 2025 wrap up because it’s a book I think about probably once a week.