- - The Best Literary Novels of 2025 That You Might’ve Missed

With contributions by Adrienne Gaffney, Claire Stern Milch, Kayleigh Schweiker, and Keely Weiss., Lauren Puckett-PopeDecember 30, 2025 at 1:33 AM

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The Best Literary Fiction of 2025 Courtesy of the Publishers

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I love that literary fiction so often resists easy categorization. I love that this “genre” is not, really, a genre at all. And I especially love that, as literary fiction strains against conventions, it reminds us of language’s simple power.

This year’s best literary novels came from debut novelists and established prize winners alike. Some of these books are love stories, others sagas of art and reckoning. Many wade through decades of complicated history; others attempt to peer into the future. Several are funny; all are profound. Where they diverge in topic and terrain, they align in the truths they reveal through precise, painstaking prose. Below, you’ll find ELLE editors’ picks for the best literary novels of 2025.

Homeseeking by Karissa Chen

“A profound and ambitious work of historical fiction set across six decades, Karissa Chen’s debut, Homeseeking, follows childhood friends and eventual lovers Suchi and Haiwen, who meet first as young students in pre-World War II Shanghai. They fall in love as teens, but war and political strife hurl them down different paths, with Suchi and her family escaping to Hong Kong while Haiwen enlists in the Nationalist Army. They marry other people, only to eventually meet again at a market in Los Angeles, circa 2008. Skillfully intertwining her timelines—Suchi’s moving from past to present, while Haiwen’s traces from present to past—Chen constructs a moving saga of Chinese history through the love and pain of two powerfully rendered protagonists.”—Lauren Puckett-Pope, senior culture editor

G.P. Putnam's Sons

$14.55 at amazon.com

Good Girl by Aria Aber

“When I saw Raven Leilani, author of Luster, quoted on the cover of Good Girl, I knew I had come to the right place. For readers drawn to Elif Batuman’s The Idiot or Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl—or for anyone who’s replayed Babygirl’s club scene more times than they’d care to admit—Good Girl lays bare the realities of class divides, intersectionality, and generational trauma under the glittery, aesthetic sheen of Berlin. On the surface, narrator Nila’s summer hums with substances, fleeting hookups, and endless techno; but at its heart, it’s a season of reckoning: a search for freedom from the systems that have long ‘othered’ her, and for a sense of belonging that feels her own. Rich in its imagery of Berlin’s people, pulse, and thrumming culture, you’ll hardly need to venture on your own Euro trip to taste the nuanced grit of this German city’s underground.”—Kayleigh Schweiker, contributor

Hogarth

$16.61 at amazon.com

We Do Not Part by Han Kang

“Translated from Korean by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, Han Kang’s We Do Not Part is an astounding work from the 2024 Nobel Prize-winning author. Boldly defying simple summary (or easy interpretation), We Do Not Part blends conjured images with real ones as protagonist Kyungha makes her way through a snowstorm from Seoul to Jeju Island—where her newly hospitalized friend’s pet bird is waiting for her, trapped without food or water while its owner recovers. Jeju Island is also the setting of a real-life insurrection and massacre that took place in the late 1940s, during which Korean forces (with backing from the U.S.) killed tens of thousands, and Kang memorializes this history—and the lasting trauma it has wrought—to haunting, poetic effect. This is a book you will not soon forget.”—LPP

Hogarth

$14.00 at amazon.com

Crush by Ada Calhoun

“I’m a big fan of Ada Calhoun’s writing, and Crush is a wild ride. You can’t help but root for the (fictional?) protagonist as she finally embraces the passion she’s been craving and so richly deserves. That said, I’ve got a few lingering questions—specifically about Tom Hanks’s role in all of this…”—Claire Stern Milch, digital director

Viking

$13.99 at amazon.com

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

As featured in ELLE’s best books of spring 2025: “I started hearing chatter about this book’s brilliance well before it hit the New York Times bestseller list, and it’s always a relief when a title lives up to its buzz. A thriller that covers a wide swath of territory within its isolated island setting, Wild Dark Shore follows Dominic Salt and his three children—as well as a mysterious woman named Rowan, who washes ashore at Shearwater, their remote Antarctic home, after a shipwreck. Shearwater itself is a former research base with a seed bank, inspired in part by the real-life Macquarie Island, and the Salts protect a precious resource: the seeds that one day might be called upon to regrow the world’s dwindling—or eradicated—food supply. But both Rowan and the Salts are hiding something, and those secrets could jeopardize their delicate relationships as well as the mission at hand. An atmospheric and affecting work of climate fiction.”—LPP

Flatiron Books

$23.19 at amazon.com

Woodworking by Emily St. James

As featured in ELLE’s best queer books of 2025: “When Erica Skyberg decides to transition, she is 35 years old, recently divorced, and working as an English teacher in rural South Dakota. So she turns for support to the only other trans woman she knows: her 17-year-old student Abigail. At turns hilarious and heartwarming, Emily St. James’s novel follows along as the two form a halting—but increasingly joyful—friendship.”—Keely Weiss, contributor

Crooked Media Reads

$16.59 at amazon.com

Stag Dance by Torrey Peters

As featured in ELLE’s best books of spring 2025 and best queer books of 2025: “In March, author Torrey Peters told me she thinks she’s ‘good at making people feel emotions that they’re surprised to feel.’ After having read her latest novel (or, really, novel-and-stories collection) Stag Dance, I can confirm the book is not only a marvel, but a keen example of what Peters describes above. The Detransition, Baby author has an uncanny ability to steer her readers through emotional mazes they might not otherwise know how to navigate, and in Stag Dance, she does so while leaping between genres and across gender binaries. The titular novel is a western tall tale, following a turn-of-the-century lumberjack who yearns to be perceived as a woman, while the other stories provide doses of sci-fi, horror, coming-of-age, and so on. Stag Dance is already one of my favorite books of the year.”—LPP

Random House

$20.10 at amazon.com

Audition by Katie Kitamura

As featured in ELLE’s best books of spring 2025: “I read Audition last summer, before ELLE.com announced it would be the legendary Katie Kitamura’s next novel, but I can honestly say I have thought about the book at least once a week since I finished it. Audition is purposefully a weird novel to describe—and to read—as it follows an actress whose role in a relationship with a young man keeps shifting as the pages turn. Is he her lover? Her son? Her peer? A stranger? And what does that make her to him? Can she pinpoint the difference between her identity and the performance of that identity, and if not, does it even matter? As always, Kitmura’s prose is hypnotic. Audition is a slim, abstract volume, and as such, some readers’ mileage may vary. But if you can give yourself permission to get lost in its bends and curves, Audition’s payoff is well worth the disorientation.”—LPP

Riverhead Books

$18.08 at amazon.com

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

“This unexpected, now-beloved sleeper hit was originally published in April but became a huge bestseller later in the year. An epistolary novel, The Correspondent centers letter-writer (and letter-lover) Sybil Van Antwerp, a 73-year-old divorcée, retiree, adoptee, mother, gardener, and reader whose life and relationships are revealed via quirky, voice-y, wide-ranging letters with family, friends, former work associates, and even authors including Ann Patchett and Joan Didion. As Sybil grapples with her worsening eyesight in the twilight of her life, the reader will find themselves adoring her, rooting for her, and at times repelled and frustrated by her. Thus is the simple, unique pleasure of The Correspondent, a tenderly wrought character study of a singularly fascinating woman.”—LPP

Crown

$25.18 at amazon.com

The Names by Florence Knapp

As featured in ELLE’s best books of spring 2025: “With The Names, Florence Knapp takes a straightforward speculative premise—what if the name you were given actually determined the path your life would take?—and delivers a grounded, gut-wrenching portrait of the butterfly effect. In the book’s opening pages, Cora faces a choice: She can name her infant son after his father, Gordon, as her abusive husband expects, or she can give him a name that is entirely his own, a ‘liberation.’ In the chapters that follow, Knapp then presents three different versions of this baby’s future: one in which he’s named Bear, another in which he’s Julian, and the third in which he, too, is named Gordon. This book is, at times, a difficult read, and it broke my heart on more than a few occasions. But it’s also a deft and lovely story, one that will hopefully prompt many an important book-club conversation.”—LPP

Pamela Dorman Books

$15.00 at amazon.com

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

As featured in ELLE’s best books of spring 2025 and best queer books of 2025: “When I first received my copy of The Emperor of Gladness, I opened to the first page, read it, closed it, then promptly opened and read it again—aloud—to my husband. Days later, I wept on the subway after finishing a chapter. This book has all the beauty and heart that fans of Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous have come to expect, the author’s poetic command of his prose propelling us through what might be an otherwise slow novel. The story opens with Hai, a Vietnamese teenager in East Gladness, Connecticut, where he considers jumping off a bridge. He is inadvertently rescued by a Lithuanian octogenarian named Grazina, who invites him to become her housemate and caretaker as she deals with dementia. Alongside his unlikely friendship with Grazina, Hai starts a job at a local restaurant, where he befriends a crew of working-class characters whom Vuong makes as rich, vibrant, and cherished as his protagonist. As Hai dodges run-ins with his mother, who believes he’s left Gladness to attend medical school in Boston, he slowly learns to face his greatest fears and deepest losses—and welcome the opportunity for a second chance.”—LPP

Penguin Press

$15.00 at amazon.com

Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle

As featured in ELLE’s best books of spring 2025: “Daria Lavelle’s debut novel, Aftertaste, introduces readers to Ukrainian immigrant Kostya Duhovny, who can commune with the dead—not through Ouija boards or seances, but through their favorite foods. He soon learns that, by preparing dishes for others, he can temporarily reunite them with the spirits of their lost loved ones for one final meal. But as he plans to open a restaurant catering to this clientele, his efforts begin to disturb the afterlife, and the consequences could be dire for more than just Kostya himself. Lavelle’s speculative approach is intriguing enough on its own, but it’s her skillful writing that ultimately makes Aftertaste such an evocative (and, yes, mouthwatering) read.”—LPP

Simon & Schuster

$14.49 at amazon.com

Flashlight by Susan Choi

As featured in ELLE’s best books of summer 2025: “Early in Susan Choi’s latest book, 10-year-old Louisa and her father disappear on a beach. Only one of them will eventually be found. What begins as a standard thriller veers in an unexpected direction as Louisa’s parents’ histories—her mother’s estrangement from her American family and her father’s from his in North Korea—become an inescapable factor in this story from the National Book Award-winning author of Trust Exercise. ”—Adrienne Gaffney, features editor

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

$15.00 at amazon.com

Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin

As featured in ELLE’s best books of summer 2025: “A recent college graduate, David Smith is torn between his two identities—that of a wealthy Stanford grad and of a Black, queer man. When he’s arrested for drug possession, he realizes that the world of elite misbehavior that his friends live in is one that he struggles to fully join. Author Rob Franklin beautifully illustrates the bubbly excesses of youth coming up against the sobering realities of racism, addiction, and violence.”—AG

S&S/Summit Books

$17.61 at amazon.com

The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey

“A Möbius strip is a surface with only one side and one continuous edge, looping in an infinite curve. As its name suggests, Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book is a narrative Möbius strip, both in form and in metaphor. It can be meandered through from either side: One path leads through a novella led by narrator Marie as she reconnects with her decades-long friend Edie, both experiencing and interpreting romantic loss in distinctly different ways; the other unfolds as an intimate memoir, tracing the raw aftermath of romantic abandonment and the self-reflection that accompanies solitude. While grappling with themes like loss, estrangement, and memory, Lacey still managed to leave me laughing at her dialogue, seeing the dynamics of my own past relationships reflected in her narration, and finding verbiage I’ve searched for to describe those close to me (I can name a couple people who seem to me ‘as if the life in [them] was spilling out, rushing out everywhere and into everything.’) At its heart, The Möbius Book captures the aching, familiar way that love and loss circle each other, while emphasizing the inevitable ebb and flow of both romantic and platonic connections.”—KS

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

$17.96 at amazon.com

The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley

As featured in ELLE’s best books of summer 2025: “Adela’s parents are furious when she becomes pregnant at 16, and they quickly send her to live with her grandmother in Florida. But what was intended as a punishment turns into something beautiful. What she finds in her new home is an incredible community of teenage moms, girls who have been looked down on by their community but who have created a family together. Mottley shows that while young mothers face incredible challenges, their lives can still be full of extraordinary love and joy.”—AG

Knopf

$20.34 at amazon.com

The Compound by Aisling Rawle

As featured in ELLE’s best books of summer 2025: “Pitched as Love Island meets Lord of the Flies—which, woof, that’s enough of a heady concoction to draw in readers already—Aisling Rawle’s debut is an intoxicating literary suspense. It takes place on the set of a reality dating competition—filmed in a desert compound sometime in a dystopian future—in which an uneven number of male and female contestants must compete to spend each night with someone of the opposite sex. Along the way, they must complete tasks and competitions for rewards. Some are relatively harmless (‘Wear another girl’s clothes without asking’), while others (‘Banish a couple from the compound’) veer darker. At the center of this game is Lily, who is young, beautiful, and content to do whatever it takes to win. This is a slow-burning but scathing assessment of consumerism, vanity, and our deep-rooted desires to perform.”—LPP

Random House

$18.73 at amazon.com

Wanting by Claire Jia

“Comparison is the thief of joy, or so we’ve all heard—why, then, is it seemingly so impossible to stop? Claire Jia explores this vexing truth in Wanting, which follows childhood best friends Ye Lian and Luo Wenyu, both with seemingly ideal lives: In Beijing, Lian has a dependable job at a college-prep company and an equally dependable boyfriend, with whom she’s planning to marry and move into a luxury condo. Wenyu, meanwhile, has become a famous YouTube influencer in California and is engaged to a Silicon Valley millionaire, with whom she moves back to Beijing. As the two friends settle back into each other’s orbits and begin risky new relationships, the reader is introduced to a third character: architect Song Chen, who’s working on Wenyu’s suburban mansion. As each character reckons with their own doubts, desires, and ‘what ifs,’ Jia builds a compelling, poignant portrait of want and the pain it leaves in its wake.”—LPP

Tin House

$13.80 at amazon.com

Make Your Way Home: Stories by Carrie R. Moore

“Carrie R. Moore’s story collection, Make Your Way Home, features 11 pieces, each zooming in on Black men and women in the American South, where they contend with personal and political history as they seek belonging—or something like it—across a land that Moore renders with as much complexity and care as her characters. The result is a gorgeously written standout debut.”—LPP

Tin House

$16.18 at amazon.com

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens

“‘Reverend Sabre Winfrey, Jr. believed without a shadow of a doubt that an idle mind was the devil’s workshop, but an idle hand belonged on a behind.’ What an opening line—and a telling beginning to Dominion by Addie E. Citchens. The aforementioned Sabre is a Baptist preacher in Dominion, Mississippi, where Citchens sets her tale of religion, hypocrisy, sexual violence, respectability (or lack thereof), secrets, identity, and family cycles. Sabre’s wife, Priscilla, ignores his womanizing with the help of booze and pills, while their youngest son, Manny (or ‘Wonderboy’), begins a sexual relationship with young orphan Diamond, who proclaims she would do ‘just about anything for him’—even if his secrets are far darker and more disturbing than his nickname would suggest. Citchens’s remarkable skill for pointed observation is what really makes this debut novel sing as she slowly peels the layers around the Winfrey family and their church community.”—LPP

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

$21.00 at amazon.com

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy

As featured in ELLE’s best books of fall 2025: “In this brilliant and unexpected novel, The Turner House author Angela Flournoy examines ‘the wilderness period’ that defines early adulthood for five women: Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia. Moving between characters and through the decades from the late 2000s into the late 2020s, The Wilderness is both gorgeously intimate and socially astute—a testament to friendship in an era and at an age that’s impossible to navigate alone.”—LPP

Mariner Books

$22.79 at amazon.com

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

As featured in ELLE’s best books of fall 2025: “With The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, author Kiran Desai told ELLE she set out to ‘write an aching story about how modernity affects our spiritual beings in the elemental matters of love and loneliness.’ The result is a novel befitting the decades it took Desai to write it. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny follows the intertwining titular youth—Sonia Shah, herself an aspiring novelist, and Sunny Bhatia, a journalist—but also their wider families, who first conspire to bring them together. Sweeping in scope and ideas, but immersive enough to carry the reader through nearly 700 pages, this is a feast of a book.”—LPP

Hogarth

$29.00 at amazon.com

Heart the Lover by Lily King

As featured in ELLE’s best books of fall 2025: “I read Lily King’s new novel in one breathless sitting earlier this year, and every minute spent with it was a treasure. King’s Writers and Lovers remains an all-time favorite of mine, so I was unsurprised to find Heart the Lover equally alluring. A campus novel and a love story, Heart the Lover introduces us to three literature students in the 1980s: Sam, Yash, and the narrator, whom they affectionately refer to as Jordan, à la Jordan Baker of The Great Gatsby. Jordan initially goes out with Sam, but soon she realizes the extent of her true feelings for Yash. Decades in the future, the three converge again under heartbreaking circumstances. It’s sentimental, yes, but all the more truthful in its tenderness. Lily King’s latest is indeed for lovers.”—LPP

Grove Press

$26.04 at amazon.com

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar

As featured in the ELLE Spotlight newsletter and ELLE’s best books of fall 2025: “This book made me sit and stare into space for several minutes after I finished it. (And I mean that in the best possible way.) Megha Majumdar has done something remarkable: she wrote a compact, tightly plotted speculative novel featuring a near-future dystopia that feels as raw and real as stepping outside my own apartment. I’ve never visited Majumdar’s hometown of Kolkata, India, but I felt as if I knew it, simply from spending a little time with the titular “guardian” and “thief” at the center of this wrenching novel—who keep switching roles as the story progresses. Majumdar asks big questions about morality and love in the age of climate change, and I found myself wondering how easily I, too, might disregard my ethics if my own family was in danger. No wonder the National Book Awards named A Guardian and a Thief a fiction finalist this year. Read it before all your friends!”—LPP

Knopf

$22.83 at amazon.com

Minor Black Figures: A Novel

As featured in ELLE’s best queer books of 2025: “As sweeping as his 2020 debut Real Life was intimate, Taylor’s much-anticipated third novel follows Wyeth, a young Manhattan-based painter and art restorer who stumbles across the forgotten work of a minor Black artist. As he navigates the glitz of the art world while also wrestling with his own creative block, Wyeth finds himself asking what it means to be a Black artist making Black art.”—KW

Riverhead Books

$25.06 at amazon.com

The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers

As featured in ELLE’s best books of fall 2025: “In an interview with author Erin Somers earlier this fall, ELLE contributor (and fellow author) Ruth Madievsky called her ‘one of the shrewdest observational comics of her generation,’ and The Ten Year Affair ‘the funniest book about infidelity you’ll read all year.’ It’s easy to understand why, as The Ten Year Affair is indeed a dexterous saga of millennial malaise and desire, split into two storylines: one in which the 30-something protagonist, Cora, has an affair with the man she meets at a baby play group; and the other, in which she remains faithful to her husband. Clever, winking, and—as Madievsky put it—‘deeply humane,’ Somers’s latest is a success.”—LPP

Simon & Schuster

$21.00 at amazon.com

This Is the Only Kingdom by Jaquira Díaz

As featured in ELLE’s best books of fall 2025: “‘This Is the Only Kingdom started as a story that was passed down by my father,’ author Jaquira Díaz told ELLE earlier this year, and eventually became—through her imagination and toil—‘the story of a fictional family, set in a fictional place.’ That resulting story opens with a murder, and rewinds to follow protagonist Maricarmen as she meets the singer (and local thief) Rey el Cantante, with whom she gives birth to a daughter, Nena, within their Puerto Rican neighborhood of el Caserío. A sweeping, decade-hopping family saga told with tenderness and nuance, This Is the Only Kingdom deftly tackles queerness, racism, drug addiction, wealth disparity, grief, and the pull of family—both biological and found.”—LPP

Algonquin Books

$19.02 at amazon.com

Only Son by Kevin Moffett

“One of those seemingly small, quiet novels that nevertheless hits you with the weight of a freight train, Only Son employs a potent blend of love and grief to immerse readers in the unnamed narrator’s transition between fatherless son and confused, halting father of his own son. But, of course, there is no true transition between these two identities—rather, they mingle in the narrator’s subconscious, building upon one another, revealing the true complexity of parent-child relationships only in their friction. Love and grief, memory and its loss, presence and absence—each is interwoven by design, as Only Son author Kevin Moffett depicts with tremendous humor and heart.”—LPP

McSweeney's Publishing

$24.00 at amazon.com

Palaver by Bryan Washington

As featured in the ELLE Spotlight newsletter, ELLE’s best books of fall 2025, and best queer books of 2025: “Bryan Washington writes about queer relationships and parent-child tensions like he’s working with a fine-toothed comb. The emotion he manages to convey in a single line of dialogue? Incredible. His latest novel, Palaver, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, is out this week, and it follows an unnamed ‘mother’ and ‘son’ wrestling with their estranged relationship when the mother unexpectedly visits the son in Tokyo, where he’s purposefully put distance between himself and his family in Houston. This is a beautiful, beautiful book.”—LPP

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

$21.94 at amazon.com

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