Cancel your plans for the foreseeable future—besides book club meet-ups—and make sure your library card is in good working order, because 2025 is on track to be an incredible year for novels, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "booked and busy." (Get it?) Fiction books from beloved and award-winning writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Suzanne Collins, Fredrik Backman, and Taylor Jenkins Reid are already on the calendar. We’re also likely to find some new favorites in the bevy of debut works set to come from promising up-and-coming authors, some of whom have already made deals to bring their first books to the screen.
To get your TBR list of the year started, we’ve rounded up the best novels of 2025 that are coming soon. Though they span nearly every fiction genre—from lit fic to suspense to speculative sci-fi, and everything in between—they barely scratch the surface of this year’s seemingly endless docket of page-turners, so be sure to keep checking back throughout the year for updates to this list.
Release date: January 7
Fans of Station Eleven and other dystopian survival stories, this one’s for you. It takes place in N.Y.C. after all the glaciers have melted and follows a girl living with her family in a settlement atop the American Museum of Natural History. They’re eventually forced to leave the city and sail north, hopefully to safety, which ends up being a journey that carries them past many others who have found their own ways to survive in the strange new world.
Release date: January 14
This thriller-y, horror-y new entry from the author of the bestseller The Final Girl Support Group is set in the ‘70s at a home for “wayward girls,” a.k.a. unwed pregnant women, who have been forced into bleak, strictly monitored lives. When one of the residents is given a book about witchcraft, the girls finally have a chance to experience power—including both the upsides and downsides of it.
Release date: January 28
Wilkerson’s extremely moving debut novel Black Cake was a massive hit and adapted into a Hulu series in 2023. Good Dirt promises to be just as buzzy: It’s another sweeping, multi-generational story that follows a woman as she dives into not only the unsolved murder of her brother nearly two decades before but also the closely connected history of a family heirloom that was destroyed the same day.
Release date: February 25
Garza won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for her nonfiction investigation into her sister’s 1990 murder, Liliana’s Invincible Summer. Though Death Takes Me—originally published in Spanish and translated into English by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker—is technically fiction, it’s another powerfully written exploration of gendered violence featuring a character with Garza’s name.
Release date: March 4
Over a decade since her last novel, Americanah author Adichie’s long-awaited next novel follows four women across the U.S. and Nigeria. A writer, lawyer, finance maven, and housekeeper, all four of the main characters are on their own paths toward learning how to love and be loved amid the turbulence of family, work, relationships, and life in general.
Release date: March 4
Lalami’s last book, the National Book Award-shortlisted The Other Americans, was a tangly crime story. This time around, she takes on another unputdownable genre: speculative fiction. The Dream Hotel is set in a world in which the government uses algorithms to analyze dreams in an attempt to prevent crimes from happening and lock up the alleged future criminals in terrifyingly strict facilities. You know, just in case you want to become even more worried about our society’s growing reliance on AI!
Release date: March 11
Comedy and crime don’t always mix, but they do perfectly here. Harman’s debut novel stars Florence, a single mother whose 10-year-old son becomes the lead suspect in the disappearance of his bully. Florence, a former girl band star and party girl, takes on the task of clearing her son’s name, and hilarious, twisty chaos ensues. If that sounds like the makings of a perfect TV show, fear not: The creator of The Bear is already on it over at FX.
Release date: March 11
The Antidote tracks a cast of characters living through the Dust Bowl in Nebraska. But, because this is a Karen Russell book, it’s not your average historical fiction: One of the characters is a “Prairie Witch” who stores memories and secrets in her body, and the whole tale is easily (and powerfully) translated to our longstanding tendency to gloss over the messy parts of history, as well as our current-day climate crisis.
Release date: March 18
This one sounds perfect for fans of The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue and basically all of Dolly Alderton’s work. It follows a pair of best friends in—you guessed it—their early 30s who must finally start growing up and building the adult lives they want and, in the process, must relearn the outlines of their best friendship.
Release date: March 18
If the cover of Hot Air isn’t enough to draw you in, the synopsis surely will be. Joannie arrives in Johnny’s backyard for her first date in seven years, only to have her childhood crush, Jonathan, now a billionaire, and his wife Julia crash their hot-air balloon into Johnny’s pool, setting up a very tangly love quadrangle.
Release date: March 18
The Hunger Games books might technically be classified as YA, but adults can get plenty out of the beloved (and terrifying) dystopian series, too, whether or not you’ve been following the series since 2008. Years after publishing the original trilogy, Collins returned with a prequel in 2020, and this newest entry falls between the two. It’s set during the 50th annual Hunger Games, featuring Katniss’ mentor Haymitch. The games that year infamously drew double the amount of child tributes into the killing competition. Bonus: We won't have to wait long to see it onscreen, as a movie version is already in development for a 2026 release.
Release date: April 8
You won't really know what Audition is about until you read it (and even then, you may have trouble deciding what and who to believe). Described as a “Möbius strip of a novel,” it flips back and forth between a pair of narratives that intertwine and contradict each other for a sharp exploration of the performances we put on every day.
Release date: May 20
If Backman’s previous novels are any indication, you’ll want a box of tissues handy while diving into My Friends. It’s a dual-timeline story where, in the present day, a young woman is on a mission to uncover the identities of a group of people featured in the corner of a famous painting, and 25 years earlier, a group of teenage best friends is building a powerful found family.
Release date: June 3
Jenkins Reid is an expert at weaving stories of complicated women throughout the 20th century, so we have high hopes for her next novel. Atmosphere is set in the 1980s NASA Space Shuttle program and centers on Joan, a professor who gets the chance to go to space with a crew of equally passionate characters.
Release date: June 17
There’s been no shortage of feminist retellings of ancient myths and classics in recent years, and this next one definitely deserves a place on your shelf. With elements of horror and suspense, it revisits Euripides’ The Bacchae, following a woman drawn in by a cult of women who appear to be living much more freely than she’s been allowed to.
