With the new year’s dawn comes a wave of fresh novels we can’t wait to explore, from family dramas and murder mysteries to a beguiling fantasy about witches and graduate students. Take note of the promising new fiction books below and add them to your 2025 to-read list!
Fiction Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2025
By Stephanie Brown

What Happened to the McCrays?
By Tracey Lange
Kick off your 2025 reading season with this heartwarming tale from master of the family drama Tracey Lange. What Happened to the McCrays? is her newest, and it combines a story of family resilience with a love letter to the power of community and youth hockey. This poignant novel follows Kyle McCray as he returns to the town he left behind to care for his ailing father. Kyle’s friends and colleagues — as well as Casey, his wife of 16 years — are still reeling from his sudden departure. After he takes over as coach for the local middle school hockey team, Kyle begins to see his community in a new light and sets out to make amends with the loved ones he once pushed away.
Publication date: January 14, 2025
Penitence
By Kristin Koval
If you love complex family sagas entwined with a murder mystery, you’ll want to pick up Penitence, the gripping debut by Kristin Koval. After Angie and David’s lives are upended by a murder in their home, they turn to Martine Dumont, a lawyer and the mother of Angie’s first love, Julian. In the aftermath, Angie must confront not only her current devastating situation but her complicated and unresolved feelings for Julian. The page-turner explores the complexities of grief, family, forgiveness, and the legal system as the story moves through time and shifts between rural Colorado and New York City.
Publication date: February 18, 2025
Sike
By Fred Lunzer
If 2025 is anything like 2024, AI’s impact on our lives will continue to dominate the headlines. Luckily, we have writers to help us work through our messy feelings about the intersection of tech and identity. One such writer is former tech researcher Fred Lunzer, whose debut novel, Sike, explores themes of connection, technology, and self-understanding. Adrian, feeling lost after his last failed relationship, decides to try out Sike, a new AI therapy app sold as a way to track your feelings and guide you toward personal happiness. Along this personal journey, Adrian falls for Maquie, a venture capitalist on the hunt for the next app as popular as Sike, even as she refuses to download it. As we switch between their perspectives, we’re taken on a wild exploration of love, technology, and human connection.
Publication date: May 20, 2025
Notes on Infinity
By Austin Taylor
We love a tech-infused relationship story (think Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow or The Startup Wife). That’s why we’re psyched to pick up Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor, which centers on two Harvard students who drop out of school to run a miracle antiaging drug start-up. After meeting in chemistry class and joining a prestigious on-campus lab, Zoe and Zach figure out how to create a potentially groundbreaking antiaging drug. They successfully pitch their work to investors and launch their start-up. Everything is going incredibly well for the two wunderkinds ... until they’re accused of something that could destroy everything they’ve built.
Publication date: June 3, 2025
Sunny Side Up
By Katie Sturino
Fans of Sex in the City and Emily Henry books will fall hard for Sunny Side Up's protagonist, Sunny Greene. A successful business owner and loving dog mom, Sunny is crushed when her happily-ever-after ends in divorce. She finally hits rock bottom trying to find a plus-size swimsuit in Bergdorf Goodman and decides that the only way back up is to begin to accept herself just the way she is. With the same candor and confidence her followers love, body acceptance icon Katie Sturino brings us a Carrie Bradshaw for the next generation.
Publication date: June 24, 2025
Dream Count
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We can’t wait to read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s upcoming novel, her first work of fiction since she published Americanah over a decade ago. Her latest tells the story of four interconnected women living in the U.S. and Nigeria and grappling with the hard choices they’ve had to make. Like all of Adichie’s work, Dream Count grapples with difficult issues of immigration, ambition, identity and belonging, and the nature of love. It’s a beautiful and important narrative. You won’t want to miss what is sure to be one of the most-discussed novels of the year.
Publication date: March 4, 2025
The Antidote
By Karen Russell
From Karen Russell, the bestselling author of Swamplandia!, The Antidote begins on Black Sunday 1935, when a devastating dust storm ravages the Great Plains. After the storm, five outcasts in a small Nebraska town find their fates entangled: a prairie witch who keeps the town’s memories, a Polish wheat farmer and his niece, a basketball star, a scarecrow, and a photographer with a time-traveling camera. With her signature blend of bighearted magical realism, Russell creates richly drawn characters and deft turns of phrase that serve as both a reflection on our country’s past ecological devastation and a warning about our current worsening climate emergency.
Publication date: March 11, 2025
Lovers of Franz K.
By bl-author-name
In this literary tribute to Franz Kafka, Burhan Sönmez tells the story of a fictional assassination attempt on Max Brod, best known as the person who published Kafka’s work after the author’s death. Amid the European student protests of the 1960s, Ferdy Kaplan is arrested in Berlin for the assassination attempt. After making a shocking discovery, though, Ferdy and the West Berlin Police Commissioner must work together to find the truth. A unique exploration of not only Kafka’s work but also immigration, antisemitism, violence, and the Cold War, Lovers of Franz K. is an ideal read for acolytes of history and literature.
Publication date: April 1, 2025
We Do Not Part
By Han Kang
We’re so excited to read the newest work from Nobel Prize winner Han Kang, whose poetic writing explores the connection between historical events and deeply personal human experience. In We Do Not Part, Kang delves into a buried piece of Korean history as Kyungha treks through a dangerous snowstorm to save his friend’s beloved bird. Taking place somewhere between a dream and reality, Kang’s story is a tribute to friendship, memory, and love in the midst of violence.
Publication date: January 21, 2025
The Bewitching
By Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Fantasy fans, get ready: New York Times bestselling author Silvia Moreno-Garcia is back this summer with a tale of witchcraft and horror as three generations of women battle a mysterious evil force. Minerva’s grandmother always said witches lived among her community in early-1900s Mexico. Minerva took the stories with a grain of salt. Yet when she begins researching an obscure horror author from the 1990s, she realizes that her grandmother’s tall tales may have been true — and that otherworldly forces from the past are back to wreak havoc on the present.
Publication date: July 15, 2025
Luminous
By Silvia Park
This highly anticipated debut novel from sci-fi writer Silvia Park follows a pair of siblings working with robots in a future reunified Korea. After losing their humanoid robot brother Yoyo as kids, estranged siblings Jun and Morgan both find themselves working in robot careers as adults: Morgan is a robot designer and Jun is a detective in the Robot Crimes Unit. But when an investigation digs up long-buried secrets, the siblings must find their way back to each other in order to uncover the truth about their past. A stunning work of speculative fiction, Luminous is a must-read examination of what it really means to be human.
Publication date: March 11, 2025
Share with your friends
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
Related Articles
With a new year comes new knowledge to be discovered! From candid memoirs and eye-opening scientific narratives to unflinching true crime accounts, we put together a list of the nonfiction books we’re excited to pick up in 2025.
Celadon delivered
Subscribe to get articles about writing, adding to your TBR pile, and simply content we feel is worth sharing. And yes, also sign up to be the first to hear about giveaways, our acquisitions, and exclusives!
Celadon delivered
"*" indicates required fields