Most anticipated fiction of 2025

Like a costume party, 2025’s fiction requires a certain willingness to get weird for entry. With new work from novelists like these, we’re just happy to be invited.
Available 01/14/2025
Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction

Death of the Author

By Nnedi Okorafor

We can never resist a book within a book, and Nnedi Okorafor (Who Fears Death, She Who Knows) has pulled one off brilliantly here: Though Death of the Author begins as the near-future story of a Nigerian American writer’s rise to fame, embedded within it is a sci-fi tale about a robot and AI-ruled Earth. This clever expansion beyond her usual hard sci-fi and fantasy will surely introduce the highly lauded Africanfuturist author to legions of new fans.

Available 01/21/2025
Literary Fiction

We Do Not Part

By Han Kang, Translated by e. yaewon, Translated by Paige Aniyah Morris

Han Kang’s novels reflect human nature across what she described—in an interview with BookPage about The Vegetarian—as “a spectrum that stretches from holiness to horror.” Han was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for the fierceness with which she “confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Her abilities are at their most undeniable and radiant in We Do Not Part, which tells the story of an author haunted by having written a book about the 1980 massacre in Gwangju, Korea, who braves an overpowering snowstorm to do a favor for her friend.

Available 03/04/2025
Literary Fiction

Wild Dark Shore

By Charlotte McConaghy

Bestselling Australian author Charlotte McConaghy does a lot of research for her ecologically informed novels: Her first two books to be published in the U.S., Migrations and Once There Were Wolves, required her to investigate Arctic terns and Scotland’s gray wolves. Her latest, Wild Dark Shore, takes a seed bank on an island near Antarctica as its setting, where rising sea levels have driven away all human caretakers except for one man, Dominic Salt, and his children . . . until a mysterious woman named Rowan washes ashore in a storm.

Available 03/04/2025
Family Drama, Popular Fiction

I Leave It Up to You

By Jinwoo Chong

This is a charming premise: After a 23-month coma, Jack Jr. wakes up to find his Manhattan life has evaporated and a global pandemic has set in. Where in this bewildering new world can he begin again? At his Umma and Appa’s sushi restaurant, back in Jersey. Jinwoo Chong, the author of Flux, offers guaranteed laughter and even a chance of romance in this promising sophomore novel.

Available 03/11/2025
Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

The Antidote

By Karen Russell

The gorgeous language and fantastical premises Karen Russell (Orange World and Other Stories, Swamplandia!) employs are always animated by deep feeling and big ideas. The Antidote (only her second novel!), shares that depth and heft: It opens with the April 1935 “Black Sunday” dust storm enveloping the tiny town of Uz, Nebraska. Uz is home to a prairie witch, known as the Antidote, who possesses the ability to store memories that her neighbors would rather not retain themselves. But when the darkness and terror passes, the Antidote discovers that it has blown away all the memories she’d kept for the townspeople along with their topsoil. Russell unspools a story of holding on to community through hardship that’s also an investigation of what has been omitted from American memory, and how we could reclaim it.

Available 03/11/2025
Short Stories

Stag Dance

By Torrey Peters

We would kill for another novel from Torrey Peters, author of the simultaneously heart-wrenching and deeply entertaining Detransition, Baby—but we’ll settle for a novella and three stories. Each of these pulls Peters’ style in a new direction, with the titular novella featuring a “stag dance” among isolated overwintering lumberjacks.

Available 03/18/2025
Comic Fiction, Popular Fiction

Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One

By Kristen Arnett

Send in the clowns! Kristen Arnett (With Teeth, Mostly Dead Things) is back and more absurd than ever. Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One follows Cherry Hendricks, a struggling clown for hire who is finding her life to be more a cause for tears than hilarity. Then she meets an older magician, Margot the Magnificent, and becomes both inspired and smitten. If this sounds familiar, you might have recently watched Chappell Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova” music video (or is that just me?), which will certainly get you in the spirit of things.

Available 03/18/2025
Historical Fiction

The Paris Express

By Emma Donoghue

The author of Room also writes some seriously good historical fiction, like 2023’s Learned by Heart, which fictionalized the youth of Anne Lister. The Paris Express, set later in the 19th century, follows a large cast of characters, each with their own reasons for taking a train to Paris—one of whom is an anarchist with a plan to derail the fated trip.

Available 03/18/2025
Literary Fiction

Theft

By Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah (Afterlives) returns with his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021. Set at the turn of the 21st century in Tanzania, Theft follows Karim, Fauzia and Badar, three young people lacking support from their families attempting to make their lives in rapidly changing Zanzibar.

Available 03/25/2025
Literary Fiction

Twist

By Colum McCann

The Dublin-born author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin, for which he won the National Book Award, Colum McCann returns to his Irish roots in his eighth novel, Twist, which tells the story of Irish journalist Anthony Fennell’s reportage on the underwater fiber-optic cables that transfer the world’s host of digital information. Repairing these cables to maintain the flow of the vital data they carry requires fast action by engineer divers, one of whom Anthony forms a close connection with as he accompanies a cable repair ship on a mission off the west coast of Africa.

Available 04/08/2025
Literary Fiction

Mỹ Documents

By Kevin Nguyen

Mỹ Documents takes place in a contemporary America where the government is forcing Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. High schooler Duncan and first year college student Jen are both detained with their mother, but their journalist half-sibling Ursula remains on the outside and begins reporting on their situation. The author of New Waves, Kevin Nguyen is a journalist, and he brings a sharp sense of journalistic ethics to this tale, which also reflects the U.S. government’s ongoing detention of immigrants and internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s.

Available 04/15/2025
Literary Fiction, Satire

Vanishing World

By Sayaka Murata, Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

In 2018, Sayaka Murata’s first novel to be translated into English, Convenience Store Woman, was a surprise hit, becoming remarkably popular for a book so openly critical of social precepts in a way that was both culturally specific to Japan and also resonant for an American audience and across the globe. Murata took her quietly radical ideas about marriage, sex and conformity and only made them louder in Earthlings. Vanishing World appears to go even further, set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples is taboo.

Available 05/13/2025
Literary Fiction

The Emperor of Gladness

By Ocean Vuong

It’s been six years since Ocean Vuong’s fiction debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and although fans drank down his 2022 poetry offering, Time Is a Mother, anticipation for a second novel has been feverish and unrelenting. We can hardly believe it’s almost here! The Emperor of Gladness is set in Connecticut, and partially inspired by Vuong’s time spent working as a fast-food server.

Available 05/20/2025
Graphic Novels & Comics

Spent

By Alison Bechdel

Though she’s best known for her graphic memoir Fun Home, which became a musical, and her long-running comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” Alison Bechdel hasn’t stopped making hits: We loved her clever, thoughtful 2021 graphic memoir The Secret to Superhuman Strength, and we’re excited for what she has in store in Spent: A Comic Novel. The subtitle indicates that this may be her most fictionalized endeavor in years, but the characters are recognizable as a version of Bechdel herself, and some familiar figures for “Dykes to Watch Out For” fans.

Available 05/20/2025
Popular Fiction

My Friends

By Fredrik Backman

From the sweeping success of his debut, A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman has consistently charmed readers with his vivid prose and unique narratives. As always, in My Friends, Backman’s characters take center stage. Our protagonist is 18-year-old artist Louisa, who, after noticing a cluster of figures in the background of a famous painting, becomes determined to uncover the origin of the painting and the story of the mysterious friends it depicts.

Available 05/27/2025
Literary Fiction

Disappoint Me

By Nicola Dinan

One of BookPage’s Best Books of 2023, Nicola Dinan’s debut, Bellies, was the real deal—a story of first love and heartbreak written with the exhilarating vulnerability of a Sally Rooney novel. We can’t wait to see what she does with the premise of her sophomore effort: A millennial trans woman begins dating a corporate lawyer in the hope that his highly traditional take on romance will fill the emotional void of her 30s.

Available 06/03/2025
Family Drama, Literary Fiction

Flashlight

By Susan Choi

Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, a story of power and perspective set at a 1980s performing arts high school, won the National Book Award in 2019 for the way it undid and upended narrative expectations. We have high hopes for Flashlight, and we know not to expect a straightforward structure. Beginning with a tragedy befalling a father and his 10-year-old daughter, the book branches out into different family members’ perspectives and peers into Korean, American and Japanese history.

Available 06/03/2025
Historical Fiction, Popular Fiction

Atmosphere

By Taylor Jenkins Reid

Fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid and all things space and astronomy will find themselves united in anticipation of the bestselling author’s upcoming release, Atmosphere: A Love Story. The Daisy Jones & The Six, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Malibu Rising author’s latest complex protagonist is one of the first women to train with NASA in the 1980s. Of course, with space travel, the stakes are incredibly high, and she and her fellow candidates will be tested to the max in this suspenseful romantic drama.

Available 06/24/2025
Family Saga, Literary Fiction

I’ll Be Right Here

By Amy Bloom

Amy Bloom’s books have always been deeply felt, and her 2022 memoir, In Love, plunged readers deeper than ever, relating her husband’s treatment for early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and the end of his life. Her new novel, I’ll Be Right Here, sounds exceptional: a book that spans decades, celebrating “the lawlessness of love” through the story of four friends living in New York City who forge an enduring bond that transforms them into family.

Book jacket stand-in for The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy
Available 09/16/2025
Literary Fiction

The Wilderness

By Angela Flournoy

It’s great to see a second novel forthcoming from the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award. In The Wilderness, Angela Flournoy expands from exploring sibling connections to chronicling the complicated relationships among five women traversing adulthood from their 20s into middle age.

Book jacket stand-in for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Available 09/23/2025
Literary Fiction

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

By Kiran Desai

Readers have waited a long time for Kiran Desai’s third novel—since 2009, when The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was first announced! The Booker Prize winner’s upcoming work is an epic tale of the human need for connection following two young Indian Americans and the events that bring them together and drive them apart.

Available 09/30/2025
Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction

We Love You, Bunny

By Mona Awad

Those who read Mona Awad’s funny, freaky Bunny and were left wondering “WTF just happened?!” will be thrilled to hear that Awad is granting us a follow-up. It’s unclear whether the action of We Love You, Bunny will take place before or after Samantha Heather Mackey and the Bunnies’ MFA cohort at Warren University, but for those who can’t get a copy of Bunny in time, the book purports to work as a standalone as well.

Book publication dates are subject to change.

Most anticipated by genre

Previous most anticipated fiction

Recent fiction reviews

Death of the Author

A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.

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Confessions

Catherine Airey excavates the intertwining stories of three generations of Irish American women in Confessions, a firecracker of a debut novel that never gives up any slack.

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Babylonia

Costanza Casati’s captivating and historically insightful second novel, inspired by a real Assyrian queen, is a resonant page turner.

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Book jacket image for Going Home by Tom Lamont

Going Home

Going Home marks the debut of a gifted writer whose readers will find themselves feeling better, somehow, about the world.

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I’ll Come to You

Rebecca Kauffman’s thoughtful portrayal of family relationships in all their tension and secrets as well as intimacy and wonder in I’ll Come to You resembles the introspective style of authors like Ethan Joella or Ann Napolitano.

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Book jacket image for Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett

Mothers and Sons

Mothers and Sons is a touching story about the self-inflicted pain of long-buried memories, once again demonstrating Adam Haslett’s ability to produce graceful, emotionally affecting realist fiction.

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The Three Lives of Cate Kay

In addition to whiplash-inducing twists, Kate Fagan’s The Three Lives of Cate Kay also packs an emotional punch, and readers will find that Cate’s story is as relatable as it is riveting.

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The Life of Herod the Great

Zora Neale Hurston’s familiarity with the political and spiritual workings of the Roman Empire makes The Life of Herod the Great a thought-provoking read, particularly in her depiction of Herod’s visits to Cleopatra, Marc Antony and Caesar.

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Homeseeking

Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking is both a love story and a family story, capturing the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”

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Deborah G. Plant author photo by Gloria Plant-Gilbert

Plucked from the ashes

In a novel never published in her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston presented a new vision of the biblical King Herod. Scholar Deborah G. Plant reveals how the masterwork was saved after Hurston’s death, and what we can learn from these precious pages.

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