The Best Books of Spring 2025

“There’s a lot about our current culture of surveillance that I find deeply frightening, which makes the central conceit of Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel—that not even our dreams may remain private—even more chilling to encounter. Here, Lalami, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Moor’s Account and The Other Americans, presents a work that feels so plausible as to be nausea-inducing. Her protagonist, a mother named Sara Hussein, purchases a neuroprosthetic implant to help regulate her infant-disturbed sleep cycle. But when the device starts mining her dreams for data, that data prompts the Risk Assessment Administration to take her into custody. Why? Because the RAA’s algorithm has predicted she will become a risk to her husband’s life. From this watershed moment, Lalami orchestrates a hyper-realized tale of techno-authoritarianism and astounding (but all too conceivable) injustice. This is a book that will challenge and convict you.”—Lauren Puckett-Pope, staff culture writer

Out now.

“Bernice L. McFadden, known for her celebrated novels including Praise Song for the Butterflies and The Book of Harlan, takes an inward approach with her latest book, the memoir Firstborn Girls. Recounting her own history (from her second birthday to the publication of her novel Sugar) as well as her ancestors’ (starting with her enslaved great-grandmother in the mid-1800s), McFadden traces the patterns that have cycled through each generation of her family’s firstborn women, and in doing so, draws parallels to the larger historical context around them. She accomplishes this seemingly straightforward task with a sharp instinct for narrative—and a profound appreciation for Black lives and Black art. McFadden’s voice is sincere and moving, both on the page and in the audiobook, which the author narrates herself. This memoir is a treasure.”—LPP

Out now.

“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 of 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

Out now.

“I’ll be honest: I did not anticipate that a book about a hare would land at the top of my TBR list this year. I can understand if you feel the same way. (There’s so much else going on.) But, of course, that’s exactly the appeal of Chloe Dalton’s memoir, Raising Hare, the reading of which feels like stepping through a cottage doorway into a slower, more meaningful way of existing with the world. (Another way to put it: Reading this memoir feels a lot like touching grass.) As she relays her experience raising an injured hare from infant to adult, returning the leveret to the wild only to find the animal willingly returning to her doorstep, Dalton follows a time-honored tradition of man-and-beast nature writing. But she also provides us with a refreshing gift: a taste of fragility, grace, and trust in a world otherwise drunk on corruption and haste. If you’re in desperate need of a deep breath, this is the first book I’d recommend.”—LPP

Out now.

“Amy Griffin might be a major figure in the venture capital scene, but she’s found a very different audience with The Tell, a memoir that recounts her difficulty recovering repressed memories in the wake of her childhood sexual abuse. As I wrote for my ELLE.com interview with Griffin earlier this year, ‘The Tell isn’t a book about trauma; it’s an investigation of what happened to Griffin and of the ways that the pressure to achieve perfection damages girls and women.’ Griffin’s career and exciting life play little part in the book, underscoring how what happened to her is an experience unfortunately shared by people of all walks of life. This is an elegant, necessary read.”—Adrienne Gaffney, features editor

Out now.

“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. We haven’t even made it to the halfway point of 2025 yet, and Stag Dance is already one of my favorite books of the year.”—LPP

Out now.

“Even though he was once a talented artist and model in the Manhattan art scene, many of us don’t see much of Michael Stewart’s work today—largely because he died so young, at the age of 25, after being brutally beaten by police officers. In the wake of his death in 1983, justice for Michael became a rallying cry heard from both his family as well as a diverse group of influential New Yorkers, one that included Madonna, writers Jimmy Breslin and Gabe Pressman, Spike Lee, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. More than 40 years later, Elon Green gives us The Man Nobody Killed, one of the most comprehensive accounts of the night of Stewart’s death. But Green also brings to life a beautiful and much-loved man who was an integral part of the excitement and creativity of early-’80s New York.”—AG

Out now.

“What The New York Times described as a ‘gruesome joyride of a novel’ is indeed one of the year’s most exhilarating hits, and not merely amongst horror readers, for whom author Stephen Graham Jones is already a household name. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter draws its shrewd title from its protagonist, Good Stab, a member of the Blackfeet Nation in the late 1800s who becomes a vampire after encountering a supernatural creature known as the Cat Man. Good Stab is thirsty for both blood and vengeance, and to achieve the latter—justice for his tribe—he must also seek the former, by hunting Indigenous people like him. Years later, he develops a relationship with a Lutheran pastor, whose diary eventually ends up in the hands of a modern-day professor. These interweaving, century-hopping narratives collide in Jones’s masterful western, which explores and critiques the real and figurative horrors wrought on Indigenous people throughout American history.”—LPP

Out now.

“As I wrote for a review of Sunrise on the Reaping earlier this year, the new Hunger Games prequel by Suzanne Collins ‘succeeds in the near-impossible task of making an well-trodden story feel as intimate and visceral as its predecessors.’ The Hunger Games is one of the most beloved franchises of all time, so for Collins to deliver such a punch nearly two decades since the first book was released is a feat. Her latest chronicles the infamous Quarter Quell in which a young Haymitch Abernathy competes years before the events of The Hunger Games. As with the other installments in Collins’s series, Sunrise is often brutal, but its unflinching approach is what gives this YA novel its tenacity. As always, it is a twisted thrill to be back in Panem.”—LPP

Out now.

“Amanda Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison for a murder she didn’t commit. Though she was exonerated of the crime, her new memoir—her second and best, in my opinion—asks if she can ever truly be free if what she went through continues to define her identity. In short but powerful chapters, Knox writes beautifully about the un-beautiful—poignantly sharing how she survived prison; her difficult return to ‘normal’ life upon her release; and her decade-long journey to finally—fully—feel free.”—Kayla Webley Adler, deputy editor

Out now.

“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

“In alternating timelines and points of view, author Dolen Perkins-Valdez introduces us to the lauded kingdom of Happy Land through the eyes of its queen and her great-great-granddaughter. Although Happy Land is a work of historical fiction, Perkins-Valdez makes it clear that much of the book’s premise is based in, as she puts it in an author’s note, ‘extensive archival research’ into the real-life Queen Louella Bobo Montgomery and her kingdom of Happy Land, a 19th-century community in North Carolina that was once home to hundreds of formerly enslaved Black Americans. (Last year’s The American Queen also explored this history.) In Happy Land’s present-day perspective, protagonist Nikki’s grandmother clings to her last piece of the kingdom as she stares down the barrel of eviction. In the past, Luella fights for her haven’s survival—and its long-term legacy. Perkins-Valdez writes of this land with admiration, awe, and precision, weaving a triumphant story that will stir readers to attention.”—LPP

“Every time Andrea Long Chu, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for New York Magazine, publishes a new essay, I make time to read it slowly, thoughtfully, and with relish. Not because I’ll always agree with her—on several occasions, I’ve strongly disagreed—but because she presents her arguments and analysis with such exemplary insight. I always come away from her work feeling educated and invigorated. So I was delighted to get my copy of Authority, which collects her essays published between 2018 and 2023, and includes two new pieces, both worth the price of admission. Chu’s subjects are wide-ranging but always relevant, and her critiques of The Last of Us, The Phantom of the Opera, and Zadie Smith rank amongst my favorites. If you care about culture in any of its endless forms, you should be reading Chu.”—LPP

Out now.

“I’ve been excitedly anticipating this debut from Electric Literature editor-in-chief Denne Michele Norris since I first heard about it a year ago. When the Harvest Comes is well worth the wait. Norris unspools the story of Davis Freeman, a Black queer violinist whose wedding reception to a white man named Everett is upended when Davis learns his father—a Baptist minister from whom Davis has been estranged for years—has died. In the wake of this loss, Davis struggles to communicate his grief and trauma with Everett, and Norris writes of their young marriage with such compassion and nuance—particularly as Davis experiments with his gender expression. Norris has written a beautiful, clear-eyed portrait of love in the face of religious and familial betrayal, and I can’t wait to read what she publishes next.”—LPP

Out now.

“In an essay she recently wrote for ELLE.com, author Morgan Jerkins called her latest book, Zeal, ‘a multi-generational love story stemming from emancipation to the current era,’ and ‘a novel that I had to put my whole feeling behind.’ That effort is well-realized in Zeal, which covers more than 150 years of a Black family’s history, much as Jerkins did with her own family in her excellent 2020 memoir, Wandering in Strange Lands. Jerkins first introduces readers to a couple named Ardelia and Oliver at their modern-day engagement party, where Oliver offers his fiancée a letter from one of his ancestors, Tirzah, written to the man she loved, a Union soldier named Harrison. ‘Whether you find me first or I find you,’ Tirzah writes, ‘We will see each other again.’ We then plunge into Tirzah and Harrison’s narrative in 1865, their freedom in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation far more complicated than many an American history textbook might lead us to believe. At once a soaring love story as well as a deeply detailed account of the post-Civil War South and the Great Migration, Zeal is a stunning feat of historical fiction.”—LPP

Out now.

“Sarah Damoff’s debut novel, The Bright Years, carries the sensitivity and knowledge of her years of experience as a social worker. A tight, compact book, easily read in one sitting, The Bright Years nevertheless accomplishes an expansive family saga, covering decades (from 1958 to 2019) and hopping between three points of view: those of Lillian Bright, her husband Ryan Bright, and their daughter, Georgette, a.k.a. Jet. In Fort Worth, this family navigates the perils of love and loss as their secrets—including Ryan’s alcoholism and Lillian’s child from a former relationship—catch up with them. Damoff’s careful approach to depicting alcoholism, and her expressions of what it means to love (and be loved) amidst the wreckage of addiction, set this tender novel apart.”—LPP

Out now.

“Celebrity memoirs are not always the most forthcoming. But Tina Knowles is not most celebrities. At over 400 pages, her memoir, Matriarch, spares few details. It’s one of the most candid memoirs I’ve read, which is especially surprising given the rabid fascination surrounding her high-profile family. But Ms. Tina has a story to share—and it is a powerful one—charting how she, the great-granddaughter of two enslaved women, went from humble beginnings in Galveston, Texas, to becoming head of one of the most successful families in the world.”—KWA

Out now.

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role creativity plays in the life of every human—not merely artists or writers or traditional ‘creatives.’ So I was immediately drawn to The Book of Alchemy, which Suleika Jaouad wrote as a sort of hybrid memoir-anthology-guidebook to building a lasting (and impactful) creative process. Featuring essays from a wide variety of ‘creatives,’ including Kiese Laymon, Jon Batiste, Jia Tolentino, John Green, Esther Perel, Melissa Febos, Hanif Abdurraqib, Ann Patchett, George Saunders, and dozens of others, The Book of Alchemy also incorporates Jaouad’s experience with illness and recovery—and describes how journaling brought her back to herself. This is a vulnerable, thoughtful book stuffed with inspiration that attempts to defy platitudes. A treat for anyone in need of a nudge toward the page.”—LPP

Out now.

“Emily Henry has become a household name both inside and outside the romance sphere, especially as her big-hearted love stories make their way toward the big screen. Her latest novel, Great Big Beautiful LifeOut now., illustrates the growing attraction between two journalists—one a bubbly magazine writer named Alice, the other a (seemingly) self-serious Pulitzer winner named Hayden—as they vie for the chance to write the life story of the famous Margaret Ives. As Henry slowly reveals Margaret’s history for the reader, she similarly brings us closer into the minds and hearts of Alice and Hayden, whose lives soon become inextricable from Margaret’s own. Henry has yet another winner on her hands with this one.”—LPP

Out now.

“In the beginning of The Hollow Half, Sarah Aziza offers readers a jarring snapshot of self-assessment. She scrolls through photos of herself on her iPhone, the device repeatedly asking, ‘Is this you?’ She understands the confusion: The images vary wildly, depicting her at different points in her worsening eating disorder. Eventually, she is hospitalized for anorexia and narrowly revived from the brink of death. In this superb debut memoir, Aziza recounts how her difficult recovery tore down the curtain between her present and her past—particularly a past that took place long before she was born. The daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, she knits together a history of violent displacement that casts a shadow well into her modern-day life in Brooklyn. With painstaking devotion, Aziza assembles memories to reconnect with the resilience of her people—and to imagine a better future for herself and her loved ones. The Hollow Half is a powerhouse of a memoir.”—LPP

Out now.