Fiction 2025

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD “Alameddine is a writer with a boundless imagination.”—NPR From National Book Award finalist and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction comes a tragicomic love story set in Lebanon, a modern saga of family, memory, and the unbreakable attachment of a son and his mother In a tiny Beirut apartment, sixty-three-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high school philosophy teacher and “the neighborhood homosexual,” Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude. Zalfa, his octogenarian mother, views her son’s desire for privacy as a personal affront. She demands to know every detail of Raja’s work life and love life, boundaries be damned. When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn’t be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja longing for peace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget. Told in Raja’s irresistible and wickedly funny voice, the novel dances across six decades to tell the unforgettable story of a singular life and its absurdities—a tale of mistakes, self-discovery, trauma, and maybe even forgiveness. Above all, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a wildly unique and sparkling celebration of love.

OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK TIME MUST-READ BOOK SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE ‘An indictment of this moment and a timeless parable about the lengths we go to for love and self-preservation, written in exuberant prose - this is a novel that will burrow its way into your soul and remain there forever’ Tahmima Anam Megha Majumdar’s electrifying new novel, following her acclaimed New York Times Bestseller A Burning—longlisted for the National Book Award—is set in a near-future Kolkata, India, ravaged by climate change and food scarcity, in which two families seeking to protect their children must battle each other—a piercing and propulsive tour de force. In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and famine, Ma, her two-year-old daughter Mishti, and her elderly father Dadu are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, with all the treasured immigration documents within it, has been stolen. Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom. With stunning control and command, Megha Majumdar paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of two families, each operating from a place of ferocious love and undefeated hope, each discovering how far they will go to secure their children’s future as they stave off encroaching catastrophe. A masterful new work from one of the most exciting voices of her generation. ‘A true literary achievement… Majumdar creates a tense and deeply compassionate portrait of desperation, fear and the combined selflessness and selfishness of parenthood… Detail is the strongest thing in A Guardian and a Thief. It conveys the nuances of not only love but also wisdom… a true joy to read.’ New York Times
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FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, KIRKUS, BOOKPAGE The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate. Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
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Aurian and Jin Koch are trying, very hard, to be peaceful. They're doing a terrible job. Owning a shiny new Inn in a boring Gold Road village might be Aurian's dream, but the world has other ideas. When Aurian and Jin Koch leave Morda Bonemaker's funeral procession to attempt a peaceful life, they underestimate how difficult their singular history of violence and mayhem will make getting along with the neighbors. Will their history follow them, even into retirement? For that matter--is Evinanjin Koch, veteran hero, capable of retirement? An Aurian and Jin novelette--NOT the second book in the Sundering Trilogy.

Finalist for the 2025 National Book Awards for Fiction From “one of our great artists of catastrophe” (Laura van den Berg) comes North Sun, or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther—an allegory of extraction and a tale of adventure and endurance during the waning days of the American whaling industry. Setting out from New Bedford in 1878, the crew of the Esther is confident the sea will be theirs: in addition to cruising the Pacific for whale, they intend to hunt the teeming northern grounds before the ice closes. But as they sail to their final destination in the Chukchi Sea, where their captain Arnold Lovejoy has an urgent directive of his own to attend to, their encounters with the natural world become more brutal, harrowing, ghostly, and strange. With one foot firmly planted in the traditional sea-voyage narrative, and another in a blazing mythos of its own, this debut novel looks unsparingly at the cost of environmental exploitation and predation, and in doing so feverishly sings not only of the past, but to the present and future as well.

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction "A heart-wrenchingly honest, often luminescent exploration of how to find and cultivate true connections, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places . . . [Palaver is] an unshakable triumph.”—The Washington Post One of TIME's Must-Read Books of 2025 and Kirkus' Best of Fiction 2025 One of The Washington Post's Best Fiction Books of the Year Named a Most Anticipated Book by the New York Times, New York, Time, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, People, Harper's Bazaar, Bustle, and Town & Country A life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love, from the award-winning Bryan Washington. In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor and drinks his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He’s entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his mother in Houston, whose preference for the son’s oft-troubled homophobic brother, Chris, pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they last saw each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep. With only the son’s cat, Taro, to mediate, the two of them bristle at each other immediately. The mother, wrestling with memories of her youth in Jamaica and her own complicated brother, works to reconcile her good intentions with her missteps. The son struggles to forgive. But as life steers them in unexpected directions—the mother to a tentative friendship with a local bistro owner and the son to a cautious acquaintance with a new patron of the bar—they begin to see each other more clearly. During meals and conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, mother and son try as best they can to determine where “home” really is—and whether they can even find it in one another. Written with understated humor and an open heart, moving through past and present and across Houston, Jamaica, and Japan, Bryan Washington’s Palaver is an intricate story of family, love, and the beauty of a life among others.
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A modern literary romcom and a life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love, from the award-winning Bryan Washington.

Short-listed for the Booker Prize Long-listed for the National Book Award “The first major American novel to be published this year.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal “Gorgeous . . . Almost impossibly heartbreaking.” —Sam Worley, New York Magazine A Must-Read: The New York Times, New York Magazine, Time, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, The Chicago Review of Books, Forbes, Literary Hub, and Town & Country “A major world writer . . . Choi is in thrilling command.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times “Devastating.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post “Ranks among her best work.” —Hamilton Cain, Los Angeles Times A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick A novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise. One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences. But now it is just Anne and Louisa, Louisa and Anne, adrift and facing the challenges of ordinary life in the wake of great loss. United, separated, and also repelled by their mutual grief, they attempt to move on. But they cannot escape the echoes of that night. What really happened to Louisa’s father? Shifting perspectives across time and character and turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Flashlight chases the shock waves of one family’s catastrophe, even as they are swept up in the invisible currents of history. A monumental new novel from the National Book Award winner Susan Choi, Flashlight spans decades and continents in a spellbinding, heart-gripping investigation of family, loss, memory, and the ways in which we are shaped by what we cannot see.
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**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025** 'Ferociously smart and full of surprises' Eleanor Catton 'Instantly bewitching' Jennifer Egan 'A rich generational saga that teems with intelligence' Financial Times The astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century, ranging from post-war Japan to suburban America and the North Korean regime One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while her father Serk, a Korean émigré, completes an academic secondment from his American university. When Louisa wakes hours later, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, probably drowned. The disappearance of Louisa’s father shatters their small family unit. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, this traumatic event reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels. 'Big, bold and surprising' Guardian ‘Engrossing... Choi is an astute, convincing writer’ Sunday Telegraph 'Susan Choi is a master of rendering relationships with utter particularity' Raven Leilani, author of Luster 'I couldn’t put it down, and once I finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about it' Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy

Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood - overwhelming, mysterious and full of freedom and consequences - swoops in and stays. Desiree and Danielle, sisters whose shared history has done little to prevent their estrangement, nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January's got a relationship with a 'good' man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life. As these friends move from the late 2000s into the late 2020s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another - amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability and the increasing volatility of modern life. The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy's masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE Named one of the Washington Post's 10 Best Books of the Year One of Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of the Year" Named a Best of the Year by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly, Vogue, Elle, Time, Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, Town & Country, Alta Journal, NPR, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Book Riot, Audible "Flournoy has delivered a future classic--the kind of novel that generations to come will read to understand the nuances and peculiarities of this time." -- Harper's Bazaar An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife--in the much-anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy. Desiree, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood--overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences--swoops in and stays. Desiree is estranged from her sister Danielle, and the two nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January's got a relationship with a "good" man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life. As these friends move from the late 2000's into the late 2020's, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another--amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life. The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy's masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.
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* ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2025 * ‘Humorous yet devastating... I loved this book' - BRIT BENNETT ‘Flournoy is singular' - RAVEN LEILANI 'Flournoy has a long-lens talent' - ELEANOR CATTON 'A triumphant whirlwind of a novel' - NAMWALI SERPELL 'One of the wisest, most talented authors working today' - JUSTIN TORRES In 2008, Desiree, January, Monique and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood and of big city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood – overwhelming, mysterious and full of freedom and consequences – swoops in and stays. Desiree is estranged from her sister Danielle, and the two nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January's got a relationship with a 'good' man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life. As these friends transition from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another – amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability and the increasing volatility of modern life. In The Wilderness, Angela Flournoy captures with disarming wit and electric language how life's most profound connections can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship. It's The Vanishing Half meets The Most Fun We Ever Had, with notes of Girl, Woman, Other. 'A future classic' - HARPER'S BAZAAR 'Flournoy inhabits a quartet of shifting perspectives with wit, tenderness and exquisite grace... Evokes the hushed, disconsolate quality of [Toni] Morrison' - NEW YORK TIMES 'A fascinating look at lasting friendships... Vivid' - WASHINGTON POST 'A triumph' - LA TIMES 'Flournoy beautifully renders how love - though at times thorny and confusing - is the one thing that keeps us connected' - TIME (The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025) ***** 5-STAR READER REVIEWS FOR THE WILDERNESS ***** 'Every heartbreak, triumph and turn of the text I actually felt in my body' 'Wow, this book... So real and raw' 'If you believe in the power of sisterhood, this is an unforgettable must-read' 'Will make you laugh, ache and long for your own family and friends' 'Captures the complexities of lifelong friendships with remarkable depth' 'One of my best books of the year, hands down' This novel contains references to assisted dying and drug use, and depictions of violence, death, and police brutality.

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR One of The New Yorker's 24 Essential Reads of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction One of Publishers Weekly's Ten Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal One of the BBC’s 10 Best Books of the Summer | A Times (London) Best Book of the Year “One gawps . . . at its breadth and ambition. [The Sisters is] a transnational tour de force.” —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review “One of this summer’s most buzzed-about novels.” —Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times “A classic story about sibling rivalry . . . One of the best novels I've ever read about the complexities of mixed heritage.” —Fredrik Backman, The New Yorker “[The Sisters] generates every kind of heat . . . If you welcome this novel into your mind, it will warm and transform you.” —Tess Gunty, National Book Award–winning author of The Rabbit Hutch “Astonishing . . . Every character—every sentence—is startlingly, indubitably alive.” —Katie Kitamura, author of Audition and Intimacies An addictively entertaining family saga by a National Book Award finalist. Meet the Mikkola sisters: Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Their mother is a Tunisian carpet seller, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, a shape-shifting presence, quick to anger. Ina meets her future husband when she’s dragged to a New Year’s rave by her sisters, only to suffer the ultimate betrayal. Evelyn drifts through life before embarking on a wild career as an actress. And Anastasia runs off to Tunisia, where she falls in love with a woman who, years later, will transform her life. Following the sisters from afar is Jonas, the son of a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father. Over the course of three decades, his life intersects with the sisters, from a chance encounter in Tunis to the scene of a fighter jet crash in Stockholm. When Evelyn disappears on a trip to New York, Jonas manages to track her down—and helps her to break the curse that has been looming over the Mikkolas for decades. In the process, a shocking revelation changes everything about who they think they are. Narrated in six parts, each spanning a period ranging from a year to a day to a single minute, Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s The Sisters is a big, vivid family saga of the highest order—an addictively entertaining tour de force.
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'It's ambitious, it's full of life, it's a triumph' The Times SELECTED AS A BOOK OF THE SUMMER BY THE TIMES, NEW YORK TIMES, VULTURE, BOSTON GLOBE, AND BBC 'Astonishing . . . every character - every sentence - is startlingly, indubitably alive' Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies 'A triumph' Irish Times 'One of the best novels I've ever read about the complexities of mixed heritage' New Yorker 'I really loved this book . . . a novel to sink into' New York Times 'One of the most enjoyable books I've read so far in 2025 . . . a page turner' The Gloss 'Superb . . . one of those books you live inside and miss when it's over' Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost 'A moving appraisal of family, language, and the spiritual developments that accrue over a life' Raven Leilani, author of Luster 'A thoroughly fascinating story about sibling rivalry, loyalty, and love' Fredrik Backman, author of A Man Called Ove 'If you welcome this novel into your mind, it will warm and transform you' Tess Gunty, author of the Rabbit Hutch 'His masterpiece . . . life overflows its pages' Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing MEET THE MIKKOLA SISTERS: INA, EVELYN, AND ANASTASIA. Their mother is a Tunisian saleswoman, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, quick to anger. Ina meets her future husband when she's dragged to a New Year's party by her sisters, only to suffer the ultimate betrayal. Evelyn drifts through life before embarking on a wild career as an actress. And Anastasia runs off to Tunisia, where she falls in love with a woman who, years later, will transform her life. Following them from afar is Jonas, the son of a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father. His life intersects with the sisters across decades and continents, from Stockholm to Tunis and New York. When Evelyn disappears, it's Jonas who tracks her down - and helps her to break a curse that has been looming over the Mikkolas for years. But in the process, a shocking revelation changes everything. Narrated in six parts, each spanning a period ranging from a year to a day to a single minute, The Sisters is a vivid, epic family saga of the highest order - an addictively entertaining tour de force.

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A razor-sharp new collection of stories of visionary childhood misfits and struggling adult dreamers from this legendary writer of “perfectly indescribable fiction . . . To read Williams is to look into the abyss” (The Atlantic). “Night was best, for, as everyone knows, but does not tell, the sobbing of the earth is most audible at night.” “Men are but unconscious machines and they perform their cruelties so effortlessly.” “Caring was a power she’d once possessed but had given up freely.” The sentences of Joy Williams are like no other—the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight chortle of hope that lurks between the words—for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these eleven stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their substance. We meet lost souls like the twin-sister heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune in “After the Haiku Period,” who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds; in “Nettle,” a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; the ghost of George Gurdieff, on an obsessive visit to the Arizona birthplace of the shining Susan Sontag; the “pelican child” who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. All of these characters insist on exploring, often at their peril, an indifferent and caustic world: they struggle against our degradation of the climate, of each other, and of honest human experience (“I try to relate only to what is immediately verifiable,” says one narrator ruefully), possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.
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Lauded as the best story writer of our time, Joy Williams returns with a taut collection that responds to our modern dilemmas with her signature dry wit and deftness of touch. In sinister and shifting landscapes, we meet souls lost and found: from the twin heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune, who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds, to a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence, to the "pelican child", who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. For readers of Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill and George Saunders, these haunted stories examine the instincts separating us from the beastly and the divine.