15 Best Books Of 2025

Another year, another round up of the best books I’ve read. Some of them were published in 2025, some of them are backlist titles that I’ve picked from the shelves, all of them are certified five-star bangers.

A Particularly Nasty Case by Adam Kay

A Particularly Nasty Case is rollicking good fun, sharp and funny (like when the narrator describes the hospital’s ‘new’ wing as being “new like the New Testament is new”). This is the rare case of a non-fiction writer producing quality fiction that doesn’t just feel like another version of their niche memoir reproduced with names changed. Your heart will be in your mouth, and your guts will fall to the floor as the unstable genius desperately tries to convince everyone around him that a wily murderer is on the loose. Hats off to Adam Kay – medicine’s loss is our gain! Read my full review of A Particularly Nasty Case here.

An Academic Affair by Jodi McAlister

Are you the kind of reader that rolls your eyes at common tropes of the romance genre? Fake dating, enemies-to-lovers, all of it feels too unrealistic and contrived? Then An Academic Affair is the perfect romance book for your cynical heart. I loved, loved, the self-awareness of this romantic comedy. The characters openly acknowledge and discuss the ridiculousness of the marriage-of-convenience trope, even as they’re living it. Read my full review of An Academic Affair here.

Five Found Dead by Sulari Gentill

Five Found Dead is another delightfully meta mystery from Sulari Gentill, this time with an Agatha Christie twist: a crime fiction writer and his sister investigate a murder that takes place on board the Orient Express. The cabin next to theirs’ is covered in blood, but there’s no body – then, the steward assigned to guard the crime scene turns up dead, too. And that’s just the beginning! As the title suggests, there are more bodies to come. It’s sharp, it’s funny, and it’s fun – any worries you might have about Sulari Gentill not living up to the standard of her previous novels are totally unfounded. Read my full review of Five Found Dead here.

107 Days by Kamala Harris

Perhaps the reason that 107 Days hasn’t made a bigger splash among the books of 2025 is that the subject is simply too soon for most of us to think about – a tantalising glimpse into what could have been with the outcome of the 2024 presidential election feels cruel. Still, it’s a crucial document about a pivotal moment in American politics, and it deserves a prominent spot on the history shelf. It feels like a particularly authentic and intimate account in the audiobook format, as it’s read by the author herself; Harris does an excellent job of relaying the highs and lows of a whirlwind campaign against incredible odds. Read my full review of 107 Days here.

This House Of Grief by Helen Garner

2025 marks the 20th anniversary of the deaths of Jai, Tyler, and Bailey Farquharson. The three young boys died after their father drove them into a dam on Father’s Day 2005, and swam away, leaving the brothers to drown. Helen Garner attended every day of the trial (and subsequent retrial) of Robert Farquharson, with the express intent of writing about it. You’ll find This House Of Grief shelved in the true crime section of your local independent bookstore, but it’s important to know at the outset that this isn’t a story about the crime itself – it’s a day-by-day depiction of a murder trial. Read my full review of This House Of Grief here.

Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

I highly recommend Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone to readers who are bored of the unreliable narrators that are a dime-a-dozen in contemporary mystery-thrillers. The point-of-view in this one is truly a breath of fresh air. Stevenson absolutely nails the vibe of an imperfect family – with its own rifts and affections and absurdities – getting together after an extended period of estrangement. The wry, dark humour really tickled me; I was unsurprised to learn afterwards that Stevenson is a comedian by trade. It’s not many writers who could squeeze so many laughs out of a book about a family of killers. Read my full review of Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone here.

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

As the scribbled cover suggests, Everything I Know About Love covers almost every facet of a young life: work, sex, partying, loss, therapy, friendship, and (of course) love – but not (just) the romantic kind. Alderton tells a tale as old as time, really, in this memoir: a twenty-something has a lot of fun, has a few tough experiences, and grows up. She fools you into thinking it’s a light-hearted “sex and parties” memoir, a la Carrie Bradshaw, and then hits you with wallops of depth and introspection. Read my full review of Everything I Know About Love here.

Larrimah by Caroline Graham & Kylie Stevenson

Larrimah is a true crime book that is also a love letter to a (very) small town of eccentrics. The titular town is located 500km (310 miles) south of Darwin (for non-Australians, trust me when I tell you that’s the middle of absolutely nowhere), fewer than a dozen people live there (and half of them are banned for life from the local pub), and it’s the scene of one of the strangest and most captivating crimes in recent history. Read my full review of Larrimah here.

You by Caroline Kepnes

You becomes an indulgent escapist fantasy of sorts, in a way that most other stalker/thriller books aren’t: because the story is told entirely from Joe’s perspective, the reader never has to experience any of the fear or distress that Beck must feel when she realises that her boyfriend is actually her tormentor. The reader gets to ‘relax’ into Joe’s perspective and appreciate his devotion, without being confronted with any of the downsides. Aside from anything else, it’s a story about a man who cares very deeply about a woman. Yes, in a very sick and twisted way, but still. Read my full review of You here.

Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty

You might be expecting Nine Perfect Strangers to devolve into cliche – an Agatha Christie-style locked room mystery, or each attendee of the ten-day retreat at Tranquillum House Health and Wellness discovers they’re connected by some dark secret in their past. I’m pleased to report that none of that happens… BUT there is one heck of a weird left turn coming. Even with the truly bizarre twist, Moriarty makes it work. She truly nails it – and I’m not just saying that because I don’t want to be the mean reviewer who meets a sticky end in her next book. Read my full review of Nine Perfect Strangers here.

Columbine by Dave Cullen

Is Columbine a good book? Yes, undoubtedly. Would I recommend it? It’s hard to say. It’s a book that is incredibly well written and beyond reproach in terms of research and attention to detail… but that’s also its downfall. Cullen goes through everything minute-by-minute: not just the events at the school on that day, but the aftershocks as the community and survivors reeled in the days, weeks, and years afterwards. It’s scary and depressing and gory, at times. It’s relayed in sharp, staccato sentences, frame by frame. So, I guess, I could only recommend it with an asterisk: read with caution. Read my full review of Columbine here.

Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby

It’s hard to imagine that anything is off-limits to Samantha Irby. She tells us things I’d imagine most of us would want to hide from our therapists. She happily dedicates a whole essay in Quietly Hostile to her appreciation for the musical works of the terminally-uncool Dave Matthews. In another, she gives the reader a frame-by-frame description of her favourite pornographic film. She waxes rhapsodic about well-stocked bathrooms, high-speed internet, elastic-waist pants, the home shopping network, and getting stoned while watching videos about whales. I’d recommend it even to the uninitiated, as it’s a great sample plate of everything that makes her work wonderful fun to read. Read my full review of Quietly Hostile here.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen is a grim read, but it’s also funny. Someone unfamiliar with Ottessa Moshfegh’s oeuvre might assume that the humour is an unintentional side effect of having a story narrated by such a dry and cutting character, but I know my girl well enough to know that nothing she puts on the page is unintentional. Likewise, the character of Rebecca Saint John is very carefully crafted, and the allusion to Daphne du Maurier’s (slash Alfred Hitchcock’s) Rebecca is no accident. No one writes confronting fiction about distasteful women quite like Moshfegh. Read my full review of Eileen here.

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions For You is one of those books that defies easy classification. Yes, it’s a literary mystery as it’s billed in the blurbs, but it’s also a coming-of-age novel. And it’s a dark academia novel, of sorts. And it’s a feminist text. And it’s a kind of subversion of the returning hero narrative. And it’s a bunch of other things in between. It doesn’t have a neat ending, nor does it have a happy one, but it does end on a pensive and tentatively optimistic note. I doubt that will satisfy readers of traditional mysteries (where justice is often served swiftly and only to a well-deserving party), but I liked it. Read my full review of I Have Some Questions For You here.

Naked by David Sedaris

Like his other essay collections, Naked draws from the deep well of Sedaris’s childhood in the suburbs of North Carolina, his misspent youth trying to become somebody, and his continuing project of trying to understand the world around him, all told with his trademark humour and wit. Many of the stories in this collection were originally written and performed for NPR’s This American Life, but Sedaris has said he had to remove any “unpleasant mental pictures” before they went to air – so, for the book, he made sure to “put those unpleasant mental pictures back in”. Read my full review of Naked here.