I don’t know about you but this year was a tough one in Quinnland. Except in one way, and that was reading. As usual I’m bringing you my favorites—just in time for your holiday shopping! Twenty-five of the best books I read in 2025, though not all were published this year. I’ve even given you some help figuring out who to buy them for…
1. CHAIN GANG ALL STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Hands down the best book I read all year, and not by a small margin either. It’s “The Hunger Games” meets “Let’s savagely indict the evils of the American prison system” and it is utterly unputdownable—a not-too-distant future where death row inmates compete on live-stream TV in gladiatorial death matches. The prize? Freedom. Millions queue to watch star fighter Loretta Thurwar climb toward the unthinkable goal of earning her liberty…but will a Black woman convicted of murder really be allowed to win the nation’s most savage game? Beautifully written, utterly poignant, queasily plausible.
Buy for: your radical college roommate who grew into an anti-death-penalty activist but still can’t quite renounce their love for the Hunger Games books. Every statistic quoted in Adjej-Brenyah’s footnotes here will resonate.
2. EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU by Jo Piazza
A viciously funny and piercingly insightful deep dive into the world of high-powered female influencers, as a journalist comes to an influencer conference to meet her college roommate turned powerhouse Trad Wife Instagrammer. But a murder upends the conference and all the women at it, and the question must be answered: what is real once the filters, hashtags, and lies are stripped away?
Buy for: Your teenage niece who wants to be an influencer when she grows up. Follow with a long discussion: yes, influencing is a job sphere in which women control millions in advertising and that’s great, but let’s talk about the dark side.
3. HIGHWAY 59 TRILOGY by Attica Locke
BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD is the first in this superb trilogy nesting social commentary inside family drama inside police thrillers, following Black Texas Ranger Darren Matthews who gets assigned every race-related case in the district even as he navigates a drinking problem, a crumbling marriage, tumultuous family history, and a looming indictment. Simply superb.
Buy for: Your legal-eagle brother who loves mysteries. He’ll dig both the twisty plots and the profound examination of how race intersects both justice and community.
4. THE ONCE AND FUTURE WITCHES by Alix E. Harrow
What if the suffragette movement got witchy? That’s the question asked by this superb fantasy set in a 19th century Britain where the women’s suffrage movement gets magical rather than militant, and the three powerful Eastwood sisters find themselves leaders of a thrilling, harrowing, and unforgettable fight for the rights of women and witches everywhere. Gorgeously poetic and inspirational.
Buy for: Your two closest female friends. Argue which of you is which Eastwood sister.
5. THE THOUSAND CRIMES OF MING HSU by Tom Lin
A classic western revenge tale starring a Chinese gunslinger—perfection. Ming Tsu, son of Chinese immigrants, left behind his violent career as an enforcer when he fell in love with the beautiful (and very white) heiress Ada. But when Ada is kidnapped and Ming sold into conscripted labor by a band of thugs unwilling to accept their marriage, the gunslinger fights his way west eliminating one enemy at a time on a blood-soaked trail back to the woman he loves.
Buy for: your boyfriend who loves John Wick movies and old spaghetti westerns. He’ll devour this pitch-perfect mashup of the two, and walk away knowing a surprising amount about Chinese immigration in the American west.
6. THE FAVORITES by Layne Fargo
“Wuthering Heights” on ice! Olympic hopeful ice dancers Katerina and Heath chase gold and each other in a torrid, tempestuous, on-again-off-again Bronte-esque affair that fascinates their rabid fans and horrifies the conservative skating world. Splashy romantic fun with terrific insights into the world of ice dancing, Olympic sports, and ruthless ambition.
Buy for: your cubicle mate who watches ice dancing clips on break and will theorize endlessly on #VirtueMoir did-they-didn’t-they? She’ll swoon.
7. LAVENDER HOUSE by Lev A.C. Rosen
Classic detective noir with a gay hero, and the start of a terrific mystery series. A San Francisco police officer recently outed in a raid on a gay nightclub and immediately ousted from the force struggles to rebuild as a PI, struggling with life outside the closet at the height of McCarthy’s persecution of gay Americans. The cases are classic whodunits filled with shady characters and underworld dames, but the spot-on depiction of America’s queer spaces on the fringes of the white-picket-fence 1950s is the real star.
Buy for: your senior-citizen gay neighbor and his husband, who undoubtedly remember days just like this.
8. THE HOMEMADE GOD by Rachel Joyce
When a famous artist dies in Italy while on honeymoon with his much-younger wife, his grown children arrive on the scene in search of both answers and his latest masterpiece. Neither will satisfy their own buried traumas and complicated grief, and the resulting familial tangle is superbly depicted.
Buy for: that office co-worker constantly entangled in messy family drama. She’ll reflect that even her family drama isn’t this messy.
9. THE HONG KONG WIDOW by Kristin Loesch
Troubled Shanghai refugee Mei scrapes a living in 1950s Hong Kong, trying to put her tragic past behind her—until a sinister opportunity comes knocking, and Mei is invited to Hong Kong’s most notorious haunted house where six spirit mediums will pit themselves against the ghosts in competition for a vast reward. Tense, emotional, poetic, utterly unputdownable.
Buy for: Your great-aunt who always fancied herself a psychic. She’ll re-think ever proposing so much as a Ouija board game at the next family gathering.
10. THE BOOK CLUB FOR TROUBLESOME WOMEN by Marie Bostwick
A quartet of 1960s housewives with outwardly enviable lives bond over secret dissatisfactions and radical literature—starting with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which urges them to question what it really means to “have it all.” Pitch-perfect depiction of the female striving for more while being told they already have more than enough.
Buy for: your grandmother, who remembers that striving and the launch of The Feminine Mystique.
11. BURY OUR BONES IN THE MIDNIGHT SOIL by V.E. Schwab
Angsty lesbian vampires for the win! The stories of a modern-day Boston college student, a soulful Victorian debutante, and a rebellious beauty from Renaissance Spain converge in a torrent of gorgeously poetic hunger, rage, and passion spanning continents and centuries.
Buy for: your lesbian goddaughter. She’ll swoon, she’ll sigh, she’ll probably get a Bury my bones in the midnight soil, plant them shallow and water them deep, and in my place will grow a feral rose, soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth tattoo.
12. THE WOLF DEN by Elodie Harper
Greek-born Amara was a doctor’s daughter before being enslaved as a prostitute in Roman-ruled Pompeii. She survives day to day in the casual violence of the brothel, dreaming of escape for herself and her friends—but what will she do, or leave behind, to earn it? A tale of great historical vividness and almost unbearable poignancy.
Buy for: your Roman empire obsessed nephew. This will bring home like nothing else that ancient Rome was more than legion movements and Imperial scheming—it was ordinary people, and exploited women, and the enslaved desperately searching for a way out.
13. THE STATIONERY SHOP by Marjan Kamali
Two dreamy, idealistic teenagers fall in love at their local stationery shop in the politically charged heat of 1950s Tehran, but revolution and tragedy are destined to divide them. Decades later a chance encounter provides the chance for answers: what happened that day when they were supposed to meet in the square and didn’t? So beautiful, delicate, and bittersweet.
Buy for: your sister-in-law whose shelves are crowded with romances and cookbooks. She’ll adore the tenderly drawn tale of young love, and she’ll go down the rabbit hole of Persian food blogs looking for jeweled rice recipes.
14. MAYA AND NATASHA by Elyse Durham
A gorgeous deep dive into not only the world of ballet, but the inevitable distortion of family love under the inhuman crush of a police state. Twin ballet students Maya and Natasha are raised in the cutthroat world of the Vaganova Academy in the USSR during the height of the Cold War, but only one will become a ballerina as jealousy, ambition, and paranoia divides the sisters with deadly results.
Buy for: This ultimate sister novel can only go into your sister’s Christmas stocking. Discuss which of you would defect to the west and which might stay for love of her art.
15. TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON by Chris Pavone
A taut thriller unfolding hour by hour as an American honeymooner wakes up alone in Lisbon and realizes her new husband has disappeared. Where did he go, what business does he have in Lisbon, and what does it have to do with the American billionaire lining up a presidential run back home?
Buy for: your political junkie son who loves thrillers and news blogs. He’ll savor this tensely plotted thriller with its eerie parallels to modern politics, and learn a lot more about #MeToo on the journey.
16. PARK AVENUE by Renee Ahdieh
Jia Song is on her way up: daughter of Korean bodega owners, now climbing the ladder at her prestigious Manhattan law firm and thisclose to scoring the classic Birkin bag that has become her ultimate internal symbol that she’s Made It. When she’s assigned to a messy case involving the legendary Park family and their billion-dollar Korean beauty empire, it’s the chance of a lifetime—or is it?
Buy for: Your ambitious daughter who lives for Korean beauty videos and designer labels. She’ll absolutely agree with Jia that sometimes buying a Birkin isn’t conspicuous consumption, it’s a war cry for independence.
17. THE MEASURE by Nikki Erlick
The world is shaken to its core when billions of identical mysterious boxes appear on the doorstep of every adult around the world. Iside every box is a piece of string which—long or short—tells how many years you have to live. Eight very different people wrestle with the choice, with unforgettable results.
Buy for: Your grandfather, who has been having long thoughtful talks lately about the end of life and what it means. Prepare to both get choked up.
18. BLOOD OVER BRIGHT HAVEN by M.L. Wang
Magical scholar Sciona has always burned to gain entry to the High Magistry of Tiran as its first female Highmage. But entry to those exalted ranks proves to be a nightmare rather than a dream, as Sciona realizes that Tiran’s industrial utopia is based on horrifying blood magic…and that no one is interested in righting the injustice.
Buy for: That retired teacher you still keep in touch with, the one who taught classes on race relations and intersectionality. They’ll nod at the unflinching parallels of Tiran’s world to ours, and the impossibility of building a moral society on a legacy of blood.
19. THE LAST FERRY OUT by Andrea Bartz
Grieving Abby comes to beautiful, isolated Isla Colel in search of answers about her recently deceased fiancee Eszter, and finds much more than she was expecting. Just what was Eszter up to in the last days before a mysterious accident claimed her life? What exactly are that group of charming ex-pats hiding about her final hours?
Buy for: Your bisexual aunt who is always looking for good f/f fiction. She’ll love the tender examination of Abby’s grief for her lost love, and the beautiful unfolding of the women’s relationship in flashback as she struggles to move on.
20. HAPPY LAND by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Mesmerizing tale about a real historic kingdom founded post-Civil War by formerly enslaved Black Americans who saw land ownership as the way to peace and prosperity, and how property ownership echoes through the succeeding generations (and is frequently undercut by racist legislation). The best kind of historical fiction, that teaches even as it entertains.
Buy for: Your dad, who lives for learning about lesser-known corners of American history. Expect a string of indignant text messages about racism baked into southern infrastructure.
21. HONEY by Isabel Banta
Nineties teen Amber Young finds herself thrust into the spotlight when a talent search molds her into a pop superstar almost overnight. Navigating the glare alongside her dancer-singer BFF and her boy-band star crush, Amber struggles with the dark side of her success: the users, the bad press, and the fact that everything from her voice, her body, and her sexual history are fodder to be packaged by her label.
Buy for: Your mother. She’ll remember how fame ate up Stevie Nicks and Janis Joplin, you’ll remember the same for Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, and the two of you will end up in a passionate discussion of how the media consumes, molds, and judges talented young female artists throughout the decades.
22. HOW TO AGE DISGRACEFULLY by Clare Pooley
When Lydia comes to volunteer at a senior citizens’ social club, she expects a group of gentle elders but finds instead a band of unexpected rebels with questionably-legal skills…skills that come in handy when the senior center comes under threat of closure. Deadpan, screwball, hilarious.
Buy for: The rising-seventy secretary you drew for the office Secret Santa. She’ll relish a book about senior citizens that doesn’t reduce them to cutesy sidekicks or wise mentors for the young.
23. ALL THAT LIFE CAN AFFORD by Emily Everett
American literature student Anna fell in love with London and made good on her dream to study there—but living paycheck to paycheck in England’s most expensive city is a far cry from her Jane Austen dreams. Until she lands a tutoring gig with the uber-wealthy Wilders and finds herself whisked into the world of the aristocratic elite…but what will it take to stay there?
Buy for: Your Anglophile cousin who still talks dreamily about that semester abroad in England. She’ll savor every minute of this love letter to London and all its out of the way nooks and crannies.
24. SOCIETY OF LIES by Lauren Ling Brown
Maya returns to her alma mater Princeton full of pride to watch her little sister Naomi graduate—only to be stunned by Naomi’s shocking murder. As she delves into her sister’s final weeks of life, Maya’s own long-buried secrets—especially the secret society she joined as a student, which likely tapped her sister as well—come home to roost,
Buy for: That young woman in your life heading off to college. There are timely lessons here about not losing yourself to belong to people who don’t deserve you in the first place.
25. THE INCREDIBLE KINDNESS OF PAPER by Evelyn Skye
A woman with a gift for origami finds her way toward her long-lost childhood friend and soulmate, one random act of kindness at a time. This book put such an enormous smile on my face!
Buy for: That person in your life, whoever they are, who really, REALLY needs a smile. And don’t we all?
Get thee to a bookstore, and happy holidays!
