all of my 2025 book recommendations

All year long, I’ve made a weekly book recommendation when kicking off the weekend open thread. These aren’t work-related books; they’re just books I like, mostly fiction. Sometimes they’re books that I’m in the middle of reading, and other times they’re just long-standing favorites.

Here’s the complete list of what I’ve recommended this year (maybe in time for holiday gift-shopping!). I’ve bolded my favorites of the favorites. (Interestingly, with some notable exceptions, it appears that what I was reading got lighter and lighter as the year went on.)

Long Bright River, by Liz Moore. It’s SO GOOD! It’s the story of two sisters, close as children but estranged as adults. When one becomes a police officer while the other struggles with addiction. When the younger sister goes missing, the other tries to find her. I thought this would be a gritty police procedural, which isn’t normally my thing, but it’s a beautifully layered literary exploration of family bonds and addiction that will get you right in the gut. The best book I’ve read in months. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Rental House, by Weike Wang. After the daughter of Chinese immigrants and the son of a white, working class family marry, they grapple with their relationship with each other and both sets of parents over the course of a summer vacation. (Amazon, Bookshop)

God of the Woods, by Liz Moore. A teenager disappears from the summer camp her family owns, 14 years after her older brother similarly disappeared. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson. After loving Liz Moore’s Long Bright River, I wanted more literary fiction mysteries where the character development gets as much attention as the plot. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Perfume and Pain, by Anna Dorn. A cancelled writer searches for inspiration and develops a surprising relationship with her new neighbor. Funny and smart. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Piglet, by Lottie Hazell. After her fiance confesses a betrayal two weeks before their wedding, a woman becomes inexplicably ravenous. (Amazon, Bookshop)

The Safekeep, by Yael van der Wouden. When her brother’s girlfriend comes to stay with her in the Netherlands, a woman’s post-war life is upended. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Blob: A Love Story, by Maggie Su. After a woman takes home a blob she finds in an alley, it grows into her ideal man. (Amazon, Bookshop)

The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett. The Queen of England stumbles into a mobile library and develops a love of reading, which upends her life as the monarch. (Amazon, Bookshop)

The Rachel Incident, by Caroline O’Donoghue. A best friendship is upended when one of the friends begins an affair with a married professor. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Real Americans, by Rachel Khong. This is an epic family saga told in three generations: a pair of scientists who fled China’s Cultural Revolution, their daughter, and the son she has in America with the wealthy heir to a pharmaceutical company, whose business is intertwined with her parents in ways she learns of only later. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Show Don’t Tell, by Curtis Sittenfeld. I will read anything Curtis Sittenfeld writes, including short stories, which normally frustrate me for being … short. As she has moved into middle age, so have many of her characters, including one story that revisits the protagonist from her novel Prep. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Every Tom, Dick & Harry, by Elinor Lipman. Yay for a new Elinor Lipman, who I believe is the Jane Austen of our time. A woman is hired to handle the estate sale of her small town’s brothel/B&B. There’s intergenerational friendship, a romance with the chief of police, family drama, a high school reunion, and much more. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Three Days in June, by Anne Tyler. The night before a woman’s daughter is getting married, her ex shows up on her doorstep with no place to stay (and a cat). The story is the day before the wedding, the day of, and the day afterwards, and it’s charming and cozy and ended too soon. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Greta & Valdin, by Rebecca K. Reilly. Greta and Valdin are siblings and roommates, one dealing with his break-up with a much older man, and one trying to figure out love and her career. It’s also about their large Maori-Russian-Catalonian family, and about struggling to find your way, and it’s funny. (Amazon, Bookshop)

I See You’ve Called In Dead, by John Kenney. An obituary writer publishes his own obituary after drinking too much one night, then he learns his newspaper can’t fire him because their systems now list him as dead. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Back After This, by Linda Holmes. A podcast producer who’s been wanting to host her own show gets offered the chance to do it … but she has to agree to let the show be about her dating life and to work with a relationship coach and influencer, of whom she’s highly skeptical. It’s smart and funny, and I looked forward to reading it every night and was sad when it was over. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Three Junes, by Julia Glass. The story of three generations of a Scottish family, across three summers. It’s about the expectations and obligations of family, as well as marriage, love, and loss. One of my favorite books of all time. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Dearly Departed, by Elinor Lipman. After the unexpected death of her mother, a single mom returns to her small hometown and realized life there was different than she’d previously understood. (Amazon, Bookshop)

The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern, by Lynda Cohen Loigman. A retired pharmacist moves to a retirement community in Florida, where she reconnects with a man from her past. The story alternates between their relationship in the present day and what happened between them when they were growing up in Brooklyn in the 1920s. (Amazon, Bookshop)

The Glitch, by Elisabeth Cohen. A tech company CEO who’s the walking embodiment of every piece of dehumanized corporate advice you’ve ever heard has her life disrupted when she meets a woman who appears to be the younger version of herself (literally — same name, same scar, same history). Darkly hilarious. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Food Person, by Adam Roberts. A down-on-her-luck food writer is hired to ghostwrite a cookbook for a messy, narcissistic TV star who doesn’t even like food. Roberts, a food writer himself, seeds the whole thing with expertise about the food world, and it’s hilarious and in parts surprisingly moving. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Consider Yourself Kissed, by Jessica Stanley. The title makes it sound like a light romance, but it’s the story of a woman who enters a relationship and finds, like many women before her, that her life must narrow so his can expand, and how she deals with that. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Aftertaste, by Daria Lavelle. A chef who can taste ghosts’ favorite meals finds he can temporarily reunite people with their lost loved ones by preparing those foods. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Girls Girls Girls, by Shoshana von Blanckensee. As soon as they graduate high school, two best friends (and secret girlfriends) drive to San Francisco and try to make a life there. It’s about being gay, Jewish, and loving your grandma. It’s also about strip clubs, cringing at yourself, and figuring out who you are versus who your family is. I loved it. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Far and Away, by Amy Poeppel. A family in Dallas and a family in Berlin swap homes for the summer, then find their lives intertwining in unexpected ways. Funny and sweet, and I am already missing many of these characters. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Park Avenue, by Renee Ahdieh. An ambitious young lawyer is asked to take on a case against a monstrously rich family’s patriarch, who seems to be hiding money from his kids and terminally ill wife. (Amazon, Bookshop)

The Bedwetter, by Sarah Silverman (Amazon, Bookshop). If you like her comedy, you’ll like this. Warning: it is crude. If you don’t like really crude comedy, then let me suggest some hilarious but less crude books by other comics: I’m Just a Person by Tig Notaro (Amazon, Bookshop); I’d Like to Play Alone, Please by Tom Segura (Amazon, Bookshop) and You’ll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein (Amazon, Bookshop).

Musical Chairs, by Amy Poeppel, who loves nothing better than to assemble a big messy group of family and chosen family and let the chaos fly. This time, the musician daughter of a famous conductor, her chamber trio, her kids, her octogenarian father’s new fiancé, and assorted other characters gather at a ramshackle home in the country and nothing goes as planned. (Amazon, Bookshop)

A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping, by Sangu Mandanna. The latest from the author of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, this is just as cozy and delightful. After one of the most powerful witches in the world loses her magic and is exiled from the magicians’ guild, she must find her way back while running an enchanted inn that only people who truly need can find. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Carnegie Hill, by Jonathan Vatner. A newlywed struggling with her marriage watches other relationships in various states of disarray in her her New York co-op building. It’s about people with money, people with less money, marriage, fidelity, and secrets. (Amazon, Bookshop)

I’m Glad My Mom Died, by Jenette McCurdy. An incredible memoir about her abusive stage mom that grabs you and won’t let you put it down. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Bring the House Down, by Charlotte Runcie. When a performer discovers a theater critic wrote a scathing review of her show the same night he slept with her, she creates a hit show about what happened. Told through the eyes of the critic’s friend and colleague, it’s an exploration of what (some) badly behaved men tell themselves and the chaos they create for those around them. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Flying Solo, by Linda Holmes. After returning home to clean out her great-aunt’s house, a woman who recently called off her wedding finds a mysterious love letter and an even more mysterious wooden duck. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Morningside Heights, by Cheryl Mendelson. The woman who wrote the amazing Home Comforts: the Art and Science of Keeping House also wrote a novel! Two married musicians grapple with the their careers, the troubled love lives of their friends, the aftermath of a neighbor’s death, and the way rapid gentrification may soon push them out of their beloved home. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Sisters of Fortune, by Esther Chehebar, who’s been called “a Jewish Jane Austen.” Three sisters in the insular Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn try to figure out their relationships to men and to each other, as one begins to question her engagement. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Sister Wife, by Christine Brown Woolley. I don’t know what made me pick this up but once I did, I couldn’t put it down. Written by one of the (former!) three sister wives from TLC’s reality show about a polygamous marriage, it’s absolutely fascinating. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Single, Carefree, Mellow, by Katherine Heiny. I don’t normally like short stories but I will read everything Katherine Heiny writes and these short stories are just as funny and smart about love and relationships as her longer books. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Great Big Beautiful Life, by Emily Henry. Two very different writers — one an outgoing celebrity journalist and one a Pulitzer-Prize-winning curmudgeon — compete to write the biography of a once-famous tabloid princess who long ago dropped out of sight. Not my favorite Emily Henry, but everything she writes is so entertaining that it’s still worth recommending. She’s an ideal author for when you want fluff that’s still smart and well-written. (Amazon, Bookshop)

The Sisters Weiss, by Naomi Ragen. The daughter of a strict ultra-Orthodox Jewish family rebels against the expectations of her parents and community, to mixed results. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Everything Here Is Under Control, by Emily Adrian. Two estranged friends reunite when one is breaking under the strain of new motherhood. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Land of Milk and Honey, by C Pam Zhang. With food supplies disappearing after an environmental disaster, a chef escapes to a job in the Italian Alps to cook in a closed oasis for the world’s elite. (Amazon, Bookshop)

What Is Wrong With You? by Paul Rudnick. Both funny and poignant, it follows a motley cast of characters (including a former TV action star, a fired book editor, and a dentist in mourning) as they prepare to attend the wedding of one of their exes to a famous tech billionaire. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Nobody’s Girl, by Virginia Roberts Giuffre. It’s an account of the author’s abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell (including abuse that simply took another form after she escaped them), and it’s absolutely harrowing. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon, by Matthew Norman. After being recently widowed, a mom raising two young kids meets a man who recently lost his wife, and they slowly start to rebuild their lives. It is charming and legitimately funny and there’s a lot of Baltimore in it, and I loved it. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Wreck, by Catherine Newman. A woman in middle age has a a delightful family, a mysterious rash, and a preoccupation with a local train accident. The family is the same one from her first book, Sandwich, but this book is 10 times funnier, and you don’t need to have read the first one to enjoy this one. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Ladies in Waiting: Jane Austen’s Unsung Characters, by Adriana Trigiani and more. A bunch of well-known authors, including my personal favorite Elinor Lipman, reimagine the lives of some of Jane Austen’s minor characters, including Mary Bennett, Georgiana Darcy, Caroline Bingley, and Miss Bates. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Buckeye, by Patrick Ryan. A short-lived affair in a small town in 1945 has long-lasting consequences for two families. I loved this! This ended up being my favorite book of everything I read this year. (Amazon, Bookshop)

And if you’re looking for more, here are my lists of book recommendations from 2024 … from 2023 … from 2022 … from 2021 … from 2020 … from 2019 … from 2018 … from 2017 … from 2016 … and from 2015.

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