PV Guide's favorite books of 2025

[Ed. note: There are some topics I can’t keep up with as consistently as others, so I thought I'd ask the people from whom I get recs on those topics. Please welcome PV Guide correspondent Nicole Clark to talk about her favorite books of the year! Nicole is an LA-based writer and editor and former bookseller who helped lead Polygon's annual best books list. You can find her work on her website, read her Polygon Exit Interview, and follow her on Bluesky and Storygraph.]

As a guest contributor it’s only fair to open with a hot take: Books are good. You should read them. 

Jokes aside, I’m grateful Pete invited me to write this. Though I spent years co-running Polygon’s best science fiction and fantasy lists, I love to read pretty much everything. The last time I got to make a genre-agnostic favorites list was when I was a bookseller at The Village Well. You could say I’ve been chasing that high ever since. 

2025 was a fantastic year. Many of my favorite authors – Nnedi Okorafor, Emily Henry, Stephen Graham Jones, Lily King – put out new books. All of them were good, which was an overwhelming and blessed experience. All of this leads me to my final caveat: I loved more than 10 books that came out in 2025.

Honorable Mentions

Nonfic: Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People - Imani Perry, The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom - Shari Franke, You Didn't Hear This From Me: Notes on the Art of Gossip - Kelsey McKinney, Authority: Essays - Andrea Long Chu, Empire of AI - Karen Hao

Sci-fi: Harmattan Season - Tochi Onyebuchi, Katabasis - R.F. Kuang

Lit fic: So Far Gone - Jess Walter, Woodworking - Emily St. James, Audition - Katie Kitamura, Moderation - Elaine Castillo, Beasts of the Sea - Lida Turpeinen

Thriller: Count My Lies - Sophie Stava, Wild Dark Shore - Charlotte McConaghy

Now, for my favorite books of the year.

Great Big Beautiful Lie - Emily Henry

Genre: Romantic Comedy
Tags: Adam Driver types, unhealthy (but, sadly, not that heated) rivalry
Buy on Bookshop

The queen of kissing books has written yet another hit. This one plays with the classic setup of two journalists competing for a scoop, but Emily Henry digs deeper than those 2000s romcom tropes. Sidebar: If Netflix messes up the Friends We Meet on Vacation adaptation, I will not be forgiving them. 

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible - Rabih Alameddine

Genre: Literary Fiction
Tags: Stockholm syndrome, call your mother
Buy on Bookshop

A friend recommended this to me on the basis of its literary merit, which is absolutely true. But you should know that this book is also funny, somehow. It has bleak humor to sustain through the horrors of the Lebanese Civil War and the indignities of being poor, gay, and living with a mom who tells her friends about your bodily functions.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter - Stephen Graham Jones

Genre: Literary, Horror, Historical, Western
Tags: Indigenous revenge quest, vampires but not in a sexy way, human hair lamp :)
Buy on Bookshop

Stephen Graham Jones is one of our greatest living horror writers, and this just might be his masterpiece. Told in alternating points of view between a Lutheran pastor and a Blackfeet man, this book is grotesquely moving. Do not read it if you hate thinking about people crawling inside bears for a winter nap. 

Heart the Lover - Lily King

Genre: Literary, Romantic Drama
Tags: A good cry, a first love, less miscommunication than a Sally Rooney novel but still some
Buy on Bookshop

Have you ever thought about the romantic mistakes of your 20s? Have you ever been thrust into an old friend group and found yourself playing the same role you did then, against your will? This book is for you. Bring tissues. 

The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders - Sarah Aziza

Genre: Memoir
Tags: Intergenerational trauma, control, schlepping across New York City
Buy on Bookshop

This one is beautifully, brutally honest. Told through braided stories of Gazan family history and Aziza’s hospitalization for an eating disorder, her memoir brilliantly exposes assumptions made in medical care and in the way we interact with each other.  

Death of the Author - Nnedi Okorafor

Genre: Science Fiction, Literary
Tags: Bookception, imagined futures, family drama, doing what you fucking want
Buy on Bookshop

This literary family drama centers on a singularly creative protagonist, Zelu, who defies the labels others apply to her. Zelu writes a best-selling dystopian novel and uses an experimental exoskeleton to walk again. I cared about her as if she was an old friend, even when (perhaps especially when) she did something I really disagreed with.  

Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream - Megan Greenwell

Genre: Nonfiction Journalism
Tags: Enshitification, solidarity, damn guys it’s bad out there
Buy on Bookshop

Crying over the death of Toys R Us was not something I expected to do in 2025, but it happened!!! As a journalist, I already had a bone to pick with private equity. This book just gave me more ammo, and for that I am grateful. Do not read this if you want to feel hopeful about the economy.  

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vol. 13 - Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe (Artist)

Genre: Manga
Tags: A little fan service never hurt anyone, jk it hurt me
Buy on Bookshop

Thanks to this series, every time I do something nice or even basically convenient, I tell my friends, “this is what Himmel the hero would do.” If you are a Himmel freak, you may enjoy this one for reasons, and then you may be a little disappointed by this one for reasons, but you should still read it because Frieren is just that good.

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This - Omar El Akkad

Genre: Memoir, History
Tags: History repeats itself, “so much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting”
Buy on Bookshop

I wish I could tell you about how much I love the last sentence in this, but instead I will tell you to READ THIS BOOK. This book is about Palestine, of course, but it’s also about the specific tendency to retroactively sprint to the moral highground; to be a person who said “of course I was against the genocide” once it becomes socially acceptable, and low risk to say so.  

A Drop of Corruption - Robert Jackson Bennett

Genre: Fantasy, Mystery
Tags: Agatha Christie but if Poirot had a foul mouth, Annihilation, “there is no war in Ba Sing Se.”
Buy on Bookshop

In this sequel to The Tainted Cup, our two favorite characters return: The disaster bisexual with a perfect memory, and his boss, who is basically if Sherlock was an eccentric woman. The epilogue also whips; the author basically says (paraphrasing) “eat the rich, jic you missed the theme of my entire series.”