“The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.”
Looking for the most talked-about books of 2025 (so far)? This year has already delivered some incredible new reads – from viral BookTok books everyone is obsessed with, to bestselling books of 2025 that are dominating reading lists and book clubs everywhere. Whether you want the best books of 2025 so far, are curious about which trending books 2025 readers can’t stop recommending, or you simply love discovering must-read new releases, this list has you covered. Today at What We Reading, we’re diving into the popular books 2025 readers are buzzing about across thrillers, romance, fantasy and more – the novels sparking conversations, topping charts, and filling social feeds. These are the books everyone is talking about right now, the ones you’ll want on your shelf before spoilers strike. So, if you’re searching for your next unforgettable read, here are the buzzy books of 2025 you won’t want to miss.
Onyx Storm (The Empyrean #3) – Rebecca Yarros
Kicking off our list of the most talked-about books from 2025 is the third entry in Rebecca Yarros’ viral BookTok Romantasy series, The Empyrean. Onyx Storm kicks off with Violet Sorrengail having survived eighteen months at Basgiath War College, knowing that there’s no more time for lessons. Because the battle has truly begun, and with enemies closing in from outside their walls and from within their own ranks, it’s impossible to know who to trust.
Now, Violet must journey beyond the failing Arertian wards to seek allies from unfamiliar lands to stand with Navarre. The trip will test every ounce of her wit, luck, and strength, but she will do anything to save what she loves – her dragons, her home, and him. Even if it means keeping a secret so big it might destroy everything. They need an army. They need power. And the one thing only Violet can find – the truth. But a storm is coming… and not everyone can survive its wrath.
Check Out Our Guide On How To Read The Empyrean Books In Order
All The Other Mothers Hate Me – Sarah Harman
Florence Grimes, age thirty-one, always takes the easy way out. Single, broke, and unfulfilled after the humiliating end to her girl-band career, she has only one reason to get out of bed: her ten-year-old son, Dylan. But then Alfie Risby, her son’s bully and the heir to a vast frozen-food empire, mysteriously disappears during a class field trip, and Dylan becomes the prime suspect.
Florence, for once, is faced with a task she can’t quit: She’s got to find Alfie and clear her son’s name or risk losing him forever – never mind that she has no useful skills, and that all the other mothers positively hate her. Oh, and she has reason to suspect that Dylan may not be as innocent as she would like to believe.
Katabasis – R.F. Kuang
Another one of the biggest BookTok books of 2025, Katabasis by R.F. Kuang, introduces readers to Alice Law, who has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality – her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world. That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly have been her fault.
Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her entire future. And even death itself isn’t going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.
Trip – Amie Barrodale
Sandra dies unexpectedly at a spiritual conference in Nepal. Across the world, her son, Trip, has run away from a treatment centre in the American desert, which was meant to help him overcome his refusal to go to school. Trip isn’t sure where to go next, but a strange man picks him up on the side of the road. As Sandra roves through the past and present in her new state of limbo, Trip and his new companion, Anthony, venture further south. When Sandra learns what has happened to her son, her struggle to help him from the other realm begins.
Amie Barrodale’s new 2025 book, Trip, is a dual odyssey of mother and son. It’s a story about childhood and motherhood, life and death, and everything in between.
Check Out These Books Everyone’s Recommending Right Now
Broken Country – Clare Leslie Hall
One of the most viral trending 2025 books from the historical fiction space, Broken Country, begins with Beth and her gentle, kind husband, Frank. When Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realise that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager – the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son, Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.
As Beth is hauled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise, and dangerous secrets and resentments from the past are brought to light, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to choose between the woman she once was and the woman she has become.
Check Out The Best Books Like Broken Country
Flashlight – Susan Choi
One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. Now, it is just Louisa and her American mother, Anne, adrift and facing the challenges of an ordinary life in the wake of a great loss. United, separated, and also repelled by their mutual grief, they attempt to move on. Yet 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 fateful night by the sea, Flashlight chases the shock waves of one family’s catastrophe. A monumental new 2025 novel from National Book Award winner Susan Choi, Flashlight spans decades and continents in a spellbinding, heart-gripping investigation of family, loss, memory, and the ways we are shaped by what we cannot see.
Atmosphere – Taylor Jenkins Reid
Any story by Taylor Jenkins Reid is going to make a splash, and Atmosphere is already one of the most popular books from 2025. Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. When she comes across an ad looking for the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program, Joan knows it’s her moment. Selected from a pool of thousands in the summer of 1980, she begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates.
As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan starts to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe. Then, in December 1984, on mission STS-LR9, it all changes in an instant.
Check Out The Best Books Like Atmosphere
Helm – Sarah Hall
Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind – a subject of folklore and awe, part-elemental god, part-aerial demon blasting through the sublime landscape of Northern England since the dawn of time. Through the stories of those who’ve obsessed over Helm, an extraordinary history is formed: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate Helm, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish Helm, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture Helm, and the farmer’s daughter who fiercely loved Helm.
But now, Dr Selima Sutar, surrounded by infinite clouds and measuring instruments in her observation hut, fears human pollution is killing Helm. Rich, wild, and vitally timely, Helm is the trending book by Sarah Hall about a singular life force and the relationship between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other.
Love Forms – Claire Adam
For much of her life, Dawn has felt as if something had been missing. Now, at the age of fifty-eight, with a divorce behind her and her two grown-up sons busy with their own loves, she should be trying to settle into a new future for herself. But she keeps returning to the past and to the secret she’s kept all these years. At just sixteen, Dawn found herself pregnant, and – as was common in Trinidad back then – her parents sent her away to have the baby and give her up for adoption.
More than forty years on, Dawn yearns to reconnect with her lost daughter. But tracking down her child isn’t as easy in reality. It’s an emotional journey that leads Dawn to retrace her steps back home and to question not only that fateful decision, but every turn in the road of her life since. Love Forms is one of the most talked-about books from 2025 about a woman in search of herself, a novel that shines with empathy through the passages of a mother’s life.
Check Out Our Best Books From 2025
Wild Dark Shore – Charlotte McConaghy
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But now, the Salts are the only inhabitants. During the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore. Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might be just what they need.
But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realises Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must choose if they can trust each other – and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.
Check Out The Best Books Like Wild Dark Shore
Bring The House Down – Charlotte Runcie
Alex Lyons always has his mind made up by the time the curtain comes down on a performance. On the opening night of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he doesn’t deliberately overrate the rating of Hayley Sinclair’s show, nor does he hesitate when the opportunity presents itself to have a one-night stand with the struggling actress.
Unaware that she’s gone home with the theatre critic who’s just written a career-ending review of her, Hayley wakes up at his apartment to his scathing one-star critique in print on the kitchen table, unsure which humiliation is worse. So she revamps her show into a viral sensation, critiquing Alex Lyons himself. Yet Alex remains unapologetic. As his reputation goes up in flames, he insists on telling his unvarnished version of events to his colleague, Sophie. Through her eyes, we see that the deeper she gets pulled into his downfall, the more conflicted she becomes. After all, there are always two sides to every story.
Dream Count – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of a pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything – until she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria, who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in the US – but faces unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has achieved.
One of the most popular books of 2025, Dream Count is a commentary on these women in a sparkling, transcendent tale that takes up the very nature of love itself. A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel is an unflinching observation of the human heart, delivered in a language that soars with beauty and power.
Check Out The Best Book Club Books From 2025
Universality – Natasha Brown
Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar. An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm.
She solves the mystery, but her viral expose raises more questions than it answers. Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, Universality focuses on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean. A thrilling new book from one of the most acclaimed young writers working today, Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language. It dares you to look away.
Flesh – David Szalay
Teenaged Istvan lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practised by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to his peers, his mother, and himself. In the years that follow, Istvan is born along by the goodwill, or self-interest, of strangers, charting a rocky yet upward trajectory that lands him further from his childhood and the defining events that abruptly ended it.
A collection of intimate moments over the course of decades, David Szalay’s Flesh chronicles a man at odds with himself – estranged from and by the circumstances and demands of a life not entirely under his control and the roles he is asked to play. Shadowed by the spectre of past tragedy and the apathy of modernity, the tension between Istvan and all that alienates him hurtles forward until sudden tragedy again throws life as he knows it into jeopardy.
The Emperor Of Gladness – Ocean Vuong
Another one of the most talked about books from 2025, The Emperor of Gladness opens one late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, where nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge, ready to jump, when he hears someone shouting across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an old woman succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he becomes her caretaker. Over the span of a year, the pair develop an unlikely and life-altering bond built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak.
Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, Ocean Vuong’s viral book shows the profound ways in which love, labour, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul.
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Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
