The 15 Best Books of 2025

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If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.Books can be a refuge from (waves arms) all this, even when they take you deeper into the darkness of 2025.There is a grace in the relationship between book and reader, with nothing but your eyes and brain and the words on the page.

Thank goodness for the hearts and minds of the authors who imagine and construct these worlds, who ask these rigorous questions, who spend their lives with words.It’s a pleasure to join with a couple of my fellow book critics in selecting some of our favorite books of the year.

— Carolyn KelloggOur picks for this year’s best in arts and entertainment.“Audition” By Katie KitamuraRiverhead: 208 pages, $28This is one of those books the less explained the better.Kitamura is one of our most exacting novelists, with never a careless word.

On its surface, “Audition” is about an actress, her husband and a young man in New York City.As you’d expect with this setup, the ideas of self, performance and identity are in the mix.

Every observation, theater visit and glimpse into their apartment becomes quietly important.The marriage’s past spools out with such clarity that what they have for breakfast becomes ominous.

Every relationship has secrets, but this one’s are transformative.Elements of this book that cannot be prized apart also cannot cohere.

It’s an astonishing accomplishment of form and narrative.It’s a rare book that can surprise like this one does.

And it’s a delight to read.— C.K.“Flesh” By David SzalayScribner: 368 pages, $28.99Emotionally stunted men aren’t particularly hard to find in fiction.

But Istvan, the antihero of Szalay’s fifth novel, is an extreme and engrossing case.Born in poverty and surviving an adolescence of sexual violation, wartime PTSD and drug abuse, he enter...