Esquire Names Its Best Books of 2025

We’re not to November yet, but the best books of the year lists are already coming in hot. We’ve seen them from Publishers Weekly, as well as Barnes & Noble. Now, Esquire names their best books of 2025.

Esquire has named 27 books to its best of the year so far, and the titles showcase a range of genres and styles. Among their picks are several books that clock in under 300 pages, a nonfiction thriller, an escapist fantasy, and more.

Here are seven of their 27 best of the year picks so far:

• Fonseca by Jessica Francis Kane: “Penelope Fitzgerald (The Beginning of Spring) is one of my all-time favorite novelists, so I was biased in my initial interest in this book, which fictionalizes the most mysterious part of Fitzgerald’s life: Her journey to Mexico in search of an inheritance that could have changed her family’s fortunes. But you don’t need to know anything about Penelope Fitzgerald to be swept away by Kane’s gorgeous prose, dry wit, and strong sense of place. This is a delightful comedy of manners that honors Fitzgerald’s legacy so well, it feels like one of her own novels.”
• A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar: “Megha Majumdar—the author of A Burning, one of Esquire’s best books of 2020—has written one of the biggest books of the fall thanks to its status as an Oprah’s Book Club pick. Set in a near-future Kolkata, India, where climate change has decimated the food supply, it’s about a mother and a young thief whose survival instincts set them against each other. It’s also a tense, emotional thriller written with a poet’s knack for finding the right images to set your brain on fire.”
• Waterline by Aram Mrjoian: “Mrjoian’s debut novel is set in the American Midwest, where a woman dies by suicide after swimming out into the middle of Lake Michigan with no intention to return. It’s a haunting image that belies the novel’s warm slices of family life that reminded me of Stuart Dybek’s short fiction, particularly The Coast of Chicago. Although his present-day characters live in the shadow of the Armenian Genocide that occurred more than one hundred years ago, Mrjoian says he “didn’t want [the novel] to be a historical trauma narrative,” and the result is a joyful, heartwarming drama with an intricately woven structure that is effortlessly pleasurable to read.”
• Bog Queen by Anna North: “I was completely engrossed (and grossed out) by Anna North’s Bog Queen, a tense and atmospheric literary thriller with a strong sense of place. It opens with a passage written from the perspective of moss—moss!—and keeps getting better. It toggles between the present day, where a forensic anthropologist tries to identify an ancient body discovered in a bog, and hundreds of years ago, when another young woman, a Celtic druid, attempts to lead her community through the threat of Roman expansion.”
• The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami: “Lalami’s (The Other Americans) new novel has one of the best high-concept hooks of the year: a museum archivist is abducted by federal agents and taken to a detention center for observation after an algorithm predicts she will murder her husband in the near-future. During her monthslong stay in the facility, her dreams are monitored for evidence of homicidal intent. It feels like a mix between Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and Wim Wender’s Until the End of the World, written in Lalami’s silky and celebrated prose.”
• The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar: “El-Mohtar’s last novel This Is How You Lose the Time War (co-written with Max Gladstone), is one of the only books to ever hit the bestseller lists four years after publication thanks to a viral tweet. Her new book, a concise fantasy adventure called The River Has Roots, is about Esther and Ysabel Hawthorne, two sisters who care for ancient trees in the town of Thistleford, which sits near the borders of Faerie. When one of the sisters gets romantically involved with a Faerie suitor, things take a turn for the worse. El-Mohtar is one of our finest crafters of sentences, so it’s fitting that this book features a magic system called Grammar.”
• The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien: “When I read the first chapter of Madeleine Thien’s new novel, The Book of Records, I had an intense emotional reaction. After a few more chapters, images from the book began appearing in my dreams at night. Both of these responses are extremely rare for me as a reader, but Thien has written something truly special here. It’s about a father and daughter migrating across the ocean who discover a liminal island where other migrants live in buildings made of time, but the less you know about the story before reading, the better.”

You can read the full list of Esquire‘s Best Books of 2025 here.

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