The New York Times’ Notable Fiction Books of 2025

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana’s Invincible Summer, a genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence. Originally written in Spanish, where the word “victim” is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor’s classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.

From the acclaimed author of Chef’s Kiss, a groundbreaking trans Regency romance that’s both delightfully witty and refreshingly iconoclastic. With its heady combination of dry wit, slow-burn romance, and a nuanced portrait of trans identity, A Gentleman’s Gentleman stands to transform the historical romance genre as we know it.

Megha Majumdar’s electrifying new novel, following her acclaimed New York Times bestseller A Burning, is set in a near-future Kolkata, India in which two families seeking to protect their children must battle each other. A piercing and propulsive tour de force.

A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in this “lushly painted” (People) historical epic of love, faith, and defiance from the bestselling author of Sam. Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.

A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years — an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss.

From the award-winning poet at the height of his career, a book of personal and American experiences, both beautiful and troubling, touching on the generative cycle of loss and renewal. This collection will stand as one of Young’s best — his voice shaping sorrow with music, wisdom, heartache, and wit.

“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.” A big and big-hearted novel — one enthralling, transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan, from the critically acclaimed author of Mr. Peanut.

Milwaukee 1932. With the Great Depression going full blast, Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with.

In the first book of a sizzling dystopian romance series, psychic gifts are a death sentence and there are rules to survival: Trust no one. Lie to everyone. And whatever you do, don’t fall for your greatest enemy.

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place where she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn’t believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident. Meditative, moving, and finely observed, Stone Yard Devotional is a seminal novel from a writer of rare power, exploring what it means to retreat from the world, the true nature of forgiveness, and the sustained effect of grief on the human soul.

From the author Sarah MacLean, a razor-sharp, wildly sexy novel about a wealthy New England family’s long-overdue reckoning … and the one week that threatens to tear them apart. “A gripping inheritance drama, wrapped around a swoony summer romance” (The New York Times Book Review), this luscious novel explores past secrets, present truths, and futures forged in the wake of wild summer storms.

1899. As the new century approaches, struggling English writer Evelyn Dolman — a hack, by his own description — marries Laura Rensselaer, daughter of an American oil tycoon. Evelyn anticipates that he and Laura will inherit a substantial fortune, but his hopes are dashed when a mysterious rift between Laura and her father, just before the patriarch’s death, leads to her disinheritance. The unhappy newlyweds travel to Venice to celebrate the New Year, but from their first moments, otherworldly occurrences begin to accumulate. Evelyn’s already jangled nerves fray further. Where has Laura disappeared to? How to explain the increasingly sinister circumstances closing around him? Could he be losing his mind?

Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history. Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully brings to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable pain — and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.

From the Booker prize-winning, bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday, a genre-bending new novel full of secrets and surprises; an immersive exploration, across time and history, of what can ever be truly known.

A whimsical and heartwarming novel about a witch who has a second chance to get her magical powers — and her life — back on track, from the national bestselling author of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches.