📚 Best Books of 2025
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1
Onyx Storm
Fantasy Romance - Rebecca Yarros - Red Tower Books - 21/01/2025 - 18+ Violet Sorrengail fights an escalating war against the venin while her mate Xaden risks losing his soul as he slowly turns venin himself. To save him, she searches for the legendary seventh dragon breed, navigating betrayal, fragile alliances and enemies hidden within Basgiath.
Onyx Storm, the third installment in Rebecca Yarros's Empyrean series following Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, confirms the American author as the defining voice of contemporary romantasy, blending epic fantasy with explicit romance. The novel follows Violet Sorrengail, a cadet turned dragon rider at the Basgiath war college, amid an increasingly desperate war against the venin, creatures who feed on the earth's magic and corrupt anyone who wields it. At the center of the plot is the bond between Violet and her mate Xaden Riorson, who, after drawing on forbidden venin power to save his army, is slowly losing his humanity, a process the dragons call irreversible. Refusing to accept his fate, Violet sets out on a desperate search for the seventh, legendary dragon breed, the irids, hoping they hold the secret to reversing the transformation, a journey that pushes her to negotiate fragile alliances with the kingdom of Poromiel and previously isolated island nations, while enemies disguised as scribes spread death within Basgiath's walls. Yarros keeps the structure that turned the saga into a phenomenon, short chapters, frequent twists, almost cinematic aerial dragon combat and an unflinching romantic register. Compared with the first two volumes, the novel widens the world beyond the military academy, adding new settings and a more complex geopolitical framework, without losing the emotional intimacy that has kept readers loyal. Genre critics have praised how Yarros, a former servicewoman, balances wartime action with psychological vulnerability, while noting that the growing number of subplots makes the book more demanding for newcomers. On release in January 2025, Onyx Storm shattered every sales record for an adult novel in two decades, selling more than 2.7 million copies in its first week and occupying the top three spots of the New York Times hardcover bestseller list simultaneously, a result that made Rebecca Yarros the best-selling romantasy author in the world.
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10votes
2
Abundance
Political and Economic Nonfiction - Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson - Avid Reader Press - 18/03/2025 - 13+ A manifesto for a politics of abundance that overcomes the bureaucratic and regulatory hurdles blocking housing, infrastructure and clean energy in the United States, calling for a liberalism able not only to protect but also to build.
Abundance, published by Avid Reader Press in March 2025, brings together two of the most influential American political commentators, Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and founder of Vox, and Derek Thompson, a writer for The Atlantic, who combine two parallel ideas, the supply-side progressivism Klein introduced in 2021 and the abundance agenda Thompson outlined separately. The book starts from a simple question, why can't the United States, the richest country in history, build enough housing, trains and clean energy despite having the resources to do so, and locates the answer not in a shortage of funds but in a tangle of regulations, permits and lawsuits that the authors, both progressives, trace largely to decades of political choices made by the American left. Klein and Thompson survey emblematic cases, from the delays in building high-speed rail in California to the ballooning costs of public housing, to argue that American liberalism ended up prioritizing protection from harm over the capacity to actually get things built, hurting the very people it was meant to help, those most affected by scarce affordable housing. The book's central proposal is not a return to right-wing laissez-faire but a different strand of progressivism, able to act on the supply side rather than simply subsidizing demand, directly building housing rather than only funding vouchers, or streamlining environmental permitting that ends up blocking the renewable-energy projects it is meant to encourage. The style, journalistic and accessible, mixes data, case studies and policymaker interviews, remaining readable for non-specialist audiences. The book sparked a heated, cross-partisan debate, earning praise even from Barack Obama, who called it essential reading for progressives, while critics from labor and environmental circles argued the authors were too lenient toward unions and environmental litigation. Within weeks it became a publishing phenomenon, climbing the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list and giving rise to an informal political movement, the abundance movement, which has shaped debate inside the Democratic Party over economic priorities for years to come.
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9votes
3
The Emperor of Gladness
Literary Novel - Ocean Vuong - Penguin Press - 13/05/2025 - 16+ In the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai, estranged from his family and secretly addicted to opioids, is talked down from a suicide attempt by Grazina, an elderly widow with dementia, and moves in with her as her caretaker.
The Emperor of Gladness, published by Penguin Press in May 2025 and released in Italy by Guanda as L'imperatore della gioia, is the second novel by Ocean Vuong, the Vietnamese American poet and novelist who had already established himself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary English-language fiction with his debut, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. The novel opens on a late-summer evening in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut, where nineteen-year-old Hai, estranged from his Vietnamese immigrant family and secretly addicted to opioids after a failed stint in rehab, stands on the edge of a bridge ready to fall into the pouring rain. He is stopped by Grazina, an elderly Lithuanian widow living alone across the river who, in the grip of advancing dementia, offers him a roof in exchange for daily care. Out of this encounter grows an unlikely, moving bond, as Hai becomes Grazina's unofficial caretaker, inventing with her an imaginary war game in which the two become heroic fighters against the cruelties of daily life, letting Vuong move between her lucid moments and episodes set in wartime Lithuania. Around this relationship, the novel widens its focus to a community of precarious workers, Hai's coworkers at a fictional fast-food chain called HomeMarket, portraying overlooked America, low wages, immigrant families, unspoken addictions. The style remains unmistakably his own, prose carrying into fiction the imagistic density of his poetry, able to turn small details into images of striking emotional power, built on a more expansive structure than his epistolary debut, framed as a long letter to his mother. Critics received the book very favorably, praising Vuong's ability to write about brutal subjects, addiction, suicide, dementia, poverty, without slipping into sentimentality, though some noted an ending that felt rushed against the slow pace of the rest of the novel. Chosen as the 114th selection of Oprah's Book Club, the book saw its visibility multiply, reaching the top of the New York Times fiction bestseller list and confirming Ocean Vuong as one of the most beloved voices in contemporary American literary fiction.
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8votes
