The staff of the New York Times Book Review choose the year’s top fiction and nonfiction titles.

“The envelope, please: After a full year spent reading hundreds of books and meeting regularly to bicker — er, converse — about their merits and flaws, the editors of the Book Review have chosen the 10 Best Books of 2025.

In novels that transport us from the battlefields of World War I to contemporary Swedish dance clubs to the halls of a convent in rural Australia, and from Nazi movie studios to New York art galleries where immigrants look for a sense of connection, our fiction picks offer sweeping stories about timely and timeless topics with a sense of verve and style.

In nonfiction, we chose immersive journalistic accounts of the housing crisis and a historic Black church, along with a riveting biography of a misunderstood painter, a fraught mother-daughter memoir and an enthralling shipwreck story that is as much a meditation on marriage as it is a seafaring adventure.

You can hear our editors discuss these books, and others they loved, on the latest episode of the Book Review podcast, and you can check out our larger list of 100 Notable Books of 2025 here. And for the longer view, here’s a list of all of our Best Books picks since 2000.”