The best books of 2025

This list is part of the best books of 2025.

Join 1,210 readers and share your 3 favorite reads of the year.

My favorite read in 2025

Book cover of Beloved

Judith Teitelman ❤️ loved this book because...

Decades had passed since I last read Beloved and I felt compelled to revisit this rich, powerful, provocative masterpiece. Morrison's writing is exquisite.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Writing 🥈 Originality
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Toni Morrison ,

Why should I read it?

41 authors picked Beloved as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times

Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved

It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…


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My 2nd favorite read in 2025

Book cover of The Distance Home

Judith Teitelman ❤️ loved this book because...

I love to travel and learn, and The Distance Home fully immersed me in a place I've never visitedthe plains of South Dakotaand in the lives of a family and people I'd likely never have encountered. This evocative, beautifully written story left me wanting to know moreabout the people, about the place, about then what happened.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Originality 🥈 Writing
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

My 3rd favorite read in 2025

Book cover of The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Judith Teitelman ❤️ loved this book because...

I have been a huge fan of Murakami's novels and essays since I first read Kafka on the Shore, one of my all-time favorite tales. And, while I've not read everything he's written, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, his most recent novel, is another one of his tales that has completely engrossed me. This one especially appealed, as I especially love stories about books and libraries.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Originality 🥈 Writing
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Haruki Murakami , Philip Gabriel (translator) ,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The City and Its Uncertain Walls as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

STEP INTO THE CITY

When a young man's girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own.

When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts and willow trees, he finds his beloved working in a different library - a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together in the other world and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

Book cover of Guesthouse for Ganesha

What is my book about?

Gold Award in the Regional Fiction (Europe) category of the 2020 IPPY Awards
Gold Medal in the Fiction-Literary category of the 2020 Readers' Favorite Book Awards
Silver Award in the Audiobook: Fiction category of the 2020 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards

"Teitelman paints an intensely beautiful world in which different cultures merge in surprising ways. . . . A rich and moving story about an unlikely pair." -Kirkus Reviews

In 1923, seventeen-year-old Esther Grunspan arrives in Köln "with a hardened heart as her sole luggage." Thus begins a twenty-two-year journey, woven against the backdrops of the European Holocaust and the Hindu Kali Yuga (the "Age of Darkness" when human civilization degenerates spiritually), in search of a place of sanctuary. Throughout her travails, using cunning and shrewdness, Esther relies on her masterful tailoring skills to help mask her Jewish heritage, navigate war-torn Europe, and emigrate to India.

Esther's traveling companion and the novel's narrator is Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu God worshipped by millions for his abilities to destroy obstacles, bestow wishes, and avenge evils. Impressed by Esther's fortitude and relentless determination, born of her deep-though unconscious-understanding of the meaning and purpose of love, Ganesha, with compassion, insight, and poetry, chooses to highlight her story because he recognizes it is all of our stories-for truth resides at the essence of its telling.

Weaving Eastern beliefs and perspectives with Western realities and pragmatism, Guesthouse for Ganesha is a tale of love, loss, and spirit reclaimed.

Book cover of Beloved
Book cover of The Distance Home
Book cover of The City and Its Uncertain Walls

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