What was the BEST NOVEL of 2025?

Now that 2025 is over, it’s okay to decide what the BEST NOVEL of 2025 was. The BEST NOVEL of 2025 isn’t going to be my favorite novel of 2025. I haven’t read enough novels from 2025 to have an opinion (not that lack of information/experience has ever stopped anyone from having an opinion). The BEST NOVEL of 2025 should be a novel with some kind of mass appeal but also have some literary value. Or it should be a novel with literary value but also have a certain degree of mass appeal. The important thing is that it would appeal to both critics and normal people.

I don’t want to say that the BEST NOVEL OF 2025 is the one that sold the most copies because I recognize that most bestselling authors are hacks. If you think I’m a book snob, you’re wrong. This blog is called Dysfunctional Literacy. I enjoy crappy books (“crap” is NOT a bad word). I began reading because of crappy books (kind of). Without crappy books, I wouldn’t want to read as much. At the same time, I know that none of the crappy books I’ve read are the ‘best’ books of any given year.

When selecting the BEST NOVEL of 2025, I wasn’t sure whether to start with the bestselling books and find the one with the most literary value or if I should start with literary fiction and find one with the most mass appeal. Luckily, the blog Literary Hub started before me. Literary Hub, (check it out at Literary Hub » The Ultimate Best Books of 2025 List) began by looking at what the literary critics said. That makes sense because the name of the blog is… Literary… Hub.

Since Literary Hub already collected data from a numerous BEST BOOKS of 2025 lists, I didn’t have to spend time reading what a bunch of literary critics thought (Thank you!). Literary Hub simply collected a bunch of BEST BOOK LISTS of 2025 (more lists than I would have had patience for) and ranked the books by how many lists each book had been chosen for. Then I took the top ten novels from Literary Hub’s book list and put each novel’s list number in parenthesis. For example, the novel that critics picked most frequently was The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, which showed up on 21 BEST BOOKS LISTS.

Keeping that in mind, below are the TEN BEST NOVELS of 2025, according to critics BEST BOOKS of 2025 lists:

1.    The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (21) 

2.    Audition by Katie Kitamura (20)  

3.    Heart the Lover by Lily King (19) 

4.    A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (18)

5.   What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (16) 

5.   Flesh by David Szalay (16) 

7. Flashlight by Susan Choi (15) 

7. A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst (15)

9.  The Wilderness by Angela Flourney (14)

10.  The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, tr. Ross Benjamin (13) 

I don’t trust critics, though. They can be pretentious. They can be biased. They can be bought. They can be frauds. They can be completely sheltered from reality. Literary Hub’s achievement here is awesome, but I wanted one more step, to see which of these top ten books was the most mainstream. I don’t trust the mainstream either, though. The mainstream likes generic, easy crap. But like I mentioned earlier, so do I. I’m capable of reading the literary stuff (I’m not capable of writing it), but I prefer the fun stuff.

For the next step, I went to Amazon (the mainstream of the mainstream) and began looking at sales rank of each of the top ten books on Literary Hub’s list. Unfortunately, all of these novels came out at different points of the year, which meant there was no standard benchmark for either sales figures or sales rank. The best I could think of (and I know it’s flawed) was to use review scores and number of reviews. Again, I know that number of reviews would be affected by the publication dates, but at least we have the review scores to balance that.

I know that reviews on Amazon might not reflect a novel’s quality, especially with literary fiction, which can be especially polarizing. Sometimes literary fiction is supposed to be polarizing, and that by itself can lead to negative reviews. Sometimes authors of literary fiction use devices that readers aren’t familiar with or don’t understand or flat out don’t like. Authors of literary fiction experiment with their writing, and everybody knows what can happen when experiments go wrong. This means that the book with the highest review score could just be the safest book.

But what else can I do? 2025 is going to be irrelevant soon, if it isn’t already, so I have to make a decision.

Aaarrrgh! I’d really like to wait 50 years and see which books from 2025 are still being read and are still relevant, and use that to make the decision, but I probably won’t be around. Maybe next week I’ll answer the question: what was the BEST NOVEL OF 1975?

Anyway, here are the top ten novels according to Literary Hub with Amazon review scores and review numbers:

1.    The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (21)  4.2 stars from 2,200 reviews

2.    Audition by Katie Kitamura (20)   3.6 stars from  2,056 reviews

3.    Heart the Lover by Lily King (19)  4.5 stars from 8,920 reviews

4.    A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (18)   4.0 stars from 1,064 reviews

5.   What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (16)  4.2 stars from 1,358 reviews

5.   Flesh by David Szalay (16)  4.0 stars from 6,996 reviews

7. Flashlight by Susan Choi (15)  4.3 stars from 1,608 reviews

7. A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst (15) 4.3 stars from 4,218 reviews

9.  The Wilderness by Angela Flourney (14) 3.7 stars from 231 reviews

10.  The Director by Daniel Kehlmann and Ross Benjamin (13)  4.2 stars from 784 reviews

Well, that was easy. Heart the Lover by Lily King had by far the highest number of reviews and the highest review scores. That MIGHT just mean it’s the easiest book to read (that isn’t necessarily bad). It MIGHT be in the most popular genre (it’s categorized in women’s literary fiction, so I guess I’m not the intended audience).

This kind of sucks, though. Since I’m a sixty-year-old male, I sense that Heart the Lover isn’t really meant for me. You might disagree, and that’s fine, but this novel HAS been characterized as ‘women’s literary fiction,’ and I’m male and somewhat sometimes anti-literary. That doesn’t mean Heart the Lover is not the BEST NOVEL of 2025, though. Being the BEST NOVEL of 2025 has nothing to do with my tastes or my opinion of the book or whether or not the book was meant for certain audiences.

According to the data that I chose to use, Heart the Lover by Lily King is the BEST NOVEL of 2025, and I’m going to stick with that (unless I change my mind later).

*****

What do YOU think? What is the BEST NOVEL of 2025? What improvements could be made to the process of determining the BEST NOVEL of 2025? If such a task is impossible, what was your favorite novel of 2025? If you haven’t read any novels from 2025, what novel from 2025 are you most likely to read? If you have no intention of reading any novels from 2025, then what novels will you… never mind.

Here are some other observations about literature from Dysfunctional Literacy:

How to Write an Award-Winning Novel starring… The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2018-2008: A Review

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2012 vs. the Oscars and the Heisman Trophy

Hondo by Louis L’Amour vs. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry! What is the best western ever?