The Best Books of Spring (2025)

“I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has become something of a problem.” So begins this electrifying tour-de-force from the bestselling, award-winning author of All the Birds Singing—and it only gains momentum from there. Max is clueless as to how he died and is even more perplexed as to why he was brought back to watch over his London flat and his grieving girlfriend, Hannah. But as Max adjusts—often hilariously—to his new spectral reality, it becomes clear Hannah is haunted by far more serious (and less literal) ghosts. Through interwoven vignettes, we travel back to the Australian outback town of her youth, a land layered with trauma—personal, generational, and national—and echoing with secrets. You’ll be tempted to savor this slim novel as long as possible, but it rewards a rapid read to pick up on all the achingly resonant connections Wyld draws across chapters, perspectives, and continents. Gobsmackingly brilliant. —Charley Burlock

This follow-up to the great Americanah delivers a big, juicy buffet of Adichie’s signature themes: men and women, love and heartbreak, race and sexual violence, and the oddities of U.S. culture as seen through African eyes. It takes the form of a braided narrative starring four high-powered women: Chiamaka, an aspiring travel writer with a bad boyfriend; her cousin Omelogar, who quits the highest echelon of Nigerian finance to pursue a master’s in porn studies (yes, really); their friend Zikora, a lawyer in Washington DC, unmarried and childless and miserable about it; and Kadiatou, once Chiamaka’s housekeeper, now making it on her own in the States…until she crosses paths with a ripped-from-the-headlines VIP sexual predator. —Marion Winik

The rest of England knows Donny as a gritty train stop on the way to somewhere else, but Kel, Shaz, and Rach know it as home—and know each other as best friends who share everything, from their parents’ pilfered Cointreau to their deepest hopes and insecurities. But under their petty rivalries and fierce love lurks a brutal secret that Shaz can neither reveal nor bear on her own. Written in a distinctive northern dialect that only takes a paragraph or two to acclimate to (we promise) this dazzling debut follows the girls from their trio’s formation at age eleven through their raucous adolescence and on to their radically divergent adulthoods. We don’t know the last book that captured teenage girlhood and female friendship this deftly. —C.B.

After the birth of her twins, museum archivist Sara becomes so sleep-deprived that she decides to get a Dreamsaver, a neurological implant that plays a central role in this gripping speculative novel. When she’s pulled aside at LAX on the way back from a work trip and taken into custody at what is essentially a women’s prison, it turns out the government has been monitoring her dreams. The place is a nightmare of coerced compliance—until Sarah and her sister inmates find the weak spot in the system. Lalami’s exploration of the darkest possibilities of technological surveillance challenges us to think about the connection between privacy and freedom. —M.W.

“A little girl died, and then she was born.” This is the truth, as logic-warping as it is devastating, from which all the others in this blistering memoir radiate. Christenson, a New York Times Book Review editor, was head-over-heels in love with her author husband and twenty weeks pregnant with her daughter, Simone, when she learned that her first child would not survive to term. In laying the details and complexities of her experience bare, Christenson gives language to an experience for which others insist there are no words, humanity to a child that might otherwise be reduced to a tragedy, and community to those isolated in and by their own griefs. You will find yourself rationing out pages to spend more time in the glow of Christenson’s luminous prose and inextinguishable love. A triumph. —C.B.

An infant at the time of her family’s death-defying escape from Vietnam, Nguyen looks back from her high-profile roost on NBC’s Today show over her California girlhood, her close but turbulent relationship with her parents, and the tension created in her marriage when each partner scored their dream job—on opposite coasts. She focuses on drawing advice from her experience, i.e. “news you can use.” Have you ever thought of campus cheerleading as “a crash course in social skills”? Did you know you should never start a new job on a Monday? Nguyen’s central credo gets her through thick and thin: Nobody can ever be a better you than you. —M.W.

On Memorial Day 2019, while Brooks was in the throes of writing her Pulitzer-prize-winning novel, Horse, her vibrant, healthy sixty-year-old husband collapsed on a D.C. sidewalk and died. Flashing between the chaotic immediate aftermath of Tony’s heart attack and the meditative “memorial days” she gave herself four years later to “do the unfinished work of grieving” on Australia’s Flinders Island, Brooks unspools a pulse-quickening love story woven within a sharp-toothed indictment of “the brutal bureaucracy of death.” While there is no shortage of moving grief memoirs, there are vanishingly few that offer bereaved readers more than a mirror to their own experience. In addition to gorgeously evoking the man she lost and the pain he left, Brooks gives practical guidance for tending to that pain and preparing in advance for a legal and logistical obstacle course that few know to train for. —C.B.

Mona Zahid is a gorgeous, brilliant, somewhat messed-up New York actress, one of the stars of a New York-based Shakespeare troupe that’s having #metoo problems. We meet her on Thanksgiving Day, self-medicating in bed before she goes out to face her husband, son, orphaned niece, and in-laws. It’s the first Thanksgiving since her sister died, which is how she got the giant bottle of oxy, and it won’t be long before she invents an errand, grabs the dog, and bolts. Her one-day Rumspringa delivers sheer delight, plus real insight on the point of Shakespeare, the staying power of a marriage, and the meaning of life. —M.W.

Inspired by the true story of Happy Land—a self-proclaimed, self-governed kingdom built by and for the formerly enslaved in the hills of North Carolina—the latest from the award-winning author of Take My Handis an intergenerational epic with urgent contemporary stakes. The novel flashes between the perspectives of Luella, the kingdom’s founding queen, and her great-great-granddaughter, Nikki, a D.C. real estate agent lured back to the land by her grandmother’s pleas for help—and her promise of revealing family secrets. Replete with confounding human dilemmas, intricately nuanced characters, and startlingly original romance, this intimate family drama subtly weaves into a national indictment of ongoing predatory property law and the history of Black land loss. —C.B.

Hoping to get some one-on-one time with his longtime crush while in town to visit his dad, Téo offers to babysit her two-year-old—in the past, they’ve hung out afterward. Unbelievably, a tragedy occurs that leaves young Joel on his hands indefinitely. With his main resources for “help” being his over-the-hill father and his gambling, boozing best friend Ben, and armed with little more than video games and chicken nuggets, Téo faces the realities of parenting: daytime tantrums, sleepless nights, and an irresistible little chatterbox of a child. Lamont’s endearing debut is “Three Men and a Baby” in a tight-knit, mostly Jewish London suburb, with a wonderful woman rabbi character adding moral complexity and a surprising romantic subplot. —M.W.

Linda is thirty, flirty, and ready for love. Only she has a very specific, ahem, type: “sleek and elegant, strong yet supple, graceful in the sky.” Yup, this lady is into planes. And while her desire is certainly sexual, it’s also deeply romantic. She longs for marriage—“what others vulgarly refer to as a ‘plane crash’”—that will meld her body and soul with her airborne lover. She knows the odds of the union are not in her favor (deaths by plane crash are roughly one in eleven million) so she does what she can to up her chances: courting pilots on dating apps, furiously vision-boarding, spending every spare cent she makes as a content moderator on predictably turbulent flights. While it may seem hard to keep up this gag for 200-odd pages, this bizarre and endearing debut never exhausts itself. We can’t remember the last time we met a character this singular or read a book this funny. —C.B.

Get into the Wayback machine for a trip to San Francisco in the 1980s, where a very innocent, financially struggling nineteen-year-old named Zippy scores a job in Fifth Floor Dresses at a hotsy-totsy department store. Vintage-loving fashionistas will eat this one up, as the talented Zippy sells the hell out of Bill Blass, Andrea Jovine, and Adrienne Vittadini and rushes upstairs and down to deliver the right bra and shoes to the dressing rooms. By night, she and her roommate hit the bars, looking for the perfect guy to give Zippy her first real kiss. Also out there somewhere: Zippy’s dad, whose last name her mother never even knew. Yet she can’t help hoping… —M.W.

Collins’s sizzling debut is set at a funky blues club in Austin, Texas, in the 1970s, a time when the town’s famous music scene was just emerging, and audiences were a volatile mix of hippies, cowboys, and rednecks. Her story is told in three voices: Deanna, who owns the Rush Creek Saloon with her husband and works the bar; Doug Moser, an up-and-coming musician and leader of the house band; and Steven, a pushy 19-year-old fan whose confusion about his faith, his sexuality, and his boundaries is going to start trouble. Meanwhile, sparks fly between Doug and Deanna, who are both married. —M.W.

Another astonishingly accomplished debut, this one set in a Beaux-Arts apartment building in Brussels during WWII. As the book opens, the art dealer Leo Raphaël has disappeared overnight with his family and his collection of paintings, leaving their dear friends and neighbors, the Sauvins, bereft. The story follows each of the building’s residents — from the refugee seamstress Masha Balayeva in the Fifth Floor Maid’s Room to the horrible busybody Miss Hobert in 3R — as they navigate the challenges of terrible times. Though the story contains its share of heartbreak, it’s the most fun we’ve had reading about World War II in years. —M.W.

Set against the backdrop of the spring 2020 lockdowns, Rachel Bloomstein, a recently divorced—and very horny—mother of three joins a dating app and reawakens her latent sexual desires through sultry texts and in-person sex with her ever-evolving roster of paramours. The quippy and the no-holds-barred dialogue will remind you of gossiping with your best friends immediately after a first date. From celebrating women in mid-life embracing their sexual liberation to revealing (rather devastatingly) our co-dependency on technology to build emotional intimacy, Shearn’s novel is at once genuinely provocative, deeply heartwarming, and aware of its time. A refreshingly grown-up coming-of-age story. —Mandie Montes

Joni Mitchell fans, drop the needle on “Blue” and settle in for a treat. This smart, funny, delightfully written nonfiction book is everything you ever wanted to know about Joni, her life, her music, her amazing string of rock-and-roll boyfriends (Graham Nash, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, Sam Shepard…), her reunion with the daughter she gave up for adoption, and her heart-melting comeback with Brandi Carlile at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022. The format of Alford’s fabulous compendium of non-chronological, sometimes personal, mini-essays was inspired by another book we love, Craig Brown’s 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret. —M.W.

As Fagan’s spicy debut would have it, “Cate Kay” is the pen name of a bestselling author whose books have been made into a trilogy of blockbuster movies starring Hollywood’s biggest hottie, actress Ryan Channing. But even Cate’s own agent has never met her, because she has a drama in her past so dark that she has completely buried her true identity. Now she’s decided to tell all in a memoir. A red-hot romance between Cate and Ryan, long in the closet for the sake of her career, is just one of the many beans about to spill. —M.W.

What is more fun than a new novel from this wildly imaginative and reliably hilarious author? This time, she’s got a couple of billionaires celebrating their anniversary with a balloon ride crash-landing into a suburban swimming pool, where a pair of single parents are tentatively maneuvering through their first date, the kids in the basement. This devolves into a weekend-long party, narrated in turn by everyone involved, including an eight-year-old and an angry personal assistant. You’ve never seen “the rich are different than you and me” and “there are things money can’t buy” done quite like this. —M.W.

We know—another Didion biography. But hear us out! By focusing on her oft-overlooked role in the movie business, New York Times film critic Wilkinson invites us to see the literary icon’s writing—and our own screen-obsessed culture—with fresh eyes. Though the literary icon made her name as an essayist, she made her fortune as a screenwriter. Through her 40-year career in Tinseltown, Didion would become acutely aware that American politics and the Hollywood factory would soon seep into each other in dangerous ways. Even if you’re not a fan of Didion—or if you think you already know everything about the obsessively chronicled star—you will uncover the literary evolution of her work in this prescient and propulsive read. —M.M.

When only a single city is left, when it’s ruled by centralized AI that has a station in each home, when two older women are among the most influential citizens, when suddenly there’s a murder in this place where nothing like that has happened in decades…you get this unique and thought-provoking novel. Enita and Helen, a bioprosthetic surgeon and a historian who are former romantic partners and now best friends, find themselves playing detective in this gripping combination of mystery, romance, and speculative fiction that has plenty of connections to and implications for our present-day lives. —M.W.