On the Shelf: The best books of 2025

By Courtney Warren

I absolutely love December! Not only is it Christmas season, but it’s book awards! All over we get to see the best books of 2025. I tracked my own books this year, and my absolute favorite (yes I made a bracket and everything) was Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Here is a breakdown of the big winners of 2025. Add a few to your list! 

Starting with adult fiction, The Booker Prize was awarded to David Szalay’s novel, Flesh, a hypnotic story that follows the life of an emotionally detached man, providing a spare yet powerful picture of modern masculinity and the impact of lingering trauma. 

Percival Everett’s James took home the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, earning praise as a brilliant, action-packed reconsideration of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved character Jim’s point of view, illustrating the absurdity of racial supremacy. 

For its emotional depth, Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, The Safekeep, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction for its intimate and unsettling exploration of repressed desire and historical amnesia in the aftermath of World War II. 

In fantasy, the Hugo Award for Best Novel went to Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup, a brilliant and imaginative mystery set in a fantastical world where a detective must solve a terrifying locked-room murder by blending epic fantasy with a compelling whodunit structure.

In the realm of children’s literature, the American Library Association announced its most prestigious awards. The John Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to children’s literature was awarded to Erin Entrada Kelly for her novel, The First State of Being. This compelling speculative fiction story, set in 1999, follows a lonely boy who befriends a teenager who claims to be a time traveler from 200 years in the future, grounding its mind-bending concepts with real relationships and a major problem to solve. 

The Randolph Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book was awarded to Rebecca Lee Kunz (illustrator) and Andrea L. Rogers (author) for Chooch Helped. This warm, loving family story, featuring dynamic mixed-media illustrations, is told by an older sister who is struggling to be patient with her two-year-old Cherokee Nation little brother, Chooch, who always wants to “help.”

Finally, the National Book Award for Fiction was claimed by Rabih Alameddine for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), a darkly comic saga spanning six decades in the life of a Lebanese family, while Fredrik Backman’s My Friends won the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction for its heartbreaking, humorous, and profoundly human exploration of the redemptive power of art and the ache of adolescence.

Not that anyone asked, but I’ll tell you about Atmosphere, anyway. It actually won the Goodreads Choice Award for Historical Fiction! It’s set in the 1980s and is all about one of the first women scientists selected for NASA’s space shuttle program, Joan Goodwin, and how she unexpectedly falls for a fellow astronaut candidate, Vanessa Ford, while they train. It’s a total emotional rollercoaster, seriously thrilling, and also such a beautiful, tender love story amidst all the high-stakes astronaut drama—I literally couldn’t put it down.