Here are our reading groups’ favorite fiction books of 2025 based on our survey results.
THE BERRY PICKERS
Amanda Peters
NATIONAL BESTSELLER 2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Winner Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family, and remain unsolved for nearly fifty years. July…
WEYWARD
Emilia Hart
A riveting debut that explores witchcraft and female intuitive powers, told over five centuries through three connected women, for fans of Kate Morton, Diane Setterfield, and Sarah Perry. I am a Weyward, and wild inside. 2019: Under cover of darkness, Kate flees London for ramshackle Weyward Cottage, inherited from a great…
THE MAD WIFE
Meagan Church
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From bestselling author Meagan Church comes a haunting exploration of identity, motherhood, and the suffocating grip of societal expectations that will leave you questioning the lives we build--and the lies we live. They called it hysteria. She called it survival. Lulu Mayfield has spent…
THE FROZEN RIVER
Ariel Lawhon
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • GMA BOOK CLUB PICK • AN NPR BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the New York Times bestselling author of I Was Anastasia and Code Name Hélène comes a gripping historical mystery inspired by the life and diary of Martha Ballard, a renowned 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote…
REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES
Shelby Van Pelt
For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up.…
THE SEED KEEPER
Diane Wilson
Minnesota Book Award Winner, Book Riot and Ms. Magazine Best Book of the Year A haunting novel spanning several generations, The Seed Keeper follows a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life, and their sacrifices to protect what matters most. Rosalie Iron Wing grew up in the woods…
THE WOMEN
Kristin Hannah
From the celebrated author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds comes Kristin Hannah's The Women—at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided. Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances "Frankie" McGrath hears these words,…
THEO OF GOLDEN
Allen Levi
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why… His name is Theo. And he asks a lot more questions than he answers. Theo visits the local coffeehouse, where ninety-two pencil portraits hang…
COLEMAN HILL
Kim Coleman Foote
In 1916, during the early days of the Great Migration, Celia Coleman and Lucy Grimes flee the racism and poverty of their homes in the post–Civil War South for the “Promised Land” of Vauxhall, New Jersey. But the North possesses its own challenges and bigotries that will shape the fates…
A GIRL WITHIN A GIRL WITHIN A GIRL
Nanda Reddy
A girl takes on a series of identities to survive, shrouding herself in layers of secrets, until years later when she is forced to reckon with her past. On an ordinary day in an upscale Atlanta suburb, Maya is making breakfast for her two sons, when her husband…