I can’t believe 2024 is winding down, and with it a year of highly anticipated fiction reads. The new year is sure to bring some of the best book club books of all time, from gripping thrillers and romance reads to literary and historical fiction. These are my most anticipated books of 2025, with some debut releases and some returning beloved authors!
Anyway, book trends for 2025 seem to favor a growing interest in the impact of technology and social media (sooo much speculative fiction and dystopian literature), but i’m curious what else will pop up.
From 2025 spring books to 2025 fall and winter books, I’m definitely hopeful I’m going to be adding some new books to the favorites list and some new book club recommendations for 2025.
25 Upcoming Book Releases in 2025 to Add to Your Reading List ASAP
Clever Little Thing by Helena Echlin
This psychological thriller sounds so dark, but also so intriguing. I love a good motherhood story, and with a supernatural spin? It sounds downright chilling.
Clever Little Thing is said to be both thought-provoking and deeply emotional. There’s also some autism representation, but I’m not sure how it will be represented, so fingers crossed it’s a good one.
Here’s the publisher’s synopsis:
A taut, powerful mom-noir psychological thriller following a mother who must confront a sudden and terrifying change in her daughter after the abrupt death of their babysitter. Charlotte’s daughter Stella is sensitive and brilliant, perhaps even a genius, but a recent change in her behavior has alarmed her parents. Following the sudden death of Stella’s babysitter, Blanka, the once disruptive and anti-social child has become docile and agreeable.
But what’s unsettling is that she has begun to mirror Blanka’s personality, from Blanka’s repetitive phrases to her accent, to fierce cravings for Armenian meat stew after being raised a vegetarian.
Clever Little Thing will be published on January 14, 2025, from Pamela Dorman Books.
2. The Note by Alafair Burke
Release Date: January 7, 2025
Growing up, May Hanover was a good girl, always. Well-behaved, top of her class, a compulsive rule-follower. Raised by a first-generation Chinese single mother with high expectations, May didn’t have room to slip up, let alone fail. Her friends didn’t call her the Little Sheriff for nothing.
But even good girls have secrets. And regrets. When it comes to her friendship with Lauren and Kelsey, she’s had her fair share of both. Their bond—forged when May was just twelve years old—has withstood a tragic accident, individual scandals, heartbreak and loss. Now the three friends have reunited for the first time in years for a few days of sun and fun in the Hamptons. But a chance encounter with a pair of strangers leads to a drunken prank that goes horribly awry.
When she finds herself at the center of an urgent police investigation, May begins to wonder whether Lauren and Kelsey are keeping secrets from her, testing the limits of her loyalty to lifelong friends.
3. Sweet Fury by Sash Bischoff
Release Date: January 7, 2025
When a beloved actress is cast in a feminist adaptation of a Fitzgerald classic, she finds herself the victim in a deadly game of revenge in which everyone, on screen and off, is playing a part.
4. Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney
Release Date: January 14, 2025
Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life.
Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there. . . but his wife has disappeared.
A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible – a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.
5. The Business Trip by Jessie Garcia
Release Date: January 14, 2025
Debut Author
Stephanie and Jasmine have nothing and everything in common. The two women don’t know each other but are on the same plane. Stephanie is on a business trip and Jasmine is fleeing an abusive relationship. After a few days, they text their friends the same exact messages about the same man―the messages becoming stranger and more erratic.
And then the two women vanish. The texts go silent, the red flags go up, and the panic sets in. When Stephanie and Jasmine are each declared missing and in danger, it begs the questions: Who is Trent McCarthy? What did he do to these women― or what did they do to him?
6. Cross My Heart by Megan Collins
Release Date: January 14, 2025
She has his wife’s heart; the one she wants is his. The author of The Family Plot brings her signature “taut, emotionally charged, and propulsive” (Jeneva Rose, New York Times bestselling author) prose to a twisty novel about a heart transplant patient who becomes romantically obsessed with her donor’s husband.
7. The Last Room on the Left by Leah Konen
Release Date: January 14, 2025
The caretaker at an isolated mountain hotel finds herself fighting for her life—and sanity—in this “twisty, addictive, feminist take on The Shining” (Andrea Bartz).
Kerry’s life is in shambles: Her husband has left her, her drinking habit has officially become a problem, and though the deadline for her big book deal—the one that was supposed to change everything—is looming, she can’t write a word. When she sees an ad for a caretaker position at a revitalized roadside motel in the Catskills, she jumps at the chance. It’s the perfect getaway to finish her book and start fresh.
But as she hunkers down in a blizzard, she spots something through the window: a pale arm peeking out from a heap of snow. Trapped in the mountains and alone with a dead, frozen body, Kerry must keep her head and make it out before the killer comes for her too. But is the deadly game of cat-and-mouse all in her mind? The body count begs to differ . . .
8. A Serial Killer’s Guide to Marriage by Asia Mackay
Release Date: January 14, 2025
Hazel and Fox are an ordinary married couple with a baby. Except for one small thing: they’re murderers. Well, they used to be.
Now, they’re just another mom-and-dad-and-baby. Hazel finds her new life terribly dull. And the more she forces herself to play her monotonous, predictable role, the more she begins to feel that murderous itch again.
Meanwhile, Fox has really taken to being a father. But then Hazel kills someone without telling Fox. And when police show up at their door, Hazel realizes it will take everything she has to keep her family together.
9. Vantage Point by Sara Sligar
Release Date: January 14, 2025
Succession meets Megan Abbott in this seductive, technological suspense about the dramatic downfall of one of America’s most affluent families. Brimming with palpable tension, Vantage Point carefully unravels a twisted web of family secrets and political ambition that raises questions about the nature of “truth” in our digital age.
10. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
Release Date: January 14, 2025
They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families.
Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament.
Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.
11. When She’s Gone by Rea Frey
Release Date: January 14, 2025
In this haunting story that spans three decades, a young gymnast escapes a kidnapping. Years later, she’s forced to face the past when her own daughter disappears.
12. Dead Money by Jakob Kerr
Release Date: January 28, 2025
Debut Author
In her job as unofficial “problem solver” for Silicon Valley’s most ruthless venture capitalist, Mackenzie Clyde’s gotten used to playing for high stakes. Even if none of those tech-bro millions she’s so good at wrangling ever make it into her pockets. But this time, she’s in way over her head—or so it seems.
Featuring jaw-dropping twists and a wily, outsider heroine you can’t help rooting for, Dead Money is a brilliant sleight-of-hand mystery. Written by a longtime insider, it is also a dead-on snapshot of the Valley’s rich and famous—and a glimpse at the darkness lurking behind the tech world’s cheery facade.
13. We Are Watching by Alison Gaylin
Release Date: January 28, 2025
From USA Today bestselling and Edgar and Shamus Award–winning author Alison Gaylin comes a slick, riveting, and all-too-plausible tale of psychological suspense where a mother is desperate to protect her family as they become targets of a group of violent conspiracy theorists.