10 Books Critics Are Raving About Now

Named one of the most anticipated books of 2025 by The New York Times, Vulture, Elle, and more, this debut novel by the author of the poetry collection Hard Damage follows a nineteen-year-old woman as she immerses herself in Berlin's vibrant yet chaotic underground scene, exploring freedom, love, and the complexities of identity. “Once in a blue moon a debut novel comes along, announcing a voice quite unlike any other, with a layered story and sentences that crackle and pop, begging to be read aloud. Good Girl introduces just such a voice,” raves The Los Angeles Times.

National Book Award winner Imani Perry embarks on a profound exploration of the color blue and its deep connections to Black history and culture. From indigo cloths traded during the transatlantic slave trade to the soul-stirring melancholy of blues music, Perry unravels blue as a symbol of both hope and heartache. Drawing from art, history, and personal reflections, she examines how blue and Blackness intertwine, shaping cultural and emotional landscapes.

Awarded the Nobel "for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life," the latest novel from the author of The Vegetarian follows a perilous journey to save a pet bird, uncovering a hidden chapter of Korean history and lost voices. "Indelible. . . a meticulously rendered portrait of friendship, mother-daughter love, and hope in the face of profound loss,” declared Publishers Weekly in its starred review. “Kang is at the top of her game."

Featured in Vogue’s best books to read in 2025, this “gorgeously textured and frequently very funny” novel follows a young actor caught between family, fame, and a complicated affair in 1980s Manhattan. It’s a big-hearted New York tale that “revels in all the heady, scuzzy, confusing bits of coming of age.”

The celebrated founder of the New Pornographers reflects on her unconventional upbringing in the 70s and 80s, where poverty, isolation, and a deep connection to nature shaped her world. “Readers don’t need to be familiar with her music to be moved by her raw, unflinching memoir,” declared The New York Times. “It’s a book that mixes defiant humor with an unsentimental resilience that recalls Cheryl Strayed.”

A secretive bestselling author decides to finally confess her true identity after years of hiding from her past in this debut thriller that Booklist praised as “exquisitely plotted with [an] inventive story structure,” adding that “Fagan's journalism-honed observational skills make her fiction debut shine.”

Featured in Vogue’s best books to read in 2025, this “modern Gothic tragedy” follows a woman who, after returning to her old money family’s remote Maine estate, becomes ensnared in a chilling mystery when intimate videos surface that she doesn’t remember filming. It’s a “highly entertaining thriller” that examines the fragility of truth in a world ruled by digital illusions and ambition.

"[Callard] is so earnestly excited by her subject that even a skeptical reader is bound to feel a swell of enthusiasm as she makes her full-throated case for a life of the mind...charming, intelligent... Open Socrates encourages us to recognize how little we know, and to start thinking." - The New York Times

In this Tertulia staff pick, a Palestinian American playwright and screenwriter weaves a multi-generational saga following a New York theater director caught in an unexpected romance, while her mother and grandmother confront buried family secrets and the complexities of their shared past. Set against the backdrop of both New York and the West Bank, this debut “has all the beats of a romantic comedy,” according to The Atlantic's Gal Beckerman. “The ribald humor, the over-the-top-ness… reminded me—surprisingly—of mid-century Jewish American writers, especially Philip Roth… These women are all antiheroes of a sort.”

More than twenty-five years after The Reader, adapted to the Oscar-winning film starring Kate Winslet, the German author returns with a novel about a Berlin bookseller searching for his radicalized granddaughter. "Some great novels manage to encapsulate an entire era, showing how history makes its way into the innermost recesses of families and individuals,” observed Le Monde. “Such is the case with War and Peace, in its epic style, and such is the case, for a very different subject, with Bernhard Schlink's new book, The Granddaughter."