10 of The New Yorker's Favorite Fiction Books of 2025

"The couple at the center of Perfection have moved from an unnamed country in southern Europe to Berlin in the twenty-tens, to pursue an art-adjacent lifestyle and careers in graphic design... Latronico documents their decisions and demurrals with an elegant proportion of sly commentary to detached reportage. Perfection, an homage to Things, Georges Perec’s classic 1965 novel of modern malaise, captures a culture of exquisite taste, tender sensitivities, and gnawing discontent."

"Smith’s playful new dystopia follows two children as they navigate a heavily surveilled world in which tech is omnipresent, and oppressive. ... One day, the children wake up to find that a red circle has been painted around their house. ... Suddenly, they’re on the run. Part of the joy of Gliff is that, while it is set in a dark future, there are moments of genuine humor."

"This volume includes forty-four previously uncollected stories by Gallant—a master of the form, who published more than a hundred stories in The New Yorker. ... The stories span Gallant’s writing life from 1944, when she was twenty-two, to 1987, and are full of her pointed wit, her acute observations, and her profound understanding of the desire, terror, and loneliness that drive us."

"The eighteen stories in this new collection look toward the 'vanishing point': in some cases, the end of life; in others, a different kind of ending... In the stories, which jump from continent to continent, a man realizes, to his dismay, that his anger can be mysteriously weaponized; another comes up with a twisted way to resist his wife’s plan to move to assisted living; a boy in Massachusetts weighs the pleasure of transgression against the state of his immortal soul. All the narratives look at life at an angle, shining unfamiliar light on both its sweet and its bitter offerings."

"Adichie’s novel is a braided account of four women, in Nigeria and America, reflecting on the choices and missed opportunities that led them to their current lives. Partnerships are forged and broken. Secrets shared between Adichie’s characters—of ambitions thwarted and dreams realized—liberate them even as they tether each to the inexorable patterns of existence."

"Short-listed for the Booker Prize, this quiet, probing novel follows a middle-aged woman as she moves into a cloistered religious community near the town where she grew up. The narrator has left her marriage and her job without announcement, and this sudden abstention is also thrust upon the reader; details from the woman’s former life filter in slowly, but much of the past remains obscure. Instead, the narrator documents her trials at the convent—a plague of mice, the arrival of a murdered nun’s bones—where the ordinary and the extraordinary collide."

"This novel, the first written in English by one of Egypt’s leading authors, takes the form of letters from a man in Cairo to his sister, who lives in America. ... Designating himself 'a truth-seeker, a lover, a revolutionary,' the man notes that he 'could never be any of those things if I didn’t understand that I was an Egyptian woman’s son.'"

"In this slyly self-aware and gently comic novel, a twenty-four-year-old college dropout, Vi, who is stuck in a dead-end job and getting over a bad breakup, discovers a blob on the ground outside a dive bar. She takes the blob—which to her recalls “the slime I made as a kid”—back to her apartment and shapes it, golem-like, into her ideal boyfriend, whom she names Bob... But problems arise when Bob starts to feel desires of his own—a turn that both accelerates the novel’s sharp plot and enriches its examination of the complex relationship between longing and identity."

"The title of this assured début novel is taken from Freud’s description of cocaine’s effects. ... The summer before the protagonist, Nina, leaves the Upper East Side for Vanderbilt, she is searching for someone to 'please God take her virginity.' ... 'Everything’s too big to get my head around,' she says, as she begins to reckon with the compromises of adulthood."

"Ava, the protagonist of this unconventional début novel, contemplates her relationship to Demetri, her older brother, as he lies dying of brain cancer, at thirty-one. ... In the face of tragedy, Dess’s narrator memorably dramatizes the anxiety-inducing exigencies of the creative arts, and the need of artists to remain focussed on their craft."