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

"This novel re-creates the filmmaking career of G. W. Pabst, the brilliant Austrian director who, in the early Nazi period, made it out of Europe to America—and then, calamitously, went back... The book combines history, biography, and detailed dramatizations of filmmaking; what holds it together is a portrait of Europe in a state of emotional and moral disintegration. The unsurprising news in “The Director” is that most of us fall short of moral heroism and will accommodate ourselves to power one way or another. Some of us even become rapt enthusiasts of the very things that had earlier repelled us."

"In this spare, associative novel of projection and self-acceptance, a young woman, Sylvie, nurses an all-consuming obsession with her therapist. Simply conjuring up the therapist’s image gives her “a sense that a great freedom was close.” As their weekly sessions unspool, the dark outlines of Sylvie’s past are revealed—a controlling ex-boyfriend, an abusive father—and it becomes clear that her longing is driven by imagined visions of the therapist’s glamorous life, situated in a “successful world” that Sylvie is convinced she doesn’t deserve to enter."

"This short, powerful novel is a sequel to Ryan’s début, “The Spinning Heart,” from 2012, a series of monologues that told stories connected to a failed housing development in Ireland and the economic collapse following the Celtic Tiger... The collective effect of their intimate, first-person narratives is that of a confessional, revealing the psyche of a country going through a traumatic change."

"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 protagonist of this beguiling novel, Lina, lives with her father in a realm seemingly unbound by ordinary time... the novel is a meditation on the sheer force of longing—for a lost home, lost loved ones, a future that will never be attained. 'A person is not what they know,' one of Lina’s fellow-travellers says. 'A person is what they yearn for.'"

"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."

"This meditative novel takes the form of an investigation that the narrator, Steven, conducts into the mental breakdown and disappearance of his father, a professor whose life fell apart during his bid for tenure at a Southern California college in the nineteen-eighties... Porter deftly combines a bildungsroman with the story of a midlife crisis to deliver a cathartic resolution."

"Allende, a doyenne of historical fiction, once again ventures to her native Chile with this engaging novel, set in the late nineteenth century. Emilia, the product of an ill-fated liaison between an Irish nun and a dissolute Chilean aristocrat, lives contentedly in San Francisco. But her love for writing—first as a dime novelist, then as a journalist—draws her to Chile, where she reports on the nascent civil war."

"In this harrowing drama of subtleties, a recently retired man moves from New York to Lisbon after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 Presidential election. Awaiting his wife’s arrival, he prepares their new apartment and tries to keep himself busy, but he is pestered by a creeping sense of disaster, both past and future... Molina writes in pulse-like scenes, and each vignette thickens the novel’s uneasy atmosphere, obscuring our conception of place and, eventually, our conception of what’s real."

"Flashlight explores the history and mysteries of one family: a father, who is ethnic Korean, raised in Japan; an American mother, estranged from her family in the Midwest; a recalcitrant daughter marked by a shocking loss; an illegitimate son who turns up after years. The family’s personal trajectories are interwoven with those of global politics in a way that feels both wrenchingly tragic and entirely credible."