The year began with enormous publishing events and has continued to deliver. We update this list as major releases land — check back throughout 2025 for new additions. Last updated: May 2025.
The third Empyrean novel — one of the biggest publishing events of the year, smashing release records. Violet and Xaden's story deepens significantly as the stakes of the war against the venin become existential. Yarros delivers the emotional payoff fans had been waiting for while expanding the world in ways that set up a thrilling final arc.
Set in a 1960s women's residential hotel in New York, Lavery's debut novel follows the residents across a year of upheaval. Funny, warm, and formally inventive — a novel that takes the mundane seriously and finds in it something quietly extraordinary. One of early 2025's most talked-about literary debuts.
The Pulitzer Prize winner from 2024 lands in wide paperback — and for many readers this will be the year they finally encounter it. If you haven't read it yet, there is no better time: it remains one of the most important American novels of the decade.
The first novel in a new series from the authors of The Expanse — humanity on a distant planet faces an alien occupation. The Expanse authors return to literary science fiction with the same grounded character work that made their previous series essential, applied to fresh material with enormous ambition.
A landmark anniversary edition of Roy's Booker Prize-winning debut continues to find new readers in 2025 — a reminder that some books age only into greater relevance. A touchstone of postcolonial literature and one of the most beautiful novels written in the 20th century.
Sanderson's Stormlight finale reaches its paperback publication — making the full first arc of the Stormlight Archive available in uniform editions for the first time. For fantasy readers who have been waiting for the right moment to start, this is it.