Booksology You’re reading the calendar correctly. It’s only mid-October, but book of the year list season is here, starting with Barnes & Noble. They selected the best books of 2025 in 19 categories: fiction, gift books, mystery and thriller books, biographies and memoirs, picture books, young readers (intermediate) books, young adults, science fiction and fantasy, history books, horror, romance, cookbooks, business books, sportsbooks, personal development, science and technology, ebook series, audiobooks, and Spanish books.
Categories reflect the source of information as a bookstore. It’s easy to see why gift books are one of the first categories listed. There are more nonfiction categories than you’ll find on other Best Books of the Year lists. A strange category is “e-book series”. Perhaps the original intention was “best ebook” to rival “best audiobook,” but the same consideration has not been given to ebook format. While the quality of an audiobook is highly dependent on the narrator, the reading experience of an ebook is almost indistinguishable from a print copy. This “eBook Series” category lets Barnes & Noble indicate that you can purchase e-books, but it doesn’t mean much from a reader’s perspective.
Here are Barnes & Noble’s best books of 2025.
Best fiction of 2025: The Imperial of Gladness by Ocean Vuong and Atmosphere: A Love Story by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Best Mystery & Thriller Books of 2025: The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown and The King of Ashes by SA Cosby
Best biographies and memoirs of 2025: “The Virgin Mary Comes to Me” by Arundhati Roy and “107 Days” by Kamala Harris
Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy of 2025: Katabasis by RF Kuang and Burying the Bones in the Midnight Earth by VE Schwab
Best horror books of 2025: “Buffalo Hunter Hunter” by Stephen Graham Jones and “I Never Meant to Be a Man” by Andrew Joseph White
Best Romance Books of 2025: Emily Henry’s The Great Big Beautiful Life and Jasmine Guillory’s Flirting Lessons
Best science and technology books of 2025: Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green; Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao
Best audiobooks of 2025: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mortal, narrated by Jem Carmela; The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb by Garrett M. Graf, narrated by Edoardo Ballerini and the entire cast.
Check out the complete list on Barnes & Noble’s blog.
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