22 of the Best Books of 2025, BIPOC Edition

This brilliant literary romance is a powerful reminder that Black country artists have always been here. One-hit-wonder Luke is honored to open for his idol, 90’s superstar JoJo Lane, at her induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. But he’ll have to confront his complicated past, because the concert is being held in his and JoJo’s small hometown in Arkansas. Luke was close to JoJo’s daughter, August, until a shocking betrayal ripped them apart and jump-started his career. As Luke, August, and JoJo grapple with their complicated relationships to the music industry, a new love song takes shape. It’s fantastic in any format, but I recommend the full-cast audiobook. —Susie Dumond

Lalami is another multi-award nominated author and her latest reminds me ofMinority Reportas it questions how technology, privacy, and freedom can coexist. We follow Sara, who has just landed at LAX, and who is swiftly gathered up by agents who say that she will soon commit a crime against her husband. They came to this conclusion using data from her dreams and the Risk Assessment Administration’s algorithm. She’s taken to a facility and held there with other dreamers, all of whom are women, and all of whom claim innocence of crimes not yet committed. Months pass before a new resident arrives who shakes things up. Now Sara is on a path toknuck if you buckagainst those who have taken her freedom. —Erica Ezeifedi

This is the debut solo novella from Amal El-Mohtar, co-author of the hugely popular novella This Is How You Lose the Time War! It’s about the two Hawthorn sisters, who live on the edge of Faerie, and what happens when one of them puts their lives at risk by falling for a Faerie man. Holly Black calls it “Half delicious murder ballad, half beguiling love story.”YES, PLEASE. — Liberty Hardy

Fantasy! Romance! Historical Fiction! Found family! Gorgeous art! Venessa Vida Kelley’s dreamy debutWhen the Tides Held the Moonhas something for everyone. Puerto Rican blacksmith Benny is tasked with building a giant glass tank. When he delivers it to the 1910s Coney Island carnival sideshow that commissioned it, he realizes it was constructed for a real merman captured from the East River. And when he falls in love with that merman, Benny realizes he’s constructed his prison and now must find a way to help him escape. The ensemble cast of “human curiosities” and Vida Kelley’s vivid illustrations make this story truly shine. —Susie Dumond

This was the 2025 National Book Award winner for Fiction, and, it’s about a man, who, at his center, just really just wants some peace and quiet. Sixty-three-year-old Raja lives with his octogenerian mother in a small Beirut apartment, where they are known as “the neighborhood homosexual” and a beloved high school philiosophy teacher, respectively. Well, Raja’s mother stays in his business, so when he’s offered an all-expenses-paid writing residency in the US, he jumps at the opportunity. What at first feels like a perfectly timed getaway soon starts to feel like something else, as Raja soon starts reliving past traumas he was trying to suppress. But Alameddine doesn’t only fill Raja’s story with doom and gloom—over six decades, we see a unique life unfold that’s full of absurdities, self-discovery, and humor. —Erica Ezeifedi

Li starts her memoir with “There is no good way to say this,” then details how she lost both of her children to suicide years apart. She explores her grief and how she has learned to be and to do—everything from gardening to playing the piano—with the constant presence of grief and thoughts of death.

“The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.”—Erica Ezeifedi

This is a deeply researched, definitive biography of transgender activist and artist Marsha P. Johnson. Written by the brilliant multi-hyphenate Tourmaline, this beautifully written book shows Marsha as a whole person, both before and after the Stonewall Uprising of 1969. Many people have heard that Marsha threw the first brick during the Stonewall Uprising, but few people know much beyond that. She was an artist and performer who toured outside of the U.S. She was a poet and muse and a fierce friend bursting with love. This book also includes some gorgeous photographs and is told with the care and reverence that Marsha’s story deserves. —Patricia Elzie-Tuttle

Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, delves into the world of Chat GPT. What will the world look like now that this powerful AI has been unleashed? Vara answers this question and more in her new essay collection. —Kendra Winchester

Since the beginning of the United States, Black conjure women, who combine traditional West African spiritual beliefs with herbal remedies and local resources, have been a balm to their communities. The legacy of these Mammies, Voodoo Queens, and Reconstruction-era Blues Women began, like so much of American history, in the South during slavery. Here, Feminist philosopher Lindsey Stewart traces their influence and legacy, which includes everything from blue jeans to Vicks VapoRub, to 2023’sThe Little Mermaid. —Erica Ezeifedi

I named this a Best Book of 2025 So Far and had to bring it back for the finale, a collection of beautiful stories of self-discovery, activism, resistance, and survival from queer elders of color. These testimonies are a necessary record of lived experience and hard-won progress, a love letter to queer history, and a reminder of the gift it is to have living elders among us. The joy in each of these stories is what has stayed with me, a joy that persisted even in periods of profound struggle and loss. We hear all the time that joy is resistance; this is the kind of work that really drives that point home and gives me hope for a better future. —Vanessa Diaz

Pulling from Limón’s six published collections, these gorgeous poems unfold in chronological order fromLucky WrecktoThe Hurting Kind. Having read every in-print title by the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate, I found myself electric with excitement to behold some of the prolific author’s new and new-to-me work. Revisiting familiar poems fed my bookish heart in myriad ways, and reading pieces fromThis Big Fake Worldand the final section for the first time is precisely why I open books—to connect, to learn, to feel awe. If you need a gift for yourself and for others, look into this exploration of dreams, grief, love, the ordinary, and the extraordinary. —Connie Pan

What the National Book Foundation had to say about The Intentions of Thunder:

“The Intentions of Thundergathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith’s career. Here, Smith’s poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry—all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows—and of Smith’s necessary voice. Lyrical and sly, meditative and volcanic,The Intentions of Thunderstunningly explores the fullness of living.”