Esquire Names Best Books of 2025 So Far

• Exit Zero by Marie-Helene Bertino: “Ghosts, unicorns, vampires, and other strange things incite Bertino’s fiction, but these twelve stories are grounded in emotional realism and leavened by humor.”
• My Documents by Kevin Nguyen: “It’s a thrilling speculative novel with a surprising amount of humor.”
• We Lived on the Horizon by Erika Swyler: “In 2025, we’re already living in an era when the proliferation of AI can make it impossible to determine what’s real. How much worse could that get a few decades or centuries from now? Erika Swyler’s (The Book of Speculation) fourth book is a timely science fiction novel.”
• Original Sins by Eve L. Ewing: “Chicago’s polymath poet, comic book writer, and sociologist returns with a fascinating and eye-opening look at how American schools have helped build and reinforce an infrastructure of racial inequality.”
• The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami: “Lalami’s (The Other Americans) new novel has one of the best high-concept hooks of the year: a museum archivist is abducted by federal agents and taken to a detention center for observation after an algorithm predicts she will murder her husband in the near-future.”
• The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar: “El-Mohtar is one of our finest crafters of sentences, so it’s fitting that this book features a magic system called Grammar.”
• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones: “It’s a creepy thriller that’s destined for a prestige TV adaptation.”

Check out the entire list, including the reasons why each title was included, over on Esquire.

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