Notable New Novels of Summer 2025

What novels are being talking about in summer 2025?

Well, to give you an objective measure: Lithub did a very helpful round-up of books that have appeared in American literary publications’ ‘most anticipated’ books lists. Top of the list come two commercial novels: Taylor Jenkins Reid’s latest, Atmosphere: A Love Story, which is set in the 1980s Space Shuttle programme, with 19 mentions, followed by multi-award-winning thriller writer S.A. Cosby’s latest outing, King of Ashes, with 15. Vera, or Faith, the latest novel from Gary Shteyngart (author of Five Books favourite Super Sad True Love Story), appeared on eight of the lists.

I was very excited to learn that Susan Choi will also release a new book this summer: Flashlight, which the Wall Street Journal has declared to be the “first major American novel to be published this year.” It’s an complex family saga, which spans decades and continents. I won’t say much more, given Ron Charles’s warning in the Washington Post: “Watch what you read about it. Even categorizing this story as a mystery risks prematurely exposing the novel’s intricate structure to too much light… In these pages, timelines splinter, diverge and finally — trust her — come crashing back together with devastating revelations.” Out now in the US, and on 10 July in the UK. (I still think about Choi’s brilliantly readable and unsettling 2019 novel, Trust Exercise, which detangled the fraught power dynamics of a performing arts school, and which won a National Book Award for Fiction.)

Another very eagerly awaited book is Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book, although this is, technically, neither quite fiction nor nonfiction. Following a devastating break-up, the author deconstructs her relationships, as well as her memories of religious fanaticism and disordered eating in her youth—partly in the form of memoir and partly as a fictional retelling, the text of each being presented upside down beside its twin, so that when you reach the end of the book you flip it over and keep going—and so on, forever. Out mid-June on both sides of the Atlantic. (Previously I spoke to Lacey about the best counterfactual novels while she was promoting Biography of X, a thrillingly inventive fictional biography of a female artist set in a near-future America after a devastating civil war has split the country in three.)

And if you are interested in novels that play around with form, you might also be interested in Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory, a sharp, gossipy campus novel about two married literature professors grappling with romantic temptation in the workplace. It sounds like a lot of fun to me. Released 12 August.

What about first-time authors? Any novels by new writers that have been getting a lot of buzz in summer 2025?

Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip also seems to have appeared on all the major literary highlights lists this summer. Lithub described it as a “00-page tragicomic Texan epic that tackles race, class, gender, sexuality, police violence, mental illness, immigration, boxing, and clowning” and compared it to Nathan Hill’s The Nix, another big beast of an American novel that came out a few years ago to great acclaim. (To give you a sense of how highly buzzed this book has been, in a starred review, Kirkus noted that comparisons to Jonathan Franzen, Philip Roth, and John Irving were “earned and deserved.”)

Schaefer reflected, rather appealingly, on the decade he spent writing this novel during an interview: “To give you a sense of how long it took me to write The Slip, at a back-to-school meeting at the tutoring center where I worked, I was once gifted a watch for my service as a career tutor. Tutoring is great because it really keeps you humble. I busted into the study room like Kramer on Seinfeld: “I just sold a novel to Simon & Schuster!” I might as well have said, “I just got back from the dentist.” The student was happy enough for me, but he had a test coming up. So, we studied for that.” Out now.

I’m also intrigued by Sarah Landwich’s The Fire Concerto, described as “a literary pageturner” about a 19th-century Polish pianist, whose career was derailed when her hands were damaged during a concert hall fire. After the death of her former mentor, she finds herself owner of a priceless antique metronome with a mysterious past. The writer, herself a classically-trained pianist, has said she drew inspiration from her study of the Romantic movement, and sees it sitting alongside other plot-driven-but-artistically-respectable books like A.S. Byatt’s Possession. This is probably one for you if you enjoy love a well-written historical mystery.

Sounds great. And are you reading a novel that was published in summer 2025 at the moment?

Yes. I just picked up British writer Charlotte Runcie’s first novel Bring the House Down, which is now out on both sides of the Atlantic and has been attracting a lot of positive attention. It’s about a theatre critic at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival who sleeps with the performer of a one-woman show he has just scathingly reviewed in print. Her response is to rebrand the show ‘The Alex Lyons Experience,’ dredging up all his previous misdeeds and hosting his ex-girlfriends on stage for a retrospective review. It’s a funny, biting premise, and it draws from Runcie’s real life experience of being written into a comedian’s show after giving a two-star review. But it has added elements, especially in the uncomfortable sexual dynamics and rowdy female response to the revenge show in the context of #MeToo. The Washington Post said it was “serious and thought-provoking” while remaining “fun and frequently witty,” declaring it “a five-star triumph.” For fans of Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age and Coco Mellors’ Cleopatra and Frankenstein. It might also make an interesting subject for book club discussions.

What books have you been looking forward to this season? Let us know your summer 2025 fiction highlights on social media.