10 notable books of 2025: A posthumous memoir about Epstein, ‘Hunger Games’ and reliving 2024

NEW YORK AP The year in publishing saw such notable releases as the latest Hunger Games novel and the first book in years from Thomas Pynchon Readers also sought life advice from Mel Robbins campaign books by former Vice President Kamala Harris among others and the posthumous memoir from one of Jeffrey Epstein s accusers Virginia Giuffre Here are notable books of in no particular order Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins Suzanne Collins once swore she was done with The Hunger Games but the author has not given up on her blockbuster series and neither have her readers Sunrise on the Reaping a prequel set years before the first book sold more than million copies worldwide according to Scholastic even as the press-shy Collins declined to promote it or give any interviews except for one with her editor David Levithan Collins began the series in and numerous fans have grown up with it At an opening night event in February numerous attendees were in their s and s and spoke of how their teenage appreciation had deepened for Collins dystopian world in which contestants hunt and kill each other all while being broadcast live As a kid you focus so much on the plot and the action explained -year-old Savannah Miller As an adult I connected to the characters a lot more and had more of an emotional response The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins The year s greater part talked about self-help book Mel Robbins The Let Them Theory offered familiar and assuring messages for a troubled time Focus on the inner self don t try to change what you can t change Robbins acknowledged debts to everyone from the ancient Stoics to the Rev Martin Luther King Jr and the title of her opening chapter reads like a variation of the Serenity Prayer Stop Wasting Your Life on Things You Can t Control Issued late last year Robbins blockbuster was high on bestseller lists throughout and the author appeared everywhere from Meet the Press to The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Time magazine named Robbins among its top creators She s empowered millions to stop overthinking start exercising and ignore their inner critic Flesh by David Szalay Literary fiction traveled in from India to New York Kiran Desai s The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia from Houston to Japan Bryan Washington s Palaver from the latest past to the nd century Ian McEwan s What We Can Know Flesh winner of the Booker Prize was a physical economic and social travelogue It s a deadpan account of a working-class half-dead Hungarian Istv n who proves equally attractive to women and catastrophe as life pulls him along through sexual improprieties juvenile detention military provision in Iraq the good life in London and back down again Happiness beyond the fleshy kind is almost entirely absent from David Szalay s novel but Flesh has a subtle uncanny rhythm that made admirers out of everyone from Dua Lipa to Booker judge Roddy Doyle who advised reporters after the award was broadcasted It is in multiple techniques a dark book but it is a satisfaction to read Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams Chosen books make news just by existing Anticipating an angry response from Meta Flatiron waited until just days before publication to announce an unflattering insider take on Meta by Sarah Wynn-Williams a former director of global inhabitants guidelines at was then Facebook Wynn-Williams alleged that CEO Mark Zuckerberg had offered to accommodate the Chinese administration s demands to censor the social media platform and that Sheryl Sandberg Joel Kaplan and other executives had enabled an abusive workplace that included sexual harassment Meta countered that Careless People was a mix of out-of-date information and false accusations and it convinced an exigency arbiter that Wynn-Williams had violated a confidentiality agreement and should be barred from promoting her book which went on to top The New York Times nonfiction list A headline from Vice read Meta Tries to Kill Damning Tell-All Book Accidentally Promotes It to Bestseller Nobody s Girl by Virginia Giuffre The very existence of Nobody s Girl made news and kept on making news Six months after the death of Virginia Giuffre publisher Alfred A Knopf published her posthumous Nobody s Girl A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice Her painful accounts of her years as a sex slave helped build GOP encouragement for releasing Justice Department files on Epstein who died in prison in and to President Donald Trump s reversing his earlier objections Her explicit memories of one Epstein client the former Prince Andrew helped lead King Charles III to strip his brother of his royal title and banish him to a private residence Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been and will remain with the casualties and survivors of any and all forms of abuse a announcement from Buckingham Palace read at the time The Fate of the Day by Rick Atkinson The second of Rick Atkinson s planned three-volume history of the Revolutionary War was published to wide acclaim and helped establish him as one of the foremost military scholars of his time one given a leading voice in Ken Burns documentary on the country s independence With various pages of source material listed The Fate of the Day combines precise and bloody details of battles fought between and with vivid sketches of protagonists known and obscure There is no better writer of narrative history than the Pulitzer-winning Atkinson a New York Times review read in part Shadow Ticket and Vineland by Thomas Pynchon At age Thomas Pynchon was back after a yearslong hiatus Shadow Ticket was a characteristically shaggy tale of a s private detective Hicks McTaggart whose search for a missing cheese heiress lands him everywhere from Milwaukee to Budapest Meanwhile filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson transformed Pynchon s novel about aging radicals Vineland into one of the year s preponderance celebrated movies One Battle After Another Anderson who faithfully adapted Pynchon s Inherent Vice in is apparently one of the privileged meager to be in contact with the famously private author Realistically for me Vineland was going to be hard to adapt Anderson observed in the movie s press notes Instead I stole the parts that really resonated with me and started putting all these ideas together With Pynchon s blessing Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson Reliving Part I Books on the winning candidate in Trump proved less attractive to readers than accounts about the losing side Original Sin by CNN s Jake Tapper and Axios Alex Thompson was among several notable works that looked back and wondered how it went so wrong for the Democratic Party The Tapper-Thompson book centered on the aging of President Joe Biden made painfully society when he debated Trump and on the aides and family members the authors alleged were keeping his cognitive decline a secret The original sin of Electoral contest was Biden s decision to run for reelection followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment the authors concluded Days by Kamala Harris Reliving Part II The title refers to the hurried and unsuccessful campaign the vice president led when she took over from Biden after he dropped out in the summer of Harris pointed fingers in multiple directions at Biden s staff Their thinking was zero-sum If she s shining he s dimmed at herself and her answer on The View that nothing comes to mind when solicited how she would govern differently than Biden I had no idea that I d just pulled the pin on a hand grenade and at the speed of time One hundred and seven days were not in the end long enough to accomplish the task of winning the presidency Independent by Karine Jean-Pierre Reliving Part III Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre gained notice purely from the title of her book Independent an early tip that she had left the Democratic Party The subtitle promised harsher takes A Look Inside a Broken White House Outside the Party Lines Unlike other critics she didn t argue that the party had become too woke or had stayed with Biden for too long She objected to how Biden was treated by the press and by fellow Democrats and contended he remained thoughtful clearheaded and well-informed however poorly he came across in his debate with Trump We had a major miss she concluded about the campaign and I was starting to take a hard look at my party Source