The year has gone by, or let’s say it has come to an end. How much could you read from that must read books 2025 list? Are you already showing off proudly the number of books you have read this year on your Instagram? You must be elated with your successful chasing of book goals for 2025. How much have these books changed your perspective or influenced your thinking? Every piece of literature you read impacts you somehow. Yes, enriches your brain and enlightens your critical thinking. Every reader knows for sure that books are not merely for entertainment. The changes they bring aren’t metaphorical or merely emotional; they linger long after you close the book. Even if it’s the only book you could manage to read the whole year.
The year 2025 had some amazing books that lingered in the hearts and minds of people. Let’s see which books made it to the list of ‘Must Read Books 2025!
1. Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
Who doesn’t know the name Arundhati Roy? This book is the first memoir, written in response to her mother’s death in September 2022. People are opinionated when it comes to Roy. If you are one of them, then read this. Here, a difficult parent is neither a villain nor a saint, but rather ambivalent. Arundhati shows Mary Roy as abusive, cruel, but has ferocious survival instincts. Her family endured periods of starvation in a relative’s house before being evicted. Roy’s memoir recalls all the hardships and how they shaped her into what she is now. Those who know Arundhanti Roy’s mother Mary as the woman who challenged the Travancore Christian Succession Act before India’s Supreme Court, (successfully overturning laws that denied daughters inheritance rights), will see her in a new light. Yes, it’s all true, not a mere fiction. Hence, this non-conventional memoir makes it to must read books 2025.
Author: Arundhati Roy
Click Here To Buy: Amazon.in, Blinkit
2. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The writer of books such as We Should All Be Feminists, Americanah, and Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie does the magic all over again. This is the first story collection in over a decade by her. This book is about the loves and longings of four Nigerian women. Here, their desires, personal choices clash with familial expectations, economic necessity, and political instability. Yes, the very lives of women. A one of must read books 2025, this book is brilliant in its observation and precision. It depicts how women’s interior lives remain illegible to the conventional structures claiming to define them. We know women will read it, so should the men!
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Click Here To Buy: Amazon.in, Crossword.in
3. ‘Is a River Alive?’ by Robert Macfarlane
Our rivers are dying, and so is Earth, faster than ever. We believe our rivers to be sacred, but we never treat them as one. That’s why all, especially we Indians, should read Macfarlane’s latest book ‘Is a River Alive?’ more than ever. This book poses a question. The question forces us to reconsider the boundaries between animate and inanimate, conscious and mechanical. We have been taught to see the natural world as a collection of things. We see natural resources to use, scenery to admire, and systems to manage our lives. A river becomes something that flows through a landscape, separate from us, waiting for human purposes to give it meaning. Macfarlane is changing this entire narrative. What if rivers aren’t objects at all, but subjects with their own forms of existence that don’t require our understanding or approval? Which is why this book makes it to the must read books 2025.
Author: Robert Macfarlane
Click Here To Buy: Amazon.in
4. Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
Literature enthusiasts and students! You must already have recognized this title. It indeed is a reference from Roland Barthes’ famous essay written in 1967, The Death of the Author. The essay argues that once a story exists, it belongs to readers, not its creator. Okorafor takes a phrase literary critics love to debate ‘death of the author’, and turns it into an actual plot of the book. Okorafor doesn’t just discuss this theory; she makes it literal, narrative around what actually happens when storytellers physically vanish. Hence, makes it an interesting selection for must read books 2025.
Author: Nnedi Okorafor
Click Here To Buy: Amazon.in
5. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Nineteen years after winning the Man Booker Prize, Desai is back with a bang. Desai, the master of diasporic literature, with her 700-page epic, shows how immigration transforms loneliness from a temporary condition into a permanent identity of self. The novel has a Dickensian coincidence: two strangers fleeing arranged marriages meet on an overnight train in India before separately immigrating to the United States, parallel trajectories intersecting across decades. We know how Desai’s stories have so many stories in one.
Here, Sonia’s story becomes a harrowing examination of artistic appropriation. In the story, Sonia’s lover Ilan, a self-absorbed artist, paints her vulnerable moments for his breakthrough exhibition. He also dismisses her own creative work as orientalist nonsense before abandoning her. Desai through this book shows how such exploitation of one permanently alters one’s relationship to visibility itself and hence, naturally, it makes it to must read books 2025 list!
Author: Kiran Desai
Click Here To Buy: Amazon.in
6. Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu
We all feel a strange sense of isolation, even when surrounded by people. Even the friendships aren’t real and sometimes a friendship can be a liability rather than a ‘friends forever’ kind of bond. If you have often felt it too, then you must read this novel. This is the story of Ruth and Maria. Ruth sees Maria for the first time when they are both nine, shopping for school uniforms. They become the only two Black girls at their Catholic school in Rhode Island, but instead of finding equal friendship, Ruth turns herself into Maria’s shadow. She follows wherever Maria leads, shuns her own desires to match Maria’s wants. This underrated but brilliant novel from my must read books 2025 shows how one person’s overwhelming presence can destroy another’s entire life until the original person disappears completely.
Once you finish this book and you will start examining your own relationships. You might wonder where admiration crossed into self-destruction.
Author: Stephanie Wambugu
Click Here To Buy: Amazon.in
Let’s Read Them All!
Bookworms! How many of these books made it to your reading list? It’s time to update your reading goals and add some new brilliant books to your wishlist. If you haven’t read these all or missed any of these must read books 2025, you should get the ginger tea ready and start reading!
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