2025 Time's Must-Read Books by BIPOC Authors
Gripping novels and short stories, eye-opening histories, moving memoirs, and more from Time’s Must-Read Books of 2025.
- Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
In a near-future Kolkata, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After...
- by Ken Liu
- Fiction, Science Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
Former “orphan hacker” Julia Z is thrust into a high-stakes adventure where she must use her AI-whispering skills to unravel a virtual reality mystery, rescue a kidnapped dream artist, and...
- by Ed Park
Gilt-edged stories that slice clean through the mundanity of modern life, written by Ed Park. In “Machine City” a college student’s chance role in a friend’s movie blurs the line...
- Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love. Two people...
- by Imani Perry
- Demographic Studies, History, Nonfiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue—and its fascinating role in Black history and culture—from National Book Award winner Imani Perry Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has...
- Fiction, Women's Domestic Life Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A young woman must shake off a family curse and the widely held belief that she is the reincarnation of her dead cousin in this wickedly funny, brilliantly perceptive novel...
- by Zadie Smith
- Essays, Nonfiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays. In this eagerly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist...
- Family Life, Fiction, Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction, Science Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
In this exhilarating tale by New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor, a disabled Nigerian American woman pens a wildly successful Sci-Fi novel, but as her fame rises,...
- by Susan Choi
- Coming of Age, Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked...
- Memoir, Memoir and Biography, Nonfiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible. Growing up, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian felt most at...
- Family Life, Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel from Charmaine Wilkerson. When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman...
- by Aria Aber
- Fiction, Friendship Fiction, Women's Domestic Life Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
An electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of self-discovery—“a stunning coming-of-age story” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and a portrait of the artist as a...
- by Rob Franklin
- Black Fiction, City Life Fiction, Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A gripping debut from an electrifying new voice about an upwardly mobile and downwardly spiraling Black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamourous parties and sudden consequences, a...
- by Hala Alyan
- Memoir, Memoir and Biography, Nonfiction
- Publication Year: 2025
The rich and deeply personal debut memoir by award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist Hala Alyan, whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past,...
- by R.F. Kuang
- Dark Fantasy, Fantasy
- Publication Year: 2025
Two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul—perhaps at the cost of their own. Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek: The story of...
- by S.A. Cosby
- Fiction, Murder Thrillers, Thrillers & Suspense
- Publication Year: 2025
King of Ashes is a Godfather-inspired Southern crime epic and dazzling family drama. When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger...
- Coming of Age, Fiction, Friendship Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the glamorous early ’90s art world in New York City, where only...
- Fiction, Women's Domestic Life Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A bold and inventive novel about real romance in the virtual workplace—bringing Castillo’s trademark wit and sharp cultural criticism to an irresistible story about the possible future of love. Girlie...
- Memoir, Memoir and Biography, Nonfiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces her complex relationship with her mother,...
- by Kevin Nguyen
The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans, in this “rich, gripping novel that lands squarely as a mirror of our contemporary...
- by Joseph Lee
- Demographic Studies, Nonfiction
- Publication Year: 2025
From award-winning journalist Joseph Lee, a sweeping, personal exploration of Indigenous identity and the challenges facing Indigenous people around the world. Before Martha’s Vineyard became one of the most iconic...
- by Nicole Cuffy
- Black Fiction, Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
An engrossing novel that sweeps from present-day California to the Vietnam War and back, where a grieving young man is drawn into the orbit of a charismatic cult leader who...
- Fiction, LGBTQ+ Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love, from the award-winning Bryan Washington. In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor and drinks his nights...
- by Jason Mott
- Black Fiction, Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
People Like Us is Jason Mott’s electric new novel. It is not memoir, yet it has deeply personal connections to Jason’s life. And while rooted in reality, it explodes with...
- Cultural Heritage Fiction, Family Life, Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labor, and class, an intimate and sharply written book following a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don’t...
- by Mai Der Vang
- Poetry
- Publication Year: 2025
Mai Der Vang’s poetry―lyrically insistent and visually compelling―constitutes a groundbreaking investigation into the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities, the ongoing cultural and environmental repercussions of...
- Memoir, Memoir and Biography, Nonfiction, Sociology
- Publication Year: 2025
In 2013, the trajectory of Amanda Nguyen’s life was changed forever when she was raped at Harvard University. Determined not to let her assault derail her goal of joining NASA...
- by Tiana Clark
- Poetry
- Publication Year: 2025
The striking sophomore poetry collection from award-winning author Tiana Clark. Dive between the borders of ruined and radical love with this lyrical poetry collection that explores topics as expansive as...
- by Michael Luo
- Cultural Anthropology, History, Immigrant Stories, Nonfiction
- Publication Year: 2025
From New Yorker writer Michael Luo comes a masterful narrative history of the Chinese in America that traces the sorrowful theme of exclusion and documents their more than century-long struggle...
- Black Fiction, Contemporary Romance, Fiction, Romance
- Publication Year: 2025
Two exes. One summer wedding. Zero chance of escaping the heat. Prepare to laugh, swoon, and fall head over heels with this irresistible standalone romance from bestselling author Bolu Babalola....
- Fiction, Immigration Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A novel that leaps across centuries past and future, as if different eras were separated by only a door. Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea,...
- Fantasy, Fiction, Historical Fantasy
- Publication Year: 2025
A chilling historical horror novel tracing the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran...
- Fiction, Women's Domestic Life Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A darkly whimsical debut about women daring to live and create with impunity. Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother...
- by Laila Lalami
- Fiction, Political Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance. Sara has just landed at LAX, returning...
- Family Life, Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and...
- by Ocean Vuong
- Asian American Fiction, Fiction, LGBTQ+ Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. One late summer evening in the post-industrial town...
- Poetry
- Publication Year: 2025
From award-winning Driftpile Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt, a dazzling exploration of love, anguish, queerness, and Indigenous resistance in the 21st century. Queer Indigenous poet Billy-Ray Belcourt offers up a powerful...
- by Kiran Desai
- Coming of Age, Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity. When Sonia and...
- by Tash Aw
- Family Life, Fiction, LGBTQ+ Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A radiant, intimate novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer―about family, desire, and what we inherit. When his grandfather dies, Jay travels...
- Coming of Age, Family Life, Fiction, LGBTQ+ Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
A tragicomic love story set in Lebanon, a modern saga of family, memory, and the unbreakable attachment of a son and his mother. In a tiny Beirut apartment, sixty-three-year-old Raja...
- Coming of Age, Fiction, Women's Domestic Life Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife—in the...
- Discrimination and Racism, History, Nonfiction, US History
- Publication Year: 2025
In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a...
- Fiction, Historical Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
In his first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize, a master storyteller captures a time of dizzying global change. At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young...
- by Yiyun Li
- Death and Dying, Essays, Memoir, Memoir and Biography, Nonfiction
- Publication Year: 2025
Things in Nature Merely Grow is Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her sons James and Vincent. “There is no good way...
- by Han Kang
- Fiction, Friendship Fiction
- Publication Year: 2025
We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history. One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent...
- Fiction, Satire, Short Stories
- Publication Year: 2025
From the critically-acclaimed author of Disorientation, a multi-genre story collection that explores the limits and possibilities of storytelling. A mail order bride from Taiwan is packed up in a cardboard...
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values. On October 25, 2023,...