Esquire
Esquire Best Books of the Year 2025
Esquire Best Books of the Year 2025 names 35 books. 5 of them also won or were shortlisted for an award.
- A Guardian and a Thiefsource (opens in a new tab)
- Angel Downsource (opens in a new tab)
- Auditionsource (opens in a new tab)
- Bog Queensource (opens in a new tab)
- Cursed Daughterssource (opens in a new tab)
- Death Takes Mesource (opens in a new tab)
- Dissolutionsource (opens in a new tab)
- Exit Zerosource (opens in a new tab)
- Extinction Capital of the World: Storiessource (opens in a new tab)
- Fonsecasource (opens in a new tab)
- Honeymoon Stagesource (opens in a new tab)
- I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darknesssource (opens in a new tab)
- Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legendsource (opens in a new tab)
- Kaplan’s Plotsource (opens in a new tab)
- Lightbreakerssource (opens in a new tab)
- Mark Twainsource (opens in a new tab)
- Metallic Realmssource (opens in a new tab)
- My Documentssource (opens in a new tab)
- Original Sinssource (opens in a new tab)
- Rosaritasource (opens in a new tab)
- Searchessource (opens in a new tab)
- Sorrowful Mysteries: The Shepherd Children of Fatima and the Fate of the Twentieth Centurysource (opens in a new tab)
- Startlement: New and Selected Poemssource (opens in a new tab)
- Terrestrial Historysource (opens in a new tab)
- The Antidotesource (opens in a new tab)
- The Book of Recordssource (opens in a new tab)
- The Buffalo Hunter Huntersource (opens in a new tab)
- The Dream Hotelsource (opens in a new tab)
- The Imagined Lifesource (opens in a new tab)
- The River Has Rootssource (opens in a new tab)
- The Ten Year Affairsource (opens in a new tab)
- The Wayfindersource (opens in a new tab)
- Waterlinesource (opens in a new tab)
- We Lived on the Horizonsource (opens in a new tab)
- Where the Axe Is Buriedsource (opens in a new tab)
About the Esquire Best Books of the Year
Esquire's own year-end best-books list for each year, one combined list per year. Esquire's terms of use bar scraping its content for AI use, so nothing was read from esquire.com directly; every list comes from a Wayback Machine copy (robots.txt was checked: it allows the book pages). 2017-2025 are Esquire's running 'Best Books of <year>' galleries in their final archived form; only the 2016 list (25 to 1) is ranked. 2011 is the December 2011 issue's 10 best books and 2012 is the 8-book 'Best Books of 2012' feature. 2014 is 'The 5 Most Important Books of 2014', kept because it is Esquire's only year-end book list that year. No year-end list was found for 2006-2010, 2013, or 2015. Archived copies of the 2025 gallery hold only its first 20 of 35 books; books 21-35 come from yearendlists.com's copy of the list, which matches Esquire on books 1-20. The 2019 gallery repeats two books, so it counts 49 unique books from 51 slides. The 2018 gallery names titles only; its authors come from Library of Congress catalog records for the ISBN in each slide's shop link (or the title, for Kindle-only links), and from the slide text where the LoC record has no author. Obvious author misspellings on the page are corrected (e.g. Jia Tolentino, Téa Obreht). Left out: mid-year 'best so far' lists, seasonal and monthly reading lists, genre lists, and Esquire UK.
Organization: Esquire. Official site (opens in a new tab)