The Library Vault

By: Briana Gagnon

It’s January 2025! How??? I’m still processing 2024 … yet here we are! 2025 looks super promising when it comes to new book releases, with many to rival those we loved so much in 2024.

I have started to plan my 2025 TBR (to be read) with the hope that I’ll read 200 books this year. I got really close in 2024 but couldn’t quite make it (too busy watching The Polar Express too many times I guess). The twenty-five books I’m going to tell you about are all on my TBR. I picked books spanning across genres and subjects because one of my goals is to push myself to read books I normally wouldn’t. I know I couldn’t hit all of the 2025 releases, but I tried my best to get most of them! I’ve had the pleasure of reading a few of these already so I’ll throw in my own personal thoughts for those books as we go.

If you need help putting a hold on any of these books, library staff are happy to help! Give us a call or send us an email.

This blog post will be a bit lengthy because of the amount of books I’m talking about, so I tried to keep the descriptions on the shorter side when I could.

I’m looking forward to reading these books and hope some of them find a spot on your TBR too! (Feel free to come talk to me about any of them once you read them, I’m always happy to talk books!)

1. Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

This will probably be a favorite for 2025 for many of us (including myself). Emily Henry never disappoints and I’m sure this book will be just as great as the rest. It’s giving grumpy x sunshine and enemies to lovers tropes set on an island and I cannot WAIT to eat this book up when it publishes in late April!

Quick Summary: Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve.

2. Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros

Onyx Storm is the third book in the Empyrean Series and you have to read it in order in order to understand anything going on. Fourth Wing and Iron Flame have taken over social media and I know Onyx Storm will be the same. People across the world will be reading this book (so if your friends/family members who love this series ghost you for a week or two, that’s why). If you love sassy dragons, well written battles, found family, and morally grey male main characters who love strong, powerful female main characters, this is for you!

Quick Summary: After nearly eighteen months at Basgiath War College, Violet Sorrengail knows there’s no more time for lessons. No more time for uncertainty. Because the battle has truly begun, and with enemies closing in from outside their walls and within their ranks, it’s impossible to know who to trust. Now Violet must journey beyond the failing Aretian wards to seek allies from unfamiliar lands to stand with Navarre. 

3. Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry

I just have to say WOW this cover is absolutely gorgeous! The concept of this book lured me in from the get go and I believe it will get people thinking and having important discussions. Imani Perry is a National Book Award Winner and a new-to-me author. Imani talks about how the color blue has been intertwined with blackness for centuries and it has been evoked in countless ways through this large span of time.

Quick Summary: Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey — an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology.

4. Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

As a newer fan of TJR’s work, I am super excited to read Atmosphere. I have an advance review copy of this waiting for me on my Kindle! This book has a chance of being one of the best books of the summer, so we’ll see if TJR can win our hearts yet again with this new novel. I feel like my heart is going to shatter but it’s fine. Cue Rocketman by Elton John please.

Quick Summary: In the summer of 1980, Joan Goodwin begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilots Hank Redmond and John Griffin, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane. As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe. Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.

5. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix

This is one of my current reads and I’m really loving it so far. I loved How To Sell A Haunted House so when I got my hands on this book, I had some high expectations. Hendrix will show readers just how much power comes from a single book (all thanks to a librarian, which I love!) This is super fun to read and so different from his previous book. I love the 1970s vibes and the different personalities the girls have. While I haven’t finished it yet, I know this is likely going to be a five star read for me.

Quick Summary: They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened. Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid … and it’s usually paid in blood.

6. Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson

If you loved Black Cake then you’ll love Charmaine Wilkerson’s next book. I love the cover and the summary grabbed me right away! I have a feeling this is going to be a super popular book club pick and remain popular throughout 2025 and beyond.

Quick Summary: The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel. When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well. The crime was never solved — and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England — the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. 

7. Source Code by Bill Gates

This book is definitely going to be one of the most popular memoirs of 2025. I would say this falls under the celebrity memoirs subgenre. Who isn’t just a little bit curious about Bill Gates’ origin story and how he became the mogul he is today? I love hearing about famous people in their own words (and love looking through all the pictures they include randomly at the middle of the book).

8. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I had to read Americanah in college and I remember really enjoying it. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is celebrated for her literary feats all over the world. Knowing that this book was ten years in the making means we’ve got a contender for top book of 2025 on our hands. This book is a story following four Nigerian women.

Quick Summary: In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on four women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power.

9. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

I couldn’t resist adding this to my list. Mark Twain is such a household name, especially for those of us from Connecticut. I’ve visited his home and read a few of his books, but I don’t know that much about this remarkable man. I think this will be another must read biography in 2025.

Quick Summary: Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain.

10. My Name is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende

I cannot wait to get my hands on this book. I’ve actually never read any of Allende’s novels before but I know she is extremely popular. This book sounds like one that will stay with you and have you reading every single book on Allende’s backlist before you’ve even finished reading this one. This may be yet another contender for top book of 2025!

Quick Summary: In San Francisco in 1866, an Irish nun, abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman. A riveting tale of self-discovery and love from one of the most masterful storytellers of our time, My Name Is Emilia del Valle introduces a character who will never let hold of your heart.

11. Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson

This graphic novel is a memoir about author Craig Thompson and his siblings who spent many summers as children weeding and harvesting rows of ginseng in Wisconsin for a dollar an hour. I really look forward to reading this! It’s fun to spice up your reading with a graphic novel every now and then. No, they’re not just for kids/teens!

Quick Summary: In his trademark breathtaking pen-and-ink work, Craig interweaves this lost youth with the 300-year-old history of the global ginseng trade and the many lives it has tied together — from ginseng hunters in ancient China, to industrial farmers and migrant harvesters in the American Midwest, to his own family still grappling with the aftershocks of the bitter past.

12. The Jackal’s Mistress by Chris Bohjalian

I read this in November 2024 and absolutley loved it. It’s advertised as a love story, which in a way it is a super slow burn kind of a love story, but this really focuses on humanity. People from all walks of life in Confederate Virginia are thrust into a precarious situation that could get them all killed. This is inspired by a true story as well, which I loved learning about in the author’s note at the end of the book. It may take a bit of time to get into at first, but I truly loved this so much. This is a period of history I love reading about and learning more about, especially previously untold/unknown stories such as this.

Quick Summary: In this Civil War love story, inspired by a real-life friendship across enemy lines, the wife of a missing Confederate soldier discovers a wounded Yankee officer and must decide what she’s willing to risk for the life of a stranger. A vivid and sweeping story of two people navigating the boundaries of love and humanity in a landscape of brutal violence, The Jackal’s Mistress is a heart-stopping new novel, based on a largely unknown piece of American history, from one of our greatest storytellers.

13. Air-Borne by Carl Zimmer

Air. We love it, we need it, it’s kind of really important! I normally don’t read non-fiction, but this topic sounds so fascinating.

Quick Summary: The fascinating, untold story of the air we breathe, the hidden life it contains, and invisible dangers that can turn the world upside down. Weaving together gripping history with the latest reporting on Covid and other threats to global health, Air-Borne surprises us on every page as it reveals the hidden world of the air.

14. Say You’ll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez

I say this now knowing it’s subject to change as I read more 2025 publications, but this is already my favorite book of the year. I felt all the feelings: happiness, angst, sadness, frustration, and love in a romantic and familial way. This book is so much more than just a romance, as it’s got so much depth to it in exploring how we love who we love and just how far love goes, even when it’s hard. Abby Jimenez is one of my favorite romance authors and she’ll be yours too once you read this book. Also, Xavier will be your next book boyfriend. Hot vet with golden retriever energy? Yes please.

Quick Summary: Samantha and Xavier start off on the wrong foot, but after Xavier apologizes, he and Samantha decide to go out on a date. After this one incredible and seemingly endless date—possibly the best in living history—Samantha is forced to admit the truth, that her family is in crisis and any kind of relationship with Xavier would be impossible. Samantha begs Xavier to forget her. To remember their night together as a perfect moment, as crushing as that may be. Only no amount of distance or time is nearly enough to forget that something between them. And the only thing better than one single perfect memory is to make a life—and even a love—worth remembering.

15. The Crash by Freida McFadden

I love a McFadden. The Housemaid series is one of my favorites I’ve read in recent years. If you love thrillers that leave you guessing until the very end with a shock twist, McFadden’s books are for you. I’m really excited to read this one and hope it’s as great as the others!

Quick Summary: The nightmare she’s running from is nothing compared to where she’s headed. Tegan is eight months pregnant, alone, and desperately wants to put her crumbling life in the rearview mirror. So she hits the road, planning to stay with her brother until she can figure out her next move. But she doesn’t realize she’s heading straight into a blizzard. She never arrives at her destination. Stranded in rural Maine with a dead car and broken ankle, Tegan worries she’s made a terrible mistake. Then a miracle she is rescued by a couple who offers her a room in their warm cabin until the snow clears. But something isn’t right. 

16. Water Moon by Samantha Soto Yambao

This cover sold me before I even knew what this book was about. It sounds like the perfect book to cozy up with on a snowy or rainy day. I’d love to sell my regrets and then proceed to go on a magical journey.

Quick Summary: A woman inherits a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets, and then embarks on a magical journey when a charming young physicist wanders into the shop, in this dreamlike and enchanting fantasy novel.

17. When The Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

Do I want to read this just because I can’t stop singing the lyrics from that classic Dean Martin song? Yup. Do I also want to read this because it’s so unserious and will probably having me laughing my butt off the entire time I’m reading it? Yup. This book literally imagines what would happen if the moon was a giant wheel of cheese, like, yes please!

Quick Summary: What would really happen if suddenly the moon were replaced by a giant wheel of cheese. It’s a whole new moooooon. One day soon, suddenly and without explanation, the moon as we know it is replaced with an orb of cheese with the exact same mass. Through the length of an entire lunar cycle, from new moon to a spectacular and possibly final solar eclipse, we follow multiple characters – school kids and scientists, billionaires and workers, preachers and politicians – as they confront the strange new world they live in, and the absurd, impossible moon that now hangs above all their lives.

18. Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

This is one of my most anticipated books of 2025. I love SGJ because he creates perfection when it comes to the slasher subgenre of horror. His 2024 book I Was A Teenage Slasher was SO so good, easily one of my favorites of last year. This has vampires and revenge, set in the early 1900’s, so basically everything I want in a book by one of the best voices in horror today.

Quick Summary: A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor, is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.

19. Sunrise On The Reaping by Suzanne Collins

I grew up reading The Hunger Games series and watching the movies as soon as they hit the theaters. Middle school Briana is jumping at the chance to read this book! Haymitch is finally getting his story and I think a lot of us who grew up with this series especially are just itching to read it and be back in the Hunger Games universe once again.

Quick Summary: When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for? As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes. Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves. When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 youths — a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight … and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.

20. The JFK Conspiracy: The Secret Plot To Kill Kennedy – And Why It Failed by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch

I see a book like this and need to read it right away. I’ve watched quite a few docuseries about JFK and the Kennedy’s so this was an automatic add to my TBR. This book is about a little known December 1960 assassination attempt. If you’re anything like me and enjoy history books and books about the Kennedy’s, this is for you.

Quick Summary: Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, is often ranked among Americans’ most well-liked presidents. Yet what most Americans don’t know is that JFK’s historic presidency almost ended before it began—at the hands of a disgruntled sociopathic loner armed with dynamite. On December 11, 1960, shortly after Kennedy’s election and before his inauguration, a retired postal worker named Richard Pavlick waited in his car — a parked Buick — on a quiet street in Palm Beach, Florida. Pavlick knew the president-elect’s schedule. He knew when Kennedy would leave his house. He knew where Kennedy was going. From there, Pavlick had a simple plan — one that could’ve changed the course of history.

21. Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

I really enjoyed Caleb’s Crossing, which I read as a teenager after buying it from a local bookshop on the Cape where I vacation every year. Geraldine Brooks’ book Horse was read in two different book clubs I help provide books for from the library. Her books are always on hold for someone! I feel like this book will be my way to get to know her in a way I never would have through the loss she’s suffered from her partner’s passing in 2019. Brooks will use this book to explore how other culture grieve while also exploring her journey through grief. I feel like this memoir will really pull at the heart strings and make you think about the loss you’ve suffered in your life and how you grieved.

Quick Summary: A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.

22. Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green

Will I read this without a second thought because John Green wrote it? Yup. I will admit I find the content matter fascinating and I feel like I’ll learn so much about this horrible disease and how it still impacts impoverished countries today. I think this will be a powerful and informative read.

Quick Summary: Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it. In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year. In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.

23. Death Of The Author by Nnedi Okorafor

I think this book is really going to take off once it publishes. I’ve heard nothing but great things about it and look forward to reading it. This book comments on the power of a single story and how it can transform the world. Okorafor has won numerous awards for her books that center on what she coins as africanfuturism and africanjujuism.

Quick Summary: Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she’s suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister’s wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she’s not sure what comes next. In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life – she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes. What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu’s life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.

24. Strangers In The Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and The Epic Story of The Chinese in America by Michael Luo

I think this is an important book to read and it will be one I look forward to diving into and learning from. This is a part of history I feel I still have so much to learn about.

Quick Summary: From New Yorker Executive Editor and writer Michael Luo, an urgent, deeply felt history of the Chinese in America and their more than century-long struggle to belong. Strangers in the Land is an epic history of exclusion, belonging, and the complications of America’s multiracial democracy.

25. Hope: The Autobiography by Pope Francis and Jorge Bergoglio

This is the first autobiography to be published by a Pope. Ever. In the hundreds of thousands of years of Popes, its never been done. This book was also written over the span of six years. Typically, this kind of book wouldn’t publish until the Pope has passed on. However, Pope Francis decided he wanted to publish now. In general, I feel like hope is something all of us could use in our lives. I look forward to reading about Pope Francis’s life and what led him to where he is today.

Quick Summary: This complete autobiography starts in the early years of the twentieth century, with Pope Francis’s Italian roots and his ancestors’ courageous migration to Latin America, continuing through his childhood, the enthusiasms and preoccupations of his youth, his vocation, adult life, and the whole of his papacy up to the present day. In recounting his memories with intimate narrative force (not forgetting his own personal passions), Pope Francis deals unsparingly with some of the crucial moments of his papacy and writes candidly, fearlessly, and prophetically about some of the most important and controversial questions of our present times: war and peace (including the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East), migration, environmental crisis, social policy, the position of women, sexuality, technological developments, the future of the Church and of religion in general.