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 10 notable books of 2025, in no particular order.

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 24 years before the first book, sold more than 4 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 2008 and many fans have grown up with it. At an opening night event in February, numerous attendees were in their 20s and 30s 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 26-year-old Savannah Miller. “As an adult I connected to the characters a lot more and had more of an emotional response.”

The year’s most 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.” Released late last year, Robbins’ blockbuster was high on bestseller lists throughout 2025 and the author appeared everywhere from “Meet the Press” to “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” Time magazine named Robbins among its top 100 creators: “She’s empowered millions to stop overthinking, start exercising and ignore their inner critic.”

Literary fiction traveled in 2025, from India to New York ( Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia”), from Houston to Japan (Bryan Washington’s “Palaver”), from the recent past to the 22nd 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, István, who proves equally attractive to women and disaster as life pulls him along through sexual improprieties, juvenile detention, military service 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 told reporters after the award was announced: “It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read.”

Some 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 public policy at was then Facebook. Wynn-Williams alleged that CEO Mark Zuckerberg had offered to accommodate the Chinese government’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 emergency 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.”

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 released 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 support for releasing Justice Department files on Epstein, who died in prison in 2019, 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 victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse,” a statement from Buckingham Palace read at the time.

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 some 50 pages of source material listed, “The Fate of the Day” combines precise and bloody details of battles fought between 1777 and 1780 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.

At age 89, Thomas Pynchon was back after a yearslong hiatus. “Shadow Ticket” was a characteristically shaggy tale of a 1930s 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 1990 novel about aging radicals, “Vineland,” into one of the year’s most celebrated movies, “One Battle After Another.” Anderson, who faithfully adapted Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice” in 2014, is apparently one of the privileged few 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.”

Books on the winning candidate in 2024, 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 public 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 Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for reelection – followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment,” the authors concluded.

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 2024. Harris pointed fingers in many 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 asked 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”).

Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre gained notice simply 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 2024 campaign, “and I was starting to take a hard look at my party.”