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Your next favorite book
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Our upcoming annual Top 20 list will show subscribers’ favorite books of the year, but in the meantime, we thought you might enjoy knowing about our favorites. So, for the first time ever, each member of the BookBrowse editorial team shared a top pick of 2025 along with some runners-up to create our own loosely structured "best of" list. Unsurprisingly, we found there was a lot of overlap between the books we featured in our digital magazine this year and the ones we chose here, though this overlap wasn’t complete. (What we feature depends on a variety of factors, including prepub reviews and the books individual reviewers decide to cover.) Here’s your chance to get a glimpse of our personal tastes and an inside look at BookBrowse editors as readers. We’re happy to share the books we loved with you, and hope you have fun reading about them!
What’s better than reading a book by an author you love? Well, probably nothing, but a good author interview can be a close second. We regularly feature interviews in our digital magazine with writers whose books we review, and in 2025, with your help, we started hosting our own Ask the Author interviews in the BookBrowse community forum. Below, we bring you some of the best Q&As for books published in hardcover or paperback this year from both inside and outside of BookBrowse, which represent just a handful drawn from a pool of many great interviews. We hope you enjoy these conversations and that you’ll join us in 2026 for more fun virtual author visits.
Are you excited about 2026 books yet? We are. Get your calendar ready, because below is a tantalizing preview of what’s to come. This list covers intriguing debuts and new work from excellent established authors, and it offers a glimpse of books we may cover in our digital magazine, First Impressions program, or book club in the year ahead. Be sure to also check out our Best Books for Book Clubs in 2026. Happy browsing!
BookBrowse interviews longtime reviewer and history BookTuber Peggy Kurkowski about the enduring power of thoughtful reviews, how the literary landscape has evolved, and why history remains her greatest teacher.
For access to the full recording as well as live access to future industry insider discussions, become a Book Club+ Member today.
Ready to start planning your book club selections for 2026? We’re here to help. These books have all been published in hardcover or paperback within the last year (or will be soon), and we’ve paired almost all of them with handy discussion guides—either from the publisher or written by our reviewers—for your convenience. Most have been featured on BookBrowse in reviews or as the subject of online discussions, and we’ve included our own comments below, along with links to the discussions, which we hope will inspire you in your own. Whether you’re looking for a contemporary narrative or a historical one, a reflective bit of character fiction or a family saga, we have you covered. Happy reading in the year ahead!
Please note that discussions may contain spoilers.
Reading a duology, trilogy, or longer series with your book club can be a special experience. Discussing linked books set in the same universe allows you to take an extended journey together, and the eager awaiting of a sequel or the next installment featuring a beloved character is a delicious anticipation that’s even better when shared. But what are the best series for book clubs? It might seem like series are the territory of certain types of genre fiction, like high fantasy, which many book groups don’t make a habit of reading, but in fact, there’s a wide variety out there that lend themselves well to discussion. Below, we present recent and ongoing series that seem ideal for book clubs—and in some cases are already very popular with them. Many of the books in these series have been subjects of BookBrowse reviews or online discussions—and we have reading guides for a lot of them!
