The winner of Barnes & Noble’s 2025 Discover Prize, which celebrates the best debut novels each year, is Maggie: Or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee. It also happens to be one of my favorite debuts of 2025.

The narrator of this novel is going through it. First, her husband reveals that he’s leaving her for a (much younger) woman named Maggie, then she finds out that she has breast cancer…and names the tumor (you guessed it) Maggie. As she leans on her dark sense of humor and ride-or-die best friend, she begins to build a new life and deeper sense of connection to her Chinese culture.

Fans of Jenny Offill and Weike Wang will find a lot to love here. Maggie is a strong start to a career I can’t wait to follow.

🎧 Hear about why I loved Maggie on this episode of the Book Riot Podcast (1:01:25 timestamp). – RS

It doesn’t get any more middle-of-big-book-season than the second Tuesday of October.

Today we’ve got a Kirkus- and National Book Award-nominated literary cli-fi novel set in near-future India, a beloved writer’s career capstone memoir, and a mythology-infused historical epic with a page count to match its scope.

Also hitting shelves:

• Reese Witherspoon’s debut thriller , written in collaboration with Harlan Coben
• A gorgeous collector’s edition of All About Love by bell hooks, truly essential reading
• Tim Curry’s memoir , whose cover is as cool as its title
• A literary horror novel about a Black film scout who gets stranded in Antarctica when a tourist excursion goes horribly wrong

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Kazuo Ishiguro was doing genre-bending literary fiction years before we were calling it that. What a pleasure it is to revisit this extraordinary novel.

Originally published in 2005, his haunting novel Never Let Me Go continues to be a signal example of the magic that can happen when a masterful writer picks up the tools of genre fiction. It hits as hard today as it did 20 years ago, just one of the many reasons he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.

Whether he’s writing about an aging butler in post-war England, children growing up in a creepy boarding school where something sinister is going on, or an AI-powered robot companion to a lonely teen, Ishiguro is always, at his core, concerned with questions of humanity and empathy. As the Nobel committee put it: "In novels of great emotional force, [Ishiguro] has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world."

🎧 Listen to our conversation about this modern classic on Zero to Well-Read.

The Ballad of a Small Player is just the kind of movie that gets my attention. A story of a small-time hustler who gets in over his head in a far-flung (from me at least) location, starring Colin Farrell doing Colin Farrell things: being charming, messy, and somehow simultaneously smart and very, very irresponsible. 

In reading about the movie, which hits select theaters this week, I discovered another point in the movie’s favor: it is based on a book I’ve always wanted to read. I had forgotten that I had been interested in the book when it came out: it made many best-of lists that year, including the New York Times‘s 100 Notable Books of the Year. 

And it was in re-reading the Times’s initial review that I remembered just why (besides the usual attraction to con-men stories) I was so intrigued. It was the opening sentiment of Tom Shone’s review: “Damn. Another writer I have to care about. After a certain age, it’s as irksome to add to the list of writers one reads as it is to add to one’s circle of friends.”

Is there a better, more bittersweet reading experience? To realize that there is yet another gem to read, yet another terrific writer to be behind on? It is a signal, painful pleasure of loving books. And in honor of that feeling, I got myself a copy of the novel to add to my pile. I might even get to it one day. – JO

The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson is the buzziest fantasy novel of 2025.

🗣️ It’s your favorite author’s favorite fantasy novel:

• “I’m obsessed.” — Alix E. Harrow
• “I can’t recommend it enough!” — Ann Leckie
• "Fiendishly charming and clever." —Tasha Suri
• “Epic fantasy at its finest” – Georgia Summers

The Raven Scholar is available wherever books are sold. Find out why NPR called it "the 2025 fantasy novel to beat.” 

Chani Nicholas is extending her brand of socially conscious astrology with a book club.

The Next Chapter is intended to "build community around books that reckon with and reimagine the world we’re living in." The inaugural selection is I’ll Tell You When I’m Home: A Memoir by Hala Alyan, which Nicholas praises for being "a master class in how to care for the reader while weaving an unflinchingly honest tale of displacement, empire, love, lineage, loss, new life, and the landscape of the human heart."

Readers who join The Next Chapter, hosted by Allstora , will get a book each month and will have access to community pages and exclusive content from Chani.

Robyn Ryle is the author of Sex of the Midwest , a novel-in-stories that explores post-pandemic longing and loneliness in one small Indiana town.

Here are three novel-ish books that inspired Ryle to write her own novel-in-stories:

The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg: This book follows the ups and downs of a family in the Chicago suburbs, skipping from the perspective of one character to another. The narrative is loosely tied together by the family itself and the theme: food. Attenberg was inspired to write the book after she read Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, which was one of my own inspirations in writing Sex of the Midwest.  

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery: Families make for a good structure to hold books together when they’re flirting with that line between novel and short story collection. In If I Survive You, Escoffery explores the multigenerational journey of one Jamaican family in Miami. Though most of the stories are centered on the character of Trelawny, Escoffery also wasn’t afraid to insert new characters mid-story, which gave me permission to do the same thing in my own novel-in-stories. 

The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day: Places are a good way to create a sense of narrative, as in Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, or Cathy Day’s outstanding story of Lima, Indiana. Her linked stories chronicle the history of the Great Porter Circus, which spends winters in the small town of Lima, forever transforming the lives of its residents. In these stories, the mundane (small town life) is combined with the exotic (the circus). I liked that model for Sex of the Midwest, where the everyday, Midwestern lives of everyone in a small town are shaken up by a sex survey they all receive in the story’s opening. 

Get your fix of social critique and spine-tingling terror in The Unveiling by Quan Barry,

The hotly anticipated new novel from the author of We Ride Upon Sticks, The Unveiling is People’s #1 Must-Read Book of Fall and a top pick from Town & Country, Literary Hub, Time, and yes, Book Riot.

Readers of Victor LaValle, Mona Awad, and Rivers Solomon will love this literary horror novel that explores abandonment, guilt, and survival in the long shadow of America’s racial legacy.

✍️ Watch author Tayari Jones explain how she’s going to sign 17,700 copies of her new novel.

👻 Learn about the entrepreneurs striking while horror is hot.

🎭 Read the history of a Zora Neale Hurston play finally coming to the stage 100 years after the short story that inspired it.

📚 Enjoy a nostalgic ode to the bookworm magic of The Gilmore Girls.

🍿 Catch all the differences between the adaptation of The Woman in Cabin 10 and the book.

Written by Rebecca Schinsky and Jeff O’Neal. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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