Real Simple’s 2025 book roundup names 38 releases its editors enjoyed most, spanning literary fiction, historical novels, thrillers, romance, memoir, speculative fiction, family sagas, and short stories. The list is not a standardized ranking or the result of a documented comparative test: it is an editorial recommendation roundup that may be updated during the year. The version covered here was updated September 16, 2025. Read Real Simple’s original list before buying, since editions, prices, and the roundup itself may change.
There is no single kind of “best” book on this list. Some selections are sweeping historical novels; others are compact literary works, high-concept thrillers, relationship stories, memoirs, or warm books suitable for younger readers. The common thread is Real Simple’s editors’ enthusiasm rather than a formal score or universal critical ranking.
| # | Preview | Product | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
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Buckeye: A Read with Jenna Pick: A Novel | $12.00 | Buy on Amazon |
| 2 |
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Buckeye (Portuguese Edition) | $12.99 | Buy on Amazon |
| 3 |
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Study Guide: Buckeye by Patrick Ryan (SuperSummary) | $11.95 | Buy on Amazon |
| 4 |
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Buckeye: Roman | »Dieses Buch ist eine Wucht!« Christine Westermann, WDR (German Edition) | $23.99 | Buy on Amazon |
| 5 |
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Before Adam | $1.99 | Buy on Amazon |
Below are all 38 selections, in the order presented by Real Simple, with a guide to the premise and the kind of reader each book may suit.
The first 10 selections: historical fiction, relationships, ambition, and grief
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Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
This multidecade historical novel begins in fictional Bonhomie, Ohio, as World War II draws to a close. A spontaneous kiss between Cal Jenkins and Margaret Salt sets off a story about secrets, choices, and consequences that continue across decades. It is a strong starting point for readers who want a substantial historical family drama with a small-town setting.
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Buckeye by Patrick Ryan is Real Simple’s first-listed recommendation. Readers interested in purchasing it can use the title-level shopping option associated with the roundup; check the current format and price before ordering.
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Heart the Lover by Lily King
Lily King’s college-set relationship novel follows Jordan, Sam, and Yash through a love triangle whose effects reach far beyond their student years. The premise is less about a single romantic decision than about the long afterlife of youthful intimacy, regret, and self-invention.
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Little Movements by Lauren Morrow
Layla, a Black choreographer, leaves Brooklyn for an arts residency in Vermont. The move forces her to reconsider artistic ambition, race, identity, and her long-distance marriage. This is a fit for readers drawn to contemporary fiction about creative work and the pressure that personal and professional lives place on one another.
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Pick a Color by Souvankham Thammavongsa
This short novel centers on Ning, a retired boxer working in a nail salon. Over the course of one workday, Ning’s observations expose the class, racial, and social dynamics surrounding her—and the ways workers can become invisible to the people they serve. Its compact length makes it an appealing choice for readers who prefer precise, concentrated literary fiction.
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What a Time to Be Alive by Jade Chang
Jade Chang takes aim at wellness culture through Lola Treasure Gold, an unemployed woman who becomes an accidental internet celebrity and self-help influencer. The novel’s satire examines the business of reinvention, online attention, and the promise that the right lifestyle can solve every problem.
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All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert
Gilbert’s memoir explores her relationship with Rayya Elias, including addiction, codependency, grief, and recovery. The book incorporates poetry and drawings alongside the prose, making it a formally varied account of love and loss. Readers should expect emotionally difficult material rather than a conventional, neatly resolved recovery narrative.
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Amity by Nathan Harris
Set after the Civil War, this historical novel follows emancipated siblings separated between New Orleans and Mexico as they attempt to reunite. Their physical distance becomes part of a larger story about freedom, family, displacement, and the difficult realities of rebuilding a life after enslavement.
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The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy
Angela Flournoy follows five Black women whose friendship endures through adulthood and changing circumstances. The novel’s multidecade scope lets it explore how friendships evolve alongside work, family, geography, and private disappointment.
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Life, and Death, and Giants by Ron Rindo
Gabriel is an unusually large and gifted boy raised by Amish grandparents in Wisconsin. Real Simple describes this warm, humorous novel as a possible gift for a teen or tween, although adult readers interested in coming-of-age stories may also find its premise appealing.
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The Break-In by Katherine Faulkner
Alice kills an intruder in self-defense, but the act does not end the danger or the uncertainty. She becomes increasingly consumed by questions about who the intruder was and how the public will judge her. This psychological thriller is built around both physical threat and the unstable boundary between justified action, media scrutiny, and self-doubt.
Rank #2
Speculative fiction, survival, AI, and complicated families
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These Memories Do Not Belong to Us by Yiming Ma
In this dystopian debut, memory extraction is a tool of authoritarian control. A young man inherits an illegal archive of human memories, placing him in conflict with a system that treats personal recollection as something that can be confiscated and managed. It should appeal to readers who like speculative fiction grounded in questions of identity and political power.
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A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst
This narrative nonfiction account recounts Maurice and Maralyn Bailey’s 1972 survival ordeal after a whale destroyed their boat in the Pacific. Forced onto a small raft, the couple faced an extreme test of endurance and their relationship. It is a survival story, but also an examination of marriage under conditions in which ordinary privacy and comfort disappear.
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Culpability by Bruce Holsinger
Holsinger’s family drama begins with an AI-controlled self-driving car crash. From there, the central question becomes larger than who caused the accident: who is morally, legally, and emotionally responsible when human decisions are mediated by artificial intelligence? The book is suited to readers who want a domestic story with a contemporary technology dilemma at its center.
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Loved One by Aisha Muharrar
Julia travels to London after the unexpected death of her longtime love and best friend. The novel follows the destabilizing work of grief while asking what remains of a person’s identity when a central relationship suddenly ends.
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What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown
A teenage girl raised off the grid begins investigating her father’s past. Her search eventually leads her away from the isolated life she knows and toward San Francisco. The novel combines suspense with a coming-of-age story about secrecy, control, and the right to construct one’s own future.
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The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater
This adult historical novel is set in a West Virginia hotel during World War II. The staff are tasked with hosting captured Axis diplomats while an FBI agent searches for information. The unusual hotel setting creates a pressure cooker in which hospitality, surveillance, loyalty, and wartime fear overlap.
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My Friends by Fredrik Backman
An aspiring young artist becomes connected to the backstory of three teenagers depicted in a famous painting. Backman uses that connection to explore friendship, art, memory, and the ways a single image can preserve or distort the lives of the people it represents.
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Finding Grace by Loretta Rothschild
The novel opens with a family holiday in Paris and a consequential decision made by the father. From that starting point, it develops into a twist-driven domestic suspense story. Readers who prefer family secrets and revelations to police-procedural plotting may want to put this one high on their list.
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Flashlight by Susan Choi
A child disappears on the Japanese coast, beginning a multigenerational story about family, memory, and competing perspectives. The novel’s structure asks how an event changes as it is retold by different people and viewed across time.
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These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean
Estranged siblings are forced to compete for their father’s fortune in this romance built around an inheritance game. The setup combines romantic tension with family rivalry, making it a natural choice for readers who enjoy both relationship-driven plots and elaborate contests.
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Second chances, heritage, and the stories families inherit
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All the Men I’ve Loved Again by Christine Pride
Cora Belle is at the center of this coming-of-age and second-chance romance. Two former loves reenter her life decades later, prompting a reconsideration of old decisions, unfinished feelings, and the person she has become in the intervening years.
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Sleep by Honor Jones
A divorced mother returns to her childhood home and confronts a disturbing event from her past. The debut novel uses the return home as both a physical and psychological journey, with buried memories shaping the suspense.
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Speak to Me of Home by Jeanine Cummins
This multigenerational family novel connects Puerto Rico, New York, and the Midwest. Its central concerns include heritage, belonging, assimilation, and the competing meanings of home across generations and places.
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This Is Your Mother by Erika J. Simpson
Simpson’s memoir examines a complicated mother-daughter relationship alongside cancer and childhood memories. A major thread is the gradual process of seeing one’s parents as full, imperfect people rather than only through the limited role they occupy in a child’s life.
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Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle
A man experiences flavors associated with the dead, an ability he brings into New York’s restaurant world. The supernatural premise becomes a way to connect food, memory, mourning, and the traces people leave behind.
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The Pretender by Jo Harkin
Inspired by Lambert Simnel—the fifteenth-century boy briefly crowned king—this historical novel examines the political machinery surrounding his rise. It is a particularly good choice for readers interested in the intersection of royal spectacle, manipulation, and the vulnerability of a child used by adults pursuing power.
For readers choosing among the historical fiction on this list, The Pretender offers a very different experience from the post–Civil War setting of Amity or the World War II hotel in The Listeners: its focus is medieval political performance and the people who manufacture legitimacy.
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Heartwood by Amity Gaige
A hiker disappears on the Appalachian Trail, and the novel follows the officer searching for her as well as an older woman who follows the case. The multiple viewpoints create a wilderness-disappearance story that is also concerned with age, solitude, and the stories strangers construct around a missing person.
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The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue
Set on a French train and based on an actual disaster in 1895, this tense historical novel unfolds through multiple viewpoints. The shifting perspectives allow the catastrophe to be understood not as one person’s story, but as a network of experiences converging in a confined space.
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Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Perkins-Valdez draws inspiration from the Kingdom of the Happy Land, a nineteenth-century community founded by formerly enslaved people in western North Carolina. The novel brings a little-known historical community into focus while exploring the meaning of freedom, self-government, and belonging.
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Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett
An estranged mother and son are forced to confront their unresolved history when the son becomes involved in an asylum case concerning a young Albanian man. The family story therefore intersects with questions about displacement, responsibility, and the moral demands of helping someone whose future depends on a legal decision.
Immigration, short stories, crime, and family fortunes
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Homeseeking by Karissa Chen
Former sweethearts are separated in China in 1947 and meet again decades later in Los Angeles. This sweeping immigrant and reunion novel follows the emotional and historical distance between those two moments, asking what survives separation and what changes beyond recovery.
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People of Means by Nancy Johnson
The novel moves between a 1959 Fisk University student drawn into the Civil Rights Movement and her daughter’s professional and ethical crisis in 1992. Its dual timeline connects political history with family inheritance, showing how choices made in one generation can shape the dilemmas faced by the next.
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Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld
This short-story collection focuses on ordinary, flawed women navigating divorce, ambition, friendship, and adulthood. One story revisits Lee Fiora from Sittenfeld’s Prep, while the collection as a whole stays interested in the awkward, consequential details of everyday life. It is the clearest selection here for readers who prefer linked or standalone short fiction to a single long narrative.
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Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney
A wife disappears, leaving her husband on a remote Scottish island. Then a woman appears who looks identical to the missing spouse. The setup places psychological suspense, isolation, identity, and marital uncertainty in the same claustrophobic landscape.
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Boat Baby by Vicky Nguyen
Nguyen’s memoir recounts her family’s escape from Communist Vietnam by sea in 1979 and follows her later life in the United States. It connects a dangerous journey with the longer story of resettlement, family memory, and growing up between histories.
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All the Other Mothers Hate Me by Sarah Harman
A struggling former musician tries to clear her son after his school bully disappears. The result is a comic mystery rooted in school-parent dynamics, social judgment, and the desperate lengths a parent may go to protect a child.
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The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie
Babs Dionne is a Maine grandmother who runs a drug operation while dealing with family crises and a rival threat. This darkly comic crime saga turns an unlikely criminal matriarch into the center of a story about loyalty, violence, aging, and the obligations of family.
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The Family Recipe by Carolyn Huynh
A Vietnamese American sandwich-shop owner creates a competition among his adult children over the future of his fortune. The family and immigrant saga uses food, inheritance, sibling rivalry, and competing ideas of success to examine what a parent can—and cannot—pass on.
How to choose your next book from the list
| If you want… | Start with… |
|---|---|
| A sweeping historical or immigrant story | Buckeye, Amity, Homeseeking, Happy Land, or Boat Baby |
| Psychological suspense | The Break-In, Finding Grace, Sleep, Heartwood, or Beautiful Ugly |
| A family-centered novel | The Wilderness, Flashlight, Mothers and Sons, or The Family Recipe |
| Romance and second chances | Heart the Lover, These Summer Storms, or All the Men I’ve Loved Again |
| Memoir or narrative nonfiction | All the Way to the River, A Marriage at Sea, This Is Your Mother, or Boat Baby |
| A speculative or supernatural premise | These Memories Do Not Belong to Us, Culpability, or Aftertaste |
| A shorter literary experience | Pick a Color or Show Don’t Tell |
| Dark or comic crime | All the Other Mothers Hate Me or The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne |
What “best” means in this roundup
Real Simple presents these as books its editors enjoyed most among the 2025 releases they considered—not as books proven superior through a shared scoring system. The source does not describe standardized testing, a comparative ranking methodology, sales-based selection, or a panel-wide rating. That distinction matters: the roundup is useful as a curated discovery list, but readers should not interpret its order as a definitive hierarchy.
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Shopping disclosure: If you purchase a book through an eligible retailer link on this page, the site may earn a commission. Prices, availability, and editions can change.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Real Simple objectively rank these 38 books?
No. Real Simple describes the selections as books its editors enjoyed most. The article does not provide a standardized scoring system, comparative testing protocol, or formal ranking methodology, so the list is best understood as an editorial recommendation roundup.
How many books are on Real Simple’s 2025 list?
The roundup contains 38 titles, including novels, memoirs, narrative nonfiction, and a short-story collection.
When was Real Simple’s 2025 book list updated?
The version summarized here was updated September 16, 2025. Real Simple notes that the page may be updated during the year, so check the source page for the latest version.
Which book should I start with?
For a broad historical family saga, start with Buckeye by Patrick Ryan, the first-listed title. Readers who prefer thrillers might begin with The Break-In or Beautiful Ugly; readers seeking memoir can try A Marriage at Sea or Boat Baby.
The Bottom Line
Real Simple’s 38-book roundup is best used as a wide-ranging discovery guide, not an objective league table. Begin with the genre that matches your mood—historical fiction, suspense, romance, memoir, speculative fiction, or family drama—and confirm the original page for any updates made after September 16, 2025.
Quick Recap
Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.
