Spring is in the air and we have so many new books releases to look forward to along with the new season!!
My recommendations for the best books to read Spring 2025 include recently published or soon to be published contemporary fiction, historical fiction, romance, suspense and non-fiction that I have already read or that are on my TBR for this spring.
Happy spring reading!!
Note: I read across a lot of genres and I only choose books that I have already read or plan to read over the coming weeks for my book lists. If I haven’t yet read the book when I publish the book list then I include the blurb provided by the publisher and update the article with my own thoughts after I read it. Some of the buzziest books of the season are on my lists but I hope I also introduce you to some titles that you might not have heard of otherwise.
You Might Also Enjoy Reading:
21 of the Best Books To Read This Spring (2024)
21 of the Best New Books To Read Spring 2023
30 of the Best New Books To Read Spring 2022
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1. Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
Setting: Fictional island
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
FROM THE PUBLISHER: Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: To write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years—or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be the Margaret Ives. Tragic heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the 20th Century.
When Margaret invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person who’ll tell her story, there are three things keeping Alice’s head in the game.
One: Alice genuinely likes people, which means people usually like Alice—and she has a whole month to win the legendary woman over.
Two: She’s ready for this job and the chance to impress her perennially unimpressed family with a Serious Publication.
Three: Hayden Anderson, who should have no reason to be concerned about losing this book, is glowering at her in a shaken-to-the core way that suggests he sees her as competition.
But the problem is, Margaret is only giving each of them pieces of her story. Pieces they can’t swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning pulsing between them every time they’re in the same room.
And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story—just like the tale Margaret’s spinning—could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad…depending on who’s telling it.
2. The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue
Setting: A Paris-bound train
Publication Date: March 18, 2025
FROM THE PUBLISHER: Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Members of parliament hurry back to Paris to vote; a medical student suspects a girl may be dying; a secretary tries to convince her boss of the potential of moving pictures; two of the train’s crew build a life away from their wives; a young anarchist makes a terrifying plan, and much more.
3. Audition by Katie Kitamura
Setting: New York City
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
FROM THE PUBLISHER: Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
4. Swept Away by Beth O’Leary
Setting: On a houseboat lost at sea
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
FROM THE PUBLISHER: What if you were lost at sea…with your one-night stand?
Zeke and Lexi thought it would just be a night of fun. They had no intentions of seeing each other again. Zeke is only in town for the weekend to buy back his late father’s houseboat. Lexi has no time for dating when she needs to help take care of her best friend’s daughter.
Going back home with a stranger seems like a perfect escape from their problems. But a miscommunication in the dark, foggy night means no one tied the houseboat to the dock. The next morning, Zeke and Lexi realize all they can see is miles and miles of water.
With just a few provisions on the idle boat, Zeke and Lexi must figure out how to get back home. But aside from their survival, they’re facing another challenge. Because when you’re stuck together for days on end, it gives you a lot of time to get to know someone—and to fall in love with them.
5. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Setting: United States and Nigeria
FROM THE PUBLISHER: Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.
6. On Isabella Street by Genevieve Graham
Setting: Toronto and Vietnam
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
FROM THE PUBLISHER: Toronto, 1967. Two young women with different backgrounds, attitudes, and aptitudes are living in an exciting but confusing time, the most extreme counter-culture movement the modern world has ever seen. They have little in common except for the place they both call home: an apartment building on Isabella Street.
Marion Hart, a psychiatrist working in Toronto’s foremost mental institution, is fighting deinstitutionalization—the closing of major institutions in favour of community-based centres—because she believes it could one day cause major homelessness. When Daniel Neumann, a veteran with a debilitating wound, is admitted to the mental institution, Marion will learn through him that there is so much more to life than what she is living.
Sassy Rankin, a budding folk singer and carefree hippy from a privileged family, joins protests over the Vietnam War and is devastated that her brother chose to join the US Marines. At the same time, she must deal with the truth that her comfortable life is financed by her father, a real estate magnate bent on gentrifying the city, making it unaffordable for many of her friends.
The strength of their unlikely friendship means that when one grapples with a catastrophic event, the other must do all she can to make it right.
7. These Days by Lucy Caldwell
Setting: Belfast
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
FROM THE PUBLISHER: April 1941: Belfast has escaped the worst of the Second World War—so far. Over the next two months, it will be so destroyed from above that people will say, in horror, “My God, Belfast is finished.” Many won’t make it through, and those who do will be forever changed.
Living amid the rubble are sisters Emma and Audrey. One is engaged to be married; the other is in a secret relationship with another woman. As the bombs fall, and tomorrow feels further and further away, these young women must grapple with the cultural expectations standing firm around them, and try to seize control of their destinies. After all, Emma thinks, if one is to survive, one must survive for something.
Thank you to NetGalley and Zando Publishing for sending a digital ARC of this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
8. Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt
Setting: Remote village in the north of England
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
FROM THE PUBLISHER: James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in.
He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his reach: autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him “like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre,” drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke’s bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.
Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for sending an ARC of this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
9. Heartwood by Amity Gaige
Setting: The Appalachian Trail in Maine, Connecticut
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
FROM THE PUBLISHER: In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.
At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.
10. The Women on Platform Two by Laura Anthony
Setting: Dublin, Ireland
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
FROM THE PUBLISHER: Dublin, 1969: Maura has just married Dr. Christy Davenport and they look forward to growing their family. But as her husband’s vicious temper emerges, Maura worries that her home might never be safe for a child. Meanwhile, her close friend Bernie, a mother of three, learns the devastating news that if she conceives again, her health complications could prove fatal.
Dublin, 2023: A close call makes Saoirse realize that she may never want to be a mother. Little does she know that only a few decades ago, a group of women made this option possible for her. And she’s about to meet one of them…
11. The Amalfi Curse by Sarah Penner
Setting: Positano, Italy
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
In this dual timeline novel, nautical archaeologist Haven Ambrose has arrived in Positano ahead of her all-female ‘Project Relic’ team to investigate mysterious shipwrecks along the Amalfi Coast but she is also on a secret quest to find the precious gemstones that her late father had discovered on his final dive. Haven’s plans, however, are soon interrupted as misfortune plagues Positano with scientists obtaining strange readings from the ocean waters, a luxury yacht sinking in calm waters, and mounting fear that Mount Vesuvius could erupt.
With plans on hold, Haven turns to conducting research in the local archives on early 19th century shipwrecks in the region where she learns the story of one 19th century woman and the legendary art of stregheria and can’t help but wonder if the Amalfi Curse is behind the bad fortune that Positano is experiencing.
In the 1821 timeline, Mari DeLuca is one of a group of stregha (sea witches) that use their ability to harness the power of the sea to protect Positano from pirates and keep the fisherman safe and prosperous. Mari, however, feels burdened by these powers and longs to escape the coast with her secret lover but a looming threat may force Mari to choose between love and safeguarding the village.
This was a fast, entertaining read that combines magical realism, historical fiction, mystery and romance in a stunning setting. The well-written, enchanting story about powerful women grabbed me from the first chapter and I was captivated by both timelines with a slight preference for Mari’s. Magical realism can be hit or miss for me but I really enjoyed this and will likely now read the author’s previous books.
Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin Trade Publishing for sending a digital ARC of this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
12. Tilt by Emma Pattee
Setting: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
FROM THE PUBLISHER: Last night, you and I were safe. Last night, in another universe, your father and I stood fighting in the kitchen.
Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.
Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. If she can just make it home, she’s determined to change her life.
13. Passion Project by London Sperry
Setting: New York City
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
FROM THE PUBLISHER: If your twenties are supposed to be the best years of your life, Bennet Taylor is failing miserably . . . with a big emphasis on the miserable. Where’s that zest she keeps hearing about? She’s a temp worker in New York City with no direction, no future, and no social life. And at the painful center of this listlessness is grief over the death of her first love.
When Bennet runs into Henry Adams just hours after standing him up for a first date, she makes an alcohol-fueled confession: She’s not ready to date. In fact, it’s been years since she felt passion for something. Not even pottery, or organized sports—not anything. Rather than leaving her to ruminate, Henry jumps at the opportunity for adventure: Bennet needs to find a passion for life, and Henry will help her find it. Every Saturday, they’ll try something new in New York City. As friends, of course.
As their “passion project” continues, the pair tackle everything from carpentry to tattooing to rappelling off skyscrapers, and Bennet feels her guarded exterior ebbing away. But as secrets surface, Bennet has to decide what she wants, and if she’s truly ready to move on. With emotional resonance and sparkling banter, Passion Project is a fun, flirty, thoughtful story of finding a spark—and igniting happiness.
14. The Story She Left Behind by Patti Callahan Henry
Setting: South Carolina, London and the Lake District, England
Publication Date: March 18, 2025
FROM THE PUBLISHER: In 1927, eight-year-old Clara Harrington’s magical childhood shatters when her mother, renowned author, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, disappears off the coast of South Carolina. Bronwyn stunned the world with a book written in an invented language that became a national sensation when she was just twelve years old. Her departure leaves behind not only a devoted husband and heartbroken daughter, but also the hope of ever translating the sequel to her landmark work. As the headlines focus on the missing author, Clara yearns for something far deeper and more insatiable: her beautiful mother.
By 1952, Clara is an illustrator raising her own daughter, Wynnie. When a stranger named Charlie Jameson contacts her from London claiming to have discovered a handwritten dictionary of her mother’s lost language. Clara is skeptical. Compelled by the tragedy of her mother’s vanishing, she crosses the Atlantic with Wynnie only to arrive during one of London’s most deadly natural disasters—the Great Smog. With asthmatic Wynnie in peril, they escape the city with Charlie and find refuge in the Jameson’s family retreat nestled in the Lake District. It is there that Clara must find the courage to uncover the truth about her mother and the story she left behind.
Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for sending a digital ARC of this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
15. Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake
Setting: United States
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
FROM THE PUBLISHER: Where there’s a will, there’s a war.
Thayer Wren, the brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech and so-called father of modern technology, is dead. Any one of his three telepathically and electrokinetically gifted children would be a plausible inheritor to the Wrenfare throne.
Or at least, so they like to think.
Meredith, textbook accomplished eldest daughter and the head of her own groundbreaking biotech company, has recently cured mental illness. You’re welcome! If only her father’s fortune wasn’t her last hope for keeping her journalist ex-boyfriend from exposing what she really is: a total fraud.
Arthur, second-youngest congressman in history, fights the good fight every day of his life. And yet, his wife might be leaving him, and he’s losing his re-election campaign. But his dead father’s approval in the form of a seat on the Wrenfare throne might just turn his sinking ship around.
Eilidh, once the world’s most famous ballerina, has spent the last five years as a run-of-the-mill marketing executive at her father’s company after a life-altering injury put an end to her prodigious career. She might be lacking in accolades compared to her siblings, but if her father left her everything, it would finally validate her worth―by confirming she’d been his favorite all along.
On the pipeline of gifted kid to clinically depressed adult, nobody wins―but which Wren will come out on top?
16. Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Setting: Tanzania
Publication Date: March 18, 2025
At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, bringing, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.
17. Zeal by Morgan Jerkins
Setting: Harlem, NYC; Mississippi; Louisiana
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
FROM THE PUBLISHER: Harlem, 2019. Ardelia and Oliver are hosting their engagement party. As the guests get ready to leave, he hands her a love letter on a yellowing, crumbling piece of paper .
Natchez, 1865. Discharged from the Union Army as a free man after the war’s end, Harrison returns to Mississippi to reunite with the woman he loves, Tirzah. Upon his arrival at the Freedmen’s Bureau, though, he catches the eye of a woman working there, who’s determined to thwart his efforts to find his beloved. After tragedy strikes, Harrison resigns himself to a life with her.
Meanwhile in Louisiana, the newly free Tirzah is teaching at a freedmen’s school, and discovers an advertisement in the local paper looking for her. Though she knows Harrison must have placed it, and longs to find him, the risks of fleeing are too great, and Tirzah chooses the life of seeming security right in front of her.
Spanning over a hundred and fifty years, Morgan Jerkins’s extraordinary novel intertwines the stories of these star-crossed lovers and their descendants. As Tirzah’s family moves across the country during the Great Migration, they challenge authority with devastating consequences, while of the legacy of heartbreak and loss continues on in the lives of Harrison’s progeny.
When Ardelia meets Oliver, she finds his family’s history is as full of secrets and omissions as her own. Could their connection be a cosmic reconciliation satisfying the unfulfilled desires of their ancestors, or will the weight of the past, present and future tear them apart?
18. The Boy From the Sea by Garrett Carr
Setting: Ireland’s West Coast
Publication Date: April 15, 2025 in Canada, May 13, 2025 in the US
FROM THE PUBLISHER: Ireland 1973, a baby boy is found on the beach of a close-knit fishing village. Fisherman Ambrose Bonnar offers to bring the child into his own family: his son, Declan, wife, Christine, and up the lane, Christine’s sister and aging father. The townspeople remain fascinated by the baby, now named Brendan, as he grows into a strange yet charismatic young man.
The Boy from the Sea tells the story of a family and community, all thrown into turmoil by Brendan’s arrival. The family’s fortunes rise and fall over the years—as do the town’s, because nothing happens to one family here that doesn’t happen to them all—as the forces of a voracious global economy and modernized commercial fishing wreak havoc on their way of life. In the village, Brendan and Declan are wildly different and often wildly at odds; out on the sea, Ambrose worries about his children, but cannot afford to tear his attention from the brutal work that keeps his family afloat. As the world around them keeps changing, the mystery of one boy’s origins pulls them all toward a surprising, stormy fate.
Both outrageously funny and incredibly moving, The Boy from the Sea is a dazzling novel from a major new voice in Irish literature.
19. Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein
Setting: London, England
FROM THE PUBLISHER: Long before Oliver Twist stumbled onto the scene, Jacob Fagin was scratching out a life for himself in the dark alleys of nineteenth-century London. Born in the Jewish enclave of Stepney shortly after his father was executed as a thief, Jacob’s whole world is his open-minded mother, Leah. But Jacob’s prospects are forever altered when a light-fingered pickpocket takes Jacob under his wing and teaches him a trade that pays far better than the neighborhood boys could possibly dream.
Striking out on his own, Jacob familiarizes himself with London’s highest value neighborhoods while forging his own path in the shadows. But everything changes when he adopts an aspiring teenage thief named Bill Sikes, whose mercurial temper poses a danger to himself and anyone foolish enough to cross him. Along the way, Jacob’s found family expands to include his closest friend, Nancy, and his greatest protégé, the Artful Dodger. But as Bill’s ambition soars and a major robbery goes awry, Jacob is forced to decide what he really stands for—and what a life is worth.
Colorfully written and wickedly funny, Allison Epstein breathes fresh life into the teeming streets of Dickensian London–reclaiming one of Victorian literature’s most notorious villains in an unforgettable new adventure.
20. On the Hippie Trail by Rick Steves
FROM THE PUBLISHER: In the 1970s, the ultimate trip for any backpacker was the storied “Hippie Trail” from Istanbul to Kathmandu. A 23-year old Rick Steves made the trek, and like a travel writer in training, he documented everything along the way: jumping off a moving train, making friends in Tehran, getting lost in Lahore, getting high for the first time in Herat, battling leeches in Pokhara, and much more. The experience ignited his love of travel and forever broadened his perspective on the world.
This book contains edited selections from Rick’s journal and travel photos with a 45-years-later preface and postscript reflecting on how the journey changed his life. Stow away with Rick Steves on the adventure of a lifetime through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal.
You know Rick Steves. Now discover the adventure that made him the travel writer he is today.
21. Death on the Island by Eliza Reid
Setting: Village off the coast of Iceland
Publication Date: April 29, 2025 (Canada) and May 13, 2024 (USA)
A group of international players has gathered in a tiny village off the coast of Iceland for a diplomatic dinner. There’s Kristján, the mayor reeling from a personal tragedy. Graeme, the ambassador with an agenda to push. Jane, his wife, along for the ride on another one of her husband’s many business trips. And several others, from Iceland and from abroad, each with their own reason for being there, their own loyalties and grievances. By the end of the night, one of them will be dead. And it will be up to the ambassador’s wife, Jane, to figure out how―and why.
What Jane soon comes to realize is that small communities can be the most dangerous of them all… and no one in their group is safe. With secrets around every corner and violent weather trapping the finite list of suspects together on the island, this locked-room mystery by internationally bestselling author Eliza Reid brings Agatha Christie and Nordic noir together in a brand-new twist.
Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster Canada for sending a digital ARC of this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
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