With more than 200 fiction titles in NPR’s annual Books We Love guide, it’s tough to narrow our 2025 favorites down into one single-digit list. But there are always a few standouts, and in the picks below you’ll find a little bit of everything that we enjoyed this year: romance, fantasy and sci-fi, oh my!

Curious about the rest of our fiction recommendations? Head to the full Books We Love site to browse hundreds of selections from 2025, and thousands from years past.

(Ballantine Books)

Atmosphere, Taylor Jenkins Reid

Fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid will agree that Atmosphere is one of her best books yet. This thrilling fictional portrayal of NASA’s space shuttle program in the 1980s doesn’t miss.

It opens with Joan in Mission Control managing a catastrophe on the shuttle. Then reade

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