Top 113 Books Released in June 2025

Some months feel ordinary, quietly turning the pages of a calendar. But June 2025? It cracked the sky open and rained down stories that refused to be forgotten. This wasn’t just another cycle of book releases, it was a surge of emotion, invention, heartbreak, and healing. A month where thrillers made our hearts pound, romances left us breathless, and quiet literary tales pulled us under like a tide. From bestselling authors delivering long-awaited masterpieces to stunning debuts that announced bold new voices, June 2025 proved that books are still the best way to understand ourselves, and escape ourselves all at once.

But this isn’t just a list of titles.

These are books that whisper when the world gets too loud. Books that roar when silence isn’t enough. Books that twist your stomach, break your heart, or make you laugh out loud in public.

In the list below, you won’t find recycled blurbs or generic summaries. Each entry opens like a story in itself, with mood, with emotion, with voice. It’s your guide not just to what was released, but what resonated.

So whether you’re building your next TBR stack, curating a summer reading list, or just chasing that rare feeling of wow, this one’s going to stay with me, these are the 113 unforgettable books that made June 2025 a month worth remembering.

Featured Book Releases of June 2025

Death Row by Freida McFadden

Genre: Psychological Thriller

Layered, lyrical, and alive with tension.

Death Row begins like a half-remembered dream, vivid, fragile, and impossible to ignore. With all hope of an appeal fading away, the fate of a condemned murderess takes a shocking turn in a breathtaking short story. Talia Kemper is on death row for murdering her husband. She had an alibi and no known motive, yet Talia’s unwavering protestations of innocence have always been ignored.

Then one day in the visiting area, she sees a recognizable stranger she’s certain is her husband. It turns out the man she’s been convicted of killing may not be dead after all. But as the days tick away toward Talia’s execution, what will it take for her to be believed?

Freida McFadden’s Death Row is part of Alibis, a collection of stories about lies, truth, and deception. It’s just a matter of what you can get away with. They can be read or listened to in one sitting. Among the most talked-about books released in June 2025, this one demands attention.

It has a strong claim to being one of the best books of June 2025.

No Lie Lasts Forever by Mark  Stevens

Genre: General Fiction

The kind of novel that changes how you see things.

Sometimes the quietest moments echo the loudest, and in No Lie Lasts Forever, Mark  Stevens captures them with grace. Zodiac with a terrifying twist, in a taut thriller from author Mark Stevens about a reformed serial killer and the disgraced journalist he coaxes into finding the imposter trading on his name.

When a reporter dies in a shockingly familiar way, the media rushes to announce the return of the PDQ Killer. The city of Denver reels, but no one more than Harry Kugel. After all, he is the PDQ Killer, or was fifteen years ago. And he didn’t do this. Still working to reform his ways, Harry won’t let some amateur murderer ride his twisted coattails and risk drawing the police back his way.

To protect his legacy and quiet new life, he’ll have to expose the copycat. Without exposing himself. Disgraced TV journalist Flynn Martin holds the key. After a botched hostage situation, she’ll do anything to revive her dying career, even hunt down a… A top contender in the literary highlights of June 2025.

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Genre: Historical Fiction & LGBTQ+ Romance

The kind of novel that changes how you see things.

The pages of Atmosphere rustle with secrets, each chapter pulling you deeper under its spell. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six comes an epic new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s Space Shuttle program about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center,… If you’re browsing June 2025 reading lists, don’t overlook this title.

The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater

Genre: General Fiction

Layered, lyrical, and alive with tension.

If stillness could speak, it would sound like the opening lines of The Listeners. #1 New York Times bestselling novelist Maggie Stiefvater dazzles in this mesmerizing portrait of an irresistible heroine, an unlikely romance, and a hotel, and a world, in peril.

January 1942. The Avallon Hotel & Spa has always offered elegant luxury in the wilds of West Virginia, its mountain sweetwater washing away all of high society’s troubles.

Local girl-turned-general manager June Porter Hudson has guided the Avallon skillfully through the first pangs of war. The Gilfoyles, the hotel’s aristocratic owners, have trained her well. But when the family heir makes a secret deal with the State Department to fill the hotel with captured Axis diplomats, June must persuade her staff, many of whom have sons and husbands heading to the front lines, to offer luxury to Nazis. With a smile. Meanwhile FBI Agent Tucker Minnick, whose coal tattoo hints at an Appalachian past, presses his ears to the hotel’s walls,… One of the defining releases of the June 2025 book cycle.

The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark

Genre: Psychological Thriller

It reaches into your chest and doesn’t let go.

There’s thunder in the silence of The Ghostwriter, a novel where everything unsaid becomes everything urgent. June, 1975. The Taylor family shatters in a single night when two teenage siblings are found dead in their own home. The only surviving sibling, Vincent, never shakes the whispers and accusations that he was the one who killed them. Decades later, the legend only grows as his career as a horror writer skyrockets. Ghostwriter Olivia Dumont has spent her entire professional life hiding the fact that she is the only child of Vincent Taylor. Now on the brink of financial ruin, she’s offered a job to ghostwrite her father’s last book.

What she doesn’t know, though, is that this project is another one of his lies. Because it’s not another horror novel he wants her to write. After fifty years of silence, Vincent Taylor is finally ready to talk about what really happened that night in 1975. This novel is why readers will remember June 2025.

June 2025 packed its shelves with strong books, and this one holds its own.

Battle of the Bookstores by Ali Brady

Genre: General Fiction

For readers who crave emotion as much as plot.

Ali Brady paints with emotion in Battle of the Bookstores, a novel that begins where most stories end. Rivalry and romance spark when two bookstore managers who are opposites in every way find themselves competing for the same promotion. Despite managing bookstores on the same Boston street, Josie Klein and Ryan Lawson have never interacted much, Josie’s store focuses on serious literature, and Ryan’s sells romance only. But when the new owner of both stores decides to combine them, the two are thrust into direct competition. Only one manager will be left standing, decided by who turns the most profit over the summer.

Efficient and detail-oriented Josie instantly clashes with easygoing and disorganized Ryan. Their competing events and contrasting styles lead to more than just frustration, the sparks between them might just set the whole store on fire. Their only solace during this chaos is the friendship they’ve each struck up with an anonymous friend in an online book forum. Little do they know they’re… A new June 2025 release that blends storytelling and emotion brilliantly.

A Family Matter by Claire Lynch

Genre: General Fiction

Layered, lyrical, and alive with tension.

In a world of noise, A Family Matter whispers its way into your heart and stays there. An exquisite and revelatory debut novel about the devastating consequences of one woman’s affair. 1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter. 2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down.

He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child, the person around whom his life has revolved, seems impossible. Heron can’t tell her about his diagnosis, just as he can’t reveal all the other secrets he’s been keeping from her for so many years. A Family Matter is a heartbreaking and hopeful exploration… Perfect for fans of the best books of June 2025.

What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown

Genre: General Fiction

It reaches into your chest and doesn’t let go.

The rhythm of longing, the weight of memory, What Kind of Paradise is stitched together with both. A teenage girl breaks free from her father’s world of isolation in this exhilarating novel of family, identity, and the power we have to shape our own destinies, from the New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Things and Watch Me Disappear The first thing you have to understand is that my father was my entire world.

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence existence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the… This story adds depth to the most moving June 2025 books.

Heir of Storms by Lauryn Hamilton Murray

Genre: General Fiction

An emotional knockout wrapped in beautiful prose.

No book asks for your attention more gently, or holds it more fiercely, than Heir of Storms. RED QUEEN meets SHADOW AND BONE in this explosive start to a YA romantasy trilogy about dangerous magic, forbidden love, and a cut-throat competition for the throne in an empire where crowns are not inherited — they’re won. The very day Blaze came into the world, she almost drowned it. A Rain Singer born into one of the most powerful fire-wielding families in the empire, Blaze’s birth summoned a devastating storm that left thousands dead.

She’s been hidden away ever since with a dark secret: the same torrential power that branded her an outcast disappeared that fateful day. And she’s not sure she wants it back. When an unexpected invitation arrives for Blaze and her twin brother, Flint, to compete as future rulers of the empire, she’s suddenly thrust into the limelight again — and into battle. Threats abound at the Golden Palace, where intrigue… An essential part of any June 2025 reading list.

Few books of June 2025 arrived with more anticipation.

Till Summer Do Us Part by Meghan Quinn

Genre: General Fiction

Layered, lyrical, and alive with tension.

To open Till Summer Do Us Part is to tumble into a mood, a moment, a murmur you won’t forget. I got what I wanted. I became buddy-buddy with my boss in an instant. But the cost will be hefty . . . finding a husband by tomorrow. Scottie Price just started a new job, and it’s a real sausage fest. She’s the only woman on a team filled with Brads and Chads. Expecting a bachelor pad atmosphere, she is quickly corrected when she finds out everyone is happily married. In an effort to impress her boss, Scottie mentions her non-existent husband in a company meeting.

But eagle-eyed Chad points out her lack of wedding ring. Panicked, Scottie creates a story about her unhappy marriage. Unfortunately for Scottie, her boss has a solution – a one-on-one session with the best marriage counsellor in the Northeast, who happens to be her boss’s husband. With no way out of her lie, Scottie agrees to see him. Frantic,… Belongs on every shelf featuring notable books from June 2025.

We Don’t Talk About Carol by Kristen L. Berry

Genre: General Fiction

The kind of novel that changes how you see things.

We Don’t Talk About Carol begins like a half-remembered dream, vivid, fragile, and impossible to ignore. A dedicated journalist unearths a generations-old family secret, and a connection to a string of missing girls that hits way too close to home, in this gripping debut novel. In the wake of her grandmother’s passing, Sydney Singleton finds a hidden photograph of a little girl who looks more like Sydney than her own sister, or mother. She soon discovers the mystery girl in the photograph is her aunt, Carol, who was one of six local North Carolina Black girls to go missing in the 1960s.

For the last several decades, not a soul has talked about Carol or what really happened to her. With her grandmother gone and Sydney looking to start a family of her own, she is determined to unravel the truth behind her long-lost aunt and the sinister silence surrounding her. Unfortunately, this is familiar territory for Sydney. Several years prior, working the… Part of what made June 2025 an exceptional month for fiction.

Worth Fighting For by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Genre: General Fiction

A tender, thrilling, and entirely human story.

Sometimes the quietest moments echo the loudest, and in Worth Fighting For, Jesse Q. Sutanto captures them with grace. Laugh and swoon with the next book in Disney’s Meant to Be collection by bestselling and award-winning author Jesse Q. Sutanto, whose novel Dial A For Aunties Emily Henry called “Utterly clever, deeply funny, and altogether charming.” Mulan is reimagined as a contemporary romance about family expectations, mistaken identity, and high stakes mergers, of both business and the heart.

As the right hand of her father’s hedge fund company, Fa Mulan knows what it takes to succeed as a woman in a man’s work twice as hard, be twice as smart, and burp twice as loud as any of the other finance bros she works with. So when her father unexpectedly falls ill in the middle of a critical acquisition, she is determined to see it through. There’s just one the family company in question is known for its ultra masculine whiskey brand, and the brood… This tale shaped the landscape of June 2025 literature.

So Happy Together by Olivia Worley

Genre: General Fiction

A tender, thrilling, and entirely human story.

The pages of So Happy Together rustle with secrets, each chapter pulling you deeper under its spell. Jane and Colin are soulmates. He just doesn’t know it yet. For twenty-four-year-old Jane, finding love in New York City is even harder than making it as a playwright, especially when all her swiping through the apps leads to one meaningless connection after another. So when Jane meets Colin, a sweet software engineer, she can’t believe her luck: they’re perfect for each other. Even when Colin breaks off their blooming relationship after six dates, Jane is certain this is just a stumbling block. She’ll get him back. She knows she will.

That is, until Colin starts dating Zoe, perfect, luminous, up-and-coming Brooklyn artist Zoe. Even worse, she’s actually kind of nice. But Zoe doesn’t have what it takes to love Colin. She’d never stay with him through thick and thin. All Jane has to do is prove it, and they’ll be so happy together. But when Jane… Its release helped define June 2025 in books.

Put it high on your list of June 2025 books to catch up on.

Flashlight by Susan Choi

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

If stillness could speak, it would sound like the opening lines of Flashlight. A novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise. One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone, presumed drowned. She is ten years old. In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi’s Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe.

Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless… Standing strong among the most compelling June 2025 stories.

The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

There’s thunder in the silence of The Phoenix Pencil Company, a novel where everything unsaid becomes everything urgent. A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK! In this dazzling debut novel, a hidden and nearly forgotten magic, of Reforging pencils, bringing the memories they contain back to life, holds the power to transform a young woman’s relationship with her grandmother, and to mend long-lost connections across time and space. Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer, journaling the details of her ordinary life and coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online.

A self-proclaimed recluse, she’s always struggled to make friends and, as a college freshman, finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. They are now in their nineties, and Monica worries about them constantly, especially her grandmother, Yun, who survived two wars in China before coming to the States, and whose memory has begun to fade. Though Yun rarely speaks of her past,… Ranks high among top June 2025 book releases.

Sister, Butcher, Sister by K.D. Aldyn

Genre: General Fiction

An emotional knockout wrapped in beautiful prose.

K.D. Aldyn paints with emotion in Sister, Butcher, Sister, a novel that begins where most stories end. The chilling prose of Karin Slaughter meets the high-stakes plotting of <em>The Butcher and the Wren</em> in a dark debut following three normal sisters, their own forgotten traumas, and the serial killer that lives within one, begging the question can you ever truly recognize the evil around you? <em>Three sisters. One killer. Which one is SHE?</em> The Rowling sisters have always been people you can understand – with partners and children, homes and dreams. And secrets, the sisters have those too.

But when Kate, the eldest, finally returns to buy her late grandfather’s home, the dark things each sister has kept buried soon rise to the surface. Is Kate having unexplained visions tied to a past she can hardly recall? What about Aurora, the married mother of two, finally acting out in the face of her sisters’ indiscretions? And is Peggy, the youngest, newly in recovery,… This one added heart to the June 2025 lineup.

Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

In a world of noise, Notes on Infinity whispers its way into your heart and stays there. Harvard students Zoe and Jack find themselves propelled into the intoxicating biotech startup world when they announce they’ve discovered the cure for ageing. Zoe, the daughter of an MIT professor who grew up in her brother’s shadow, can envision her future anew at Harvard University. Jack, a boy in Zoe’s organic chemistry class with unruly hair and a gleam of competitiveness, matches her intellect and curiosity with every breath.

When Jack refers Zoe for a position in a prestigious professor’s lab, the two become entwined as colleagues, staying up late to discuss scientific ideas. They find themselves on the cusp of a breakthrough: the promise of immortality through a novel anti-ageing drug. Zoe and Jack set off on their new project in secret. Finding encouraging results, they bring their work to an investor, drop out of Harvard, and form a startup. But after the money,… A standout in the June 2025 new release crowd.

Among the books released in June 2025, this one rewards patience most.

The Other Side of Now by Paige Harbison

Genre: General Fiction

For readers who crave emotion as much as plot.

The rhythm of longing, the weight of memory, The Other Side of Now is stitched together with both. A hilarious and heartfelt novel about how loves and lives are never truly lost, for fans of Rebecca Serle and Taylor Jenkins Reid. With a leading role on a hit TV show and a relationship with Hollywood’s latest heartthrob, Meg Bryan appears to have everything she ever wanted. But underneath the layers of makeup and hairspray, her happiness is as fake as her stage name, Lana Lord. Following a small breakdown at her thirtieth birthday party, she books an impromptu trip where she knows the grass is greener: Ireland.

Specifically, the quaint little village where she and her best friend Aimee always dreamt of moving, a dream that fell apart when an accident claimed Aimee’s life a decade ago. When Meg arrives, the people in town are so nice, treating her not as a stranger, but a friend. Except for the (extremely hot) bartender giving her… This June 2025 book deserves more than just a glance.

Never Thought I’d End Up Here by Ann Liang

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

No book asks for your attention more gently, or holds it more fiercely, than Never Thought I’d End Up Here. From the author of the instant New York Times bestseller I Hope This Doesn’t Find You, Never Thought I’d End Up Here is another hilarious and romantic romcom from Ann Liang, this time following a former model determined to get revenge on the boy who ruined her life. Leah Zhang has spent her whole life in LA – it’s all she’s ever known. But after accidentally wishing her cousin ill health and a very depressing marriage at her wedding, her parents stage an intervention.

She’s forgotten most of her Mandarin, has zero regard for etiquette, and can’t hold a conversation with her own grandparents for longer than a minute. Their solution? Send her on an intensive two-week travel program across China’s most beautiful cities. To them, it’s the perfect opportunity for Leah to get back to her roots. To Leah, it’s simply a much-needed escape…. One of the most unforgettable reads of June 2025.

A First Time for Everything by K.L. Walther

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

To open A First Time for Everything is to tumble into a mood, a moment, a murmur you won’t forget. From the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer of Broken Rules comes a fun new coming-of-age romance full of dating disasters, powerful firsts, and the importance of family. Madeline has always been extremely close to her family, so she is shocked when her older brother gets engaged without including them (or even giving them a heads up!).

Mads has never been the biggest fan of his fiancée, Katie, so in order to remain one happy family, she is determined to bond with Katie before the big day, which includes reluctantly agreeing to be a bridesmaid. During a late-night bridesmaids-only game of “Truth or Dare” Mads is cornered into revealing she has never been kissed or even been on a date, which spurs the other girls to unite on a quest to find Mads the perfect plus-one for the wedding. Next thing she knows… Critical to understanding what made June 2025 special in fiction.

The River’s Daughter by Bridget Crocker

Genre: General Fiction

The kind of novel that changes how you see things.

The River’s Daughter begins like a half-remembered dream, vivid, fragile, and impossible to ignore. Recalling memoirs like Wild and Educated, an internationally renowned whitewater rafting guide offers a gripping and inspiring memoir about overcoming hardship and coming into her own through her relationship with the rivers she has known. After Bridget Crocker’s parents split in a vicious divorce, she moved with her mother from California to Wyoming, to a trailer park on the banks of the Snake River. Her childhood was nearly idyllic, with a stepfather she loved and a new baby brother, and with the river as her companion.

When her mother underwent a drastic personality change seemingly overnight and left her stepfather for an eco-warrior and radical new lifestyle, Bridget’s world upended. She returned to California to live with her explosive father, until his violence sent her back to Wyoming. The river was the most constant and nurturing influence in Bridget’s life; it helped instill in her the… A must-read gem from the June 2025 publishing wave.

It shows how deep the bench of books released in June 2025 really runs.

Park Avenue by Renée Ahdieh

Genre: General Fiction

A story that lingers in your heart and your mind.

Sometimes the quietest moments echo the loudest, and in Park Avenue, Renée Ahdieh captures them with grace. #1 NYT-bestselling YA author Renee Ahdieh’s adult debut novel, about a young lawyer who gets pulled in to manage a crisis with her firm’s biggest client, a family whose Korean beauty brand is worth a billion dollars, pitched as CRAZY RICH ASIANS meets SUCCESSION Jia Song was always destined for greatness. As the daughter of Korean bodega owners, she promised herself that she would have every Fifth Avenue luxury when she grew up, and it is all within reach.

She has just made junior partner at her prestigious Manhattan law firm, she has two best friends who are always there for her, and she is even about to score the ultra-luxe Birkin bag of her dreams. Sure, maybe her love life is in shambles and she’s spending too much time at the office. But she is set up to become the firm’s next star. So… This book helped shape the literary voice of June 2025.

The Summer We Ran by Audrey Ingram

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

The pages of The Summer We Ran rustle with secrets, each chapter pulling you deeper under its spell. Does your past define your destiny? Told through multiple perspectives, rich with emotion and immersive dual timelines, The Summer We Ran weaves together a story of lost love, devastating secrets, shocking sabotage, and the painstaking decision two people must make in order to fulfill the futures they each desire. In the summer of 1996, teenage Tess Murphy’s mom gave her two rules to abide keep quiet and stay out of trouble.

Her mother landed a new job as a cook at an affluent Virginia estate and didn’t want anything to risk the opportunity, least of all her outspoken daughter. What no one saw coming was Tess falling deeply in love with the boy next door, high-society Grant Alexander. Over a few wondrous and heat-filled months, Tess and Grant’s love blooms so ferociously it feels utterly impossible that anything can keep them apart, until tragedy strikes… June 2025 saw many books, this one stands out.

A Forgery of Fate by Elizabeth Lim

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

If stillness could speak, it would sound like the opening lines of A Forgery of Fate. A breathtaking romantic fantasy inspired by Beauty and the Beast about a girl who paints the future and a cursed dragon lord, bound by love and deception in a plot to bring down the gods. From the New York Times bestselling author of Six Crimson Cranes! Truyan Saigas didn’t choose to become a con artist, but after her father is lost at sea, it’s up to her to support her mother and two younger sisters.

A gifted art forger, Tru has the unique ability to paint the future, but even such magic is not enough to put her family back together again, or stave off the gangsters demanding payment in blood for her mother’s gambling debts. Left with few options, Tru agrees to a marriage contract with a mysterious dragon lord. He offers a fresh start for her mother and sisters and elusive answers about… Its emotional pull makes it a highlight of June 2025.

We Could Be Magic by Marissa Meyer

Genre: General Fiction

Layered, lyrical, and alive with tension.

There’s thunder in the silence of We Could Be Magic, a novel where everything unsaid becomes everything urgent. A swoon-worthy young adult graphic novel about a girl’s summer job at a theme park from #1 New York Times bestselling author Marissa Meyer. When Tabitha Laurie was growing up, a visit to Sommerland saved her belief in true love, even as her parents’ marriage was falling apart. Now she’s landed her dream job at the theme park’s prestigious summer program, where she can make magical memories for other kids, guests, and superfans just like her.

All she has to do is audition for one of the coveted princess roles, and soon her dreams will come true. There’s just one problem. The heroes and heroines at Sommerland are all, well… thin. And no matter how much Tabi lives for the magic, she simply doesn’t fit the park’s idea of a princess. Given a not-so-regal position at a nacho food stand instead, Tabi is going to… A nuanced release that made June 2025 memorable.

Count it among the top books of June 2025.

Meet Me at the Crossroads by Megan Giddings

Genre: General Fiction

A tender, thrilling, and entirely human story.

Megan Giddings paints with emotion in Meet Me at the Crossroads, a novel that begins where most stories end. From the award-winning, critically-acclaimed author of Lakewood and The Women Could Fly, a dazzling novel about two brilliant sisters and what happens to their undeniable bond when a mysterious and possibly perilous new world beckons. On an ordinary summer morning, the world is changed by the appearance of seven mysterious doors that seemingly lead to another world. People are, of course, mesmerized and intrigued: A new dimension filled with beauty and resources beckons them to step into an adventure.

But, perhaps inevitably, people soon learn that what looks like paradise may very well be filled with danger. Ayanna and Olivia, two Black Midwestern teens, and twin sisters, have different ideas of what may lie in the world beyond. But will their personal bond endure such wanton exploration? And when one of them goes missing, will the other find solace of her own? And will she uncover the… Among the treasures June 2025 delivered to readers.

The Summer That Changed Everything by Brenda Novak

Genre: General Fiction

For readers who crave emotion as much as plot.

In a world of noise, The Summer That Changed Everything whispers its way into your heart and stays there. She returned to prove her father’s innocence, but there’s no telling what she’ll find… It’s been fifteen years since Lucy Sinclair saw her father. Fifteen long years since she sat in a courtroom and watched him sentenced to life in prison. He murdered three victims, all people she knew, which ruined her life at just seventeen. But now she’s back in Virginia to talk to him, wondering if there’s more to the story of what happened that fateful night.

An old flame, Ford Wagner, makes his own return to North Hampton Beach, fleeing a marriage that seems destined for divorce. He’s wary of Lucy and her digging into the past, but the more time they spend together, the closer they get and the more he finds himself reconsidering the truth behind the death of their mutual friend that summer. Problem is, there are plenty of those in… This book enriched the June 2025 reading experience.

He’s to Die For by Erin Dunn

Genre: General Fiction

Layered, lyrical, and alive with tension.

The rhythm of longing, the weight of memory, He’s to Die For is stitched together with both. Brooklyn 99 meets The Charm Offensive in this sparkling romantic murder it’s murder cute in the first degree when a detective finds himself falling for the lead suspect in a career-making case. At 29, Detective Rav Trivedi is the youngest member of the NYPD’s homicide squad, and his future looks bright. He may be a bit of an outsider in the department – an ivy-league educated gay Brit with a weakness for designer suits – but his meteoric rise and solve rate prove he belongs.

So when his CO assigns him lead on the high-profile murder of a record executive, Rav is ready for action. He won’t be distracted by TV crews, tabloids, or what’s trending on social media, nor by the ridiculously hot rock star with a clear motive and no alibi. This is it, his shot, and he is not going to screw… A core part of the June 2025 literary conversation.

The Lost Book of First Loves by RaeAnne Thayne

Genre: General Fiction

A story that lingers in your heart and your mind.

No book asks for your attention more gently, or holds it more fiercely, than The Lost Book of First Loves. From <em>New York Times </em>bestselling author RaeAnne Thayne comes a brand-new story about two women, a family secret and a lost manuscript that changes everything… Raised by her literary icon father Carson Wells, Allison Wells always felt loved, even though her mother died when she was a teen. But when she takes a DNA test on a whim and discovers she has a sister that she’s never heard about before, it’s clear there are things her father never told her before he died.

Determined to meet Juniper, her half sister, and unravel the truth of what happened all those years ago, Ali finds herself taking a job as Juniper’s intern. She’ll eventually figure out a way to tell Juniper the truth of their relationship. But she never could have imagined what would happen next… Juniper Connolly has always been incredibly healthy…until she wakes up in the hospital… Recognized for elevating June 2025 fiction.

Even in a month this crowded, few June 2025 books linger like this one.

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove

Genre: General Fiction

An emotional knockout wrapped in beautiful prose.

To open Of Monsters and Mainframes is to tumble into a mood, a moment, a murmur you won’t forget. Spaceships aren’t programmed to seek revenge, but for Dracula, Demeter will make an exception. Demeter just wants to do her job: shuttling humans between Earth and Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately, her passengers keep dying, and not from equipment failures, as her AI medical system, Steward, would have her believe. These are paranormal murders, and they began when one nasty, ancient vampire decided to board Demeter and kill all her humans. To keep from getting decommissioned, Demeter must join forces with her own team: A werewolf. An engineer built from the dead.

A pharaoh with otherworldly powers. A vampire with a grudge. And a fleet of cheerful spider drones. Together, this motley crew will face down the ultimate evil, Dracula. The queer love child of pulp horror and ​classic ​sci-fi, <em>Of Monsters and ​Mainframes</em> ​is a dazzling, heartfelt odyssey that probes what it means to be one of society’s monsters, and explores… This title gave depth to the June 2025 releases.

The Expat Affair by Kimberly Belle

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

The Expat Affair begins like a half-remembered dream, vivid, fragile, and impossible to ignore. An American expat‘s startling discovery plunges her into the glamorous but deadly world of Amsterdam’s diamond industry. Following a nasty divorce, Rayna Dumont came to Amsterdam for a fresh start. She’s never been the type for a one-night stand, but this move is all about adventure, and Xander is handsome and successful and more than willing to go along for the ride. Until the morning after, when Rayna finds him dead on the shower floor and millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds missing from his safe.

From her lavish home in the heart of the city, Willow Prins is captivated by the news. Her husband is Xander’s former boss and heir to a diamond house, and the scandal strains their already-rocky marriage. As the house comes under scrutiny, Willow wonders if her life is about to implode, and how much of the blame she can place… This novel is part of why June 2025 mattered to readers.

The Beautiful Maddening by Shea Ernshaw

Genre: General Fiction

Brimming with soul, suspense, and raw truth.

Sometimes the quietest moments echo the loudest, and in The Beautiful Maddening, Shea Ernshaw captures them with grace. From #1 New York Times bestselling author Shea Ernshaw comes a haunting romantic contemporary fantasy about a teen navigating her family’s love curse that blooms with their enchanted tulips every year. Seventeen year-old Lark Goode wants only one to escape her small town of Cutwater and the history of her family name. It’s a history that began during the Dutch tulip mania of 1636, when Lark’s ancestor stole the last remaining tulip bulbs and fled to America.

But when the tulips bloomed on American soil, madness sprouted from their snowy white petals. The madness was love. Now, generations later, the Goodes remain cursed, the unnatural flowers outside their home causing locals to fall helplessly in love with anyone carrying Goode blood in their veins. While her brother embraces the strange power, Lark wants nothing more than to be free from it. But when she meets a… A brilliant representation of June 2025’s creative range.

The Slip by Lucas Schaefer

Genre: General Fiction

For readers who crave emotion as much as plot.

The pages of The Slip rustle with secrets, each chapter pulling you deeper under its spell. For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill comes a haymaker of an American novel about a missing teenage boy, cases of fluid and mistaken identity, and the transformative power of boxing. Austin, It’s the summer of 1998, and there’s a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter named David Dalice, he begins to come into his own.

Even the boy’s slightly-stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to be watching him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier, more confident, tanner, even. Then one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind. Across the city, Charles Rex, now going simply by “X,” has been undergoing a teenage transformation of his own, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works, seeking… Among the best literary achievements of June 2025.

Of all the June 2025 books on this list, this is the one readers kept recommending first.

Dear Future Me by Deborah O’Connor

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

If stillness could speak, it would sound like the opening lines of Dear Future Me. In 2003 Mr. Danler’s high school class got an assignment to write letters to their future selves. Twenty years later they receive them in the mail. Upon opening them the students are shocked to find that their envelopes contain old secrets that threaten to expose the truth about the tragic death of one of their classmates, and when one letter leads a student, Miranda, to jump to her death, the small community is rocked to its core.

Stunned by what has happened and armed with a clue of her own, Miranda’s best-friend Audrey decides to track down her former classmates to get to the bottom of Miranda’s death. In doing so, she sets off a chain of events that could expose the truth not just about one untimely death but two. Widely appreciated as a standout June 2025 novel.

Tell Me Something Good by Court Stevens

Genre: General Fiction

The kind of novel that changes how you see things.

There’s thunder in the silence of Tell Me Something Good, a novel where everything unsaid becomes everything urgent. This is a story of the rich and the very poor. It is a story of an illegal auction with dire consequences. A story of murders past and present. And of intertwined relationships and the silent ripples they leave behind, where love becomes a guiding force, revealing the lengths one will go to protect those they cherish.

Over twenty years ago, a young hunting guide in rural Kentucky was driving his boat in the early morning mist when his peaceful cruise was cut short by a scene so disturbing, he packed up and moved away. Nine women died early that morning, but it was linked to a similar crime in Texas, so the locals quickly wrote it off as having nothing to do with them. Now, all these years later, when everyone has nearly forgotten about that grisly part of… This story was made to be remembered from June 2025.

Now She’s Dead by Roselyn Clarke

Genre: General Fiction

The kind of novel that changes how you see things.

Roselyn Clarke paints with emotion in Now She’s Dead, a novel that begins where most stories end. Last summer, Sara Ellis was found dead by the lake, and only Mandy knows what really happened. This summer, she’s desperate to keep it a secret. For a few weeks every summer, Sara was Mandy’s best friend. At Highmark, the lake resort where their families vacationed, the two were in a world of their own. Or at least Mandy got to be part of Sara’s world. But now Sara’s dead. The police ruled her death an accident; a tragic mistake after a night of impaired judgment.

For the past year, Mandy’s coped by escaping: leaving home and barely keeping it together at school. The last thing she wants to do is return to Highmark this summer, even if she does need “closure.” As soon as she’s back, though, she hears the whispers: someone killed Sara Ellis. And if she’s not careful, they’ll figure out it’s all… Its voice echoes in the halls of June 2025 fiction.

Nobody in Particular by Sophie Gonzales

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

In a world of noise, Nobody in Particular whispers its way into your heart and stays there. Young Royals meets The Prince and Me when a disgraced princess falls for a new student at their all-girls boarding school, but the two must hide their forbidden love at all costs. Princess Rosemary of Henland can’t afford distractions. She’s working tirelessly to repair her image following a scandal that lost the trust of both her country and her best friend. Unfortunately, when a beautiful and funny new student joins her boarding school, Rose finds herself quite distracted indeed.

Attending Bramppath College on a music scholarship, talented pianist Danni expects to be an outcast amongst the wealthy children of the elite, but she is pleasantly surprised to be taken in by the ex-best friend of the princess. The more Danni gets to know her new classmates, the more intrigued she becomes by Rose. When somebody sees something they shouldn’t and rumors circulate throughout Henland, Rose… June 2025 was richer thanks to this book’s arrival.

This is the kind of range the books of June 2025 kept delivering.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab

Genre: General Fiction

Brimming with soul, suspense, and raw truth.

The rhythm of longing, the weight of memory, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is stitched together with both. From V. E. Schwab, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue: a new genre-defying novel about immortality and hunger. This is a story about hunger. 1532. Santo Domingo de la Calzada. A young girl grows up wild and wily, her beauty is only outmatched by her dreams of escape. But María knows she can only ever be a prize, or a pawn, in the games played by men. When an alluring stranger offers an alternate path, María makes a desperate choice.

She vows to have no regrets. This is a story about love. 1827. London. A young woman lives an idyllic but cloistered life on her family’s estate, until a moment of forbidden intimacy sees her shipped off to London. Charlotte’s tender heart and seemingly impossible wishes are swept away by an invitation from a beautiful widow, but the price… This one deepened the dialogue around June 2025 books.

Caught Up by Navessa Allen

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

No book asks for your attention more gently, or holds it more fiercely, than Caught Up. I wanted this woman, and I was a man who always got what he wanted. Nico ‘Junior’ Trocci knows Lauren Marchetti is off limits. She is sweetness and laughter, whereas Junior exists in a world of violence and depravity. Men like him don’t get to have women like her. It’s why he pushed her away back in high school and has kept his distance ever since. But when Junior looks Lauren up online, he discovers the shy, bookish girl he remembers is gone.

In her place is a strikingly beautiful woman whose social media is filled with scantily clad pictures of herself and a connection to a nearby play club. Junior’s innocent curiosity quickly turns into a dark obsession. But watching Lauren from a distance isn’t enough; he needs to make her his. He’s ruthless; a walking red flag. Good thing red is my favorite… An emotional cornerstone of the June 2025 catalog.

With a Vengeance by Riley Sager

Genre: Thriller & Suspense

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

To open With a Vengeance is to tumble into a mood, a moment, a murmur you won’t forget. One train. No stops. A deadly game of survival and revenge. In 1942, six people destroyed Anna Matheson’s family. Twelve years later, she’s ready for retribution. Under false pretenses, Anna has lured those responsible for her family’s downfall onto a luxury train from Philadelphia to Chicago, an overnight journey of fourteen hours. Her goal? Confront the people who’ve wronged her, get them to confess their crimes, and deliver them into the hands of authorities waiting at the end of the line. Justice will at last be served.

But Anna’s plan is quickly derailed by the murder of one of the passengers. As the train barrels through the night, it becomes clear that someone else on board is enacting their own form of revenge, and that they won’t stop until everyone else is dead. With time running out before the train reaches its destination, Anna is forced… It added brilliance to June 2025’s publishing timeline.

The Bachelorette Party by Camilla Sten

Genre: General Fiction

A tender, thrilling, and entirely human story.

The Bachelorette Party begins like a half-remembered dream, vivid, fragile, and impossible to ignore. Scream meets The Guest List in this wickedly compelling and compulsively page-turning thriller of friendship and murder from the author of The Lost Village, Camilla Sten. On a remote, craggy island nestled off the coast of Sweden, four friends, Tilly, Anna, Linnea and Evelina, meet every year. Best friends since childhood, the idea is to drink beer, dance by the water, and shake off the weight of life’s expectations. The location of the island is a secret to everyone but them. One night of reckless fun and secret-sharing, and then they return to their normal lives.

Ten years later. Ever since she was a teenager, Tessa Nilsson has been consumed by the story of four friends who disappeared on their annual trip to a remote island together. As her true crime fervor turned into a wildly popular podcast, Tessa urgently covered Sweden’s most gruesome cases, but could… A book that reflects the power of June 2025 storytelling.

It remains one of the most talked-about books of June 2025.

King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby

Genre: General Fiction

An emotional knockout wrapped in beautiful prose.

Sometimes the quietest moments echo the loudest, and in King of Ashes, S.A. Cosby captures them with grace. Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby returns with King of Ashes, a Godfather-inspired Southern crime epic and dazzling family drama. When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family, and the family business, together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day.

But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger. Roman, a financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, has some money to help buy his brother out of trouble. But in… Not just a story, a June 2025 milestone.

Welcome to Murder Week by Karen Dukess

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

The pages of Welcome to Murder Week rustle with secrets, each chapter pulling you deeper under its spell. In this delightfully funny and heartfelt new novel from the author of the “bittersweet page-turner” (The New York Times) The Last Book Party, an American woman travels to the English countryside when she discovers tickets her late mother had purchased for a murder mystery simulation in a small British town. When thirty-four-year-old Cath loses her mostly absentee mother, she is ambivalent. With days of quiet, unassuming routine in Buffalo, New York, Cath consciously avoids the impulsive, thrill-seeking lifestyle that her mother once led.

But when she’s forced to go through her mother’s things one afternoon, Cath is perplexed to find tickets for an upcoming “murder week” in England’s Peak. A whole town has come together to stage a fake murder mystery to attract tourism to their quaint hamlet. Baffled but helplessly intrigued by her mother’s secret purchase, Cath decides to go on the trip herself, and… Belongs in every roundup of great June 2025 books.

The River Is Waiting by Wally Lamb

Genre: General Fiction

A story that lingers in your heart and your mind.

If stillness could speak, it would sound like the opening lines of The River Is Waiting. Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin, and that’s before he causes the tragedy that tears apart his family. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he witnesses frightful acts of brutality. But he also experiences small acts of kindness and kinship. Buoyed by those and by his mother’s enduring faith in him, Corby begins to transcend the boundaries of his confinement, sustained by his hope that mercy and reconciliation might still be possible. Can those he loves ever forgive his crimes? Stands out for what it brought to June 2025 fiction.

Slow Burn Summer by Josie Silver

Genre: General Fiction

For readers who crave emotion as much as plot.

There’s thunder in the silence of Slow Burn Summer, a novel where everything unsaid becomes everything urgent. A talent agent hires an actress to play the part of “novelist” on a book tour for his agency’s publicity-shy client She’s playing the part of romance author, but has she found her own real life love story? Talent agent Charlie Francisco has three problems: a divorce that ended his screenwriting career, a business he never planned to inherit, and a take-your-breath-away romance novel whose author wants nothing to do with its publication.

The book is a surefire hit, if only his agency can find someone to “play” author on its summer book tour. Enter Kate Elliott, a former soap actress who’s miraculously right for the part at the very moment her life seems to be going all wrong. Kate is still recovering from her own divorce and Charlie’s job offer is a lifeline. She agrees to the pretense for all interviews, signings, and appearances… This book helped define the best of June 2025 releases.

Add it to the pile of June 2025 books that outperformed their hype.

A Most Puzzling Murder by Bianca Marais

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

Bianca Marais paints with emotion in A Most Puzzling Murder, a novel that begins where most stories end. How do you solve a murder that hasn’t happened yet? Destiny Whip is a former child prodigy, world-renowned enigmatologist and very, very alone. A life filled with loss has made her a recluse, an existence she’s content to endure until a letter arrives inviting her to interview for the position of Scruffmore family historian. Not only does an internet search for the name yield almost nothing, it’s a role she never applied to in the first place!

After she decodes the invitation’s hidden message with ease, the promise of her family secrets being revealed is too powerful a draw for the orphaned Destiny, who soon finds herself on Eerie Island. It’s a place whose inhabitants are almost as inhospitable as the tempestuous weather. The Scruffmores themselves turn out to be not much better, a snarled mess of secrets and motives connected by their mistrust for… A vivid example of June 2025’s literary excellence.

A Dance of Lies by Brittney Arena

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

In a world of noise, A Dance of Lies whispers its way into your heart and stays there. A debut fantasy romance filled with hope after heartbreak, secrets, and betrayal, as a dancer-turned-spy must decide how far she will go to secure her freedom My protector is gone, revealed to be a monster. But I remind myself that I am not a damsel. I’m no princess bound within a tower. I am a shadow. Vasalie Moran was once a dancer in King Illian’s court, until he framed her for murder. Barely surviving her two years in the dungeons, she’s suddenly called to face her king.

He offers her a deal: become his spy at the six-week royal Gathering and he’ll grant her freedom. As Illian’s orders grow bloody and dangerous, forcing her to harm and betray those around her, Vasalie discovers that the monster she serves may be aligned with a bigger monster, one far closer to home. With her world threatened, Vasalie enlists… June 2025’s identity is incomplete without this title.

Kill Your Darlings by Peter Swanson

Genre: General Fiction

For readers who crave emotion as much as plot.

The rhythm of longing, the weight of memory, Kill Your Darlings is stitched together with both. From the New York Times bestselling author of The Kind Worth Killing and Eight Perfect Murders comes an inventive, utterly propulsive murder-mystery in reverse, tracing a marriage back in time to uncover the dark secret at its heart. Thom and Wendy Graves have been married for over twenty-five years. They live in a beautiful Victorian on the north shore of Massachusetts. Wendy is a published poet and Thom teaches English literature at a nearby university. Their son, Jason, is all grown up. All is well…except that Wendy wants to murder her husband.

What happens next has everything to do with what happened before. The story of Wendy and Thom’s marriage is told in reverse, moving backward through time to witness key moments from the couple’s lives, their fiftieth birthday party, buying their home, Jason’s birth, the mysterious death of a work colleague, all painting a portrait of… Left its mark on the June 2025 literary landscape.

Realm of Thieves by Karina Halle

Genre: General Fiction

A tender, thrilling, and entirely human story.

No book asks for your attention more gently, or holds it more fiercely, than Realm of Thieves. Two thieves vie for dominance in the illegal dragon egg trade, putting both their lives and their hearts on the line in this scorching romantasy from New York Times bestselling author Karina Halle. For Brynla Aihr, crime and survival have always gone hand in hand. Ever since she escaped the fanatical dragon-worshipping cult that controls her homeland, she’s had to carve out a life doing the stealing dragon eggs. Egg theft is illegal and, in most cases, fatal.

To breach a dragon’s nest means a harrowing journey through the ancient wards spelled to keep the monstrous beasts confined. Dragons can’t get out and only those with a death wish can get in. Despite the risks, dragon eggs are highly coveted for their magic. A black market flourishes under competing criminal empires, and Brynla’s loyalty has always been to the highest bidder. Until she finds herself… A conversation piece among June 2025’s best books.

For many readers, this was the sleeper hit among June 2025 books.

If I Told You, I’d Have to Kiss You by Mae Marvel

Genre: General Fiction

It reaches into your chest and doesn’t let go.

To open If I Told You, I’d Have to Kiss You is to tumble into a mood, a moment, a murmur you won’t forget. Ms. and Ms. Smith meets The Pairing in this heart-racing romance of secrets, spies, and steam. A few rules for the international superspy: (1) Never blow your cover. (2) Never accept the first plan. (3) Never fall for anyone at the agency. Especially if she’s your ex-girlfriend. Second-generation spy Yardley Whitmer, code name “the Unicorn,” can do no wrong. With her combination of debutante-style charm and expert spycraft, she’s become an instant legend in the field.

If only finally moving out of her girlfriend’s home were as easy as rappelling off the Eiffel Tower. But living a full-time cover story has slowly eroded her relationship with KC until there’s nothing left but lies. KC “Tabasco” Nolan, hacker extraordinaire, can crack anything, except the code that would tell her the right moment to confess her secret job to Yardley. Now it’s too late, and she’s in danger… A novel that resonated across June 2025’s readership.

Never Been Shipped by Alicia Thompson

Genre: General Fiction

A story that lingers in your heart and your mind.

Never Been Shipped begins like a half-remembered dream, vivid, fragile, and impossible to ignore. A band reunion may be enough to change two musicians’ tune on love in this electric romance from USA Today bestselling author Alicia Thompson. Micah’s relationship to music is complicated. As teenagers, her band took off after being featured on a popular TV show, but the group barely released their sophomore album before breaking up.

Now, over a decade later, the band is reuniting for one more performance on a themed cruise, and Micah is determined to learn from her past mistakes — no losing herself in the music, and no losing her heart along the way. John misses playing in a band, and mostly he misses Micah, who’d been his best friend until the music stopped. Back then, he didn’t take the lead, either in his guitar parts or while he sat back and watched her date another bandmate. John’s never been one to… Elevated the expectations of June 2025 fiction.

Heathen & Honeysuckle by Sarah A. Bailey

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

Sometimes the quietest moments echo the loudest, and in Heathen & Honeysuckle, Sarah A. Bailey captures them with grace. Graham knows nothing new ever happens in the small town of Pacific Shores. That is, until he runs into his new neighbor. Golden haired, honey-eyed, and sharp-tongued, Darby Andrews. The mischievous surfer is immediately smitten with the innocent girl-next-door, and vows to dedicate his summer to bringing out her wild side. As Leo and Darby’s budding friendship turns into a burning love that neither of them could’ve expected, Leo is determined to protect it at all costs.

Until he finds the girl of his teenage dreams ran away in the middle of the night without so much as a Darby Andrews is Crestwell, Kansas’s golden child. She’s always been a rule follower, save for one secret summer spent living with her grandmother in California; the consequences of which still haunt her a decade later. Darby’s always done what she was told, including agreeing to marry… Echoes with the emotional core of June 2025’s best stories.

Seven Year Itch by Amy Daws

Genre: General Fiction

For readers who crave emotion as much as plot.

The pages of Seven Year Itch rustle with secrets, each chapter pulling you deeper under its spell. Alone and Looking to Bone! Loudmouthed Mountain Man Seeks Fiery Woman to Grow Old With. I might look like a tall, tattooed, bearded neanderthal…but like an onion, I have layers. Swipe right if you like a proud cat daddy who catches feelings after direct eye contact. All I wanted was a casual plus-one to my brother’s destination wedding, but those idiots on my family tree hacked my dating profile and sabotaged my quest for the perfect weekend fling. Now I’m stuck on a tropical vacation with only my hand to keep me company.

Until I’m forced to share a room with the bane of my existence: my sister-in-law’s best friend. Dakota has hated me for the past seven years. I wasn’t losing much sleep over her screaming rants because she was some other guy’s problem. Or she was, until she got divorced. Being stuck in… This book belongs in every conversation about June 2025.

It quietly outclasses many louder books of June 2025.

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser

Genre: General Fiction

Layered, lyrical, and alive with tension.

If stillness could speak, it would sound like the opening lines of Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Prairie Fires comes a terrifying true-crime history of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest – a gripping investigation of how a new strain of serial killer emerged out of a toxic landscape of deadly industrial violence Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest.

But in the 1970s and 80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? And why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? What explains the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing? As Murderland indelibly maps the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers in mayhem – the Green River Killer,… It offered something unique to June 2025’s book lovers.

Jill Is Not Happy by Kaira Rouda

Genre: General Fiction

An emotional knockout wrapped in beautiful prose.

There’s thunder in the silence of Jill Is Not Happy, a novel where everything unsaid becomes everything urgent. An ill-fated road trip resurrects a married couple’s darkest secrets in this new thriller from the <em>USA Today</em> bestselling author of <em>Best Day Ever</em> and <em>The Next Wife</em>. Some secrets keep a couple together. If you ask Jill Tingley, she’ll tell you she and her husband Jack are college sweethearts living the dream in Southern California. Wealthy, popular and genetically blessed, theirs is an enviable life, though they’ve grown distant in recent years. Newly empty nesting with their daughter Maggie away at college, Jill suggests a road trip to reconnect.

Jack would rather do anything else than drive to Utah with his wife. He’s only stayed in this marriage because of a shared secret, a tragedy in the past he wanted to keep buried. And for his daughter’s sake. But Jack is finished with the charade of his marriage. He’s filing for divorce as soon… A defining voice in the June 2025 release lineup.

Last Night Was Fun by Holly Michelle

Genre: General Fiction

Layered, lyrical, and alive with tension.

Holly Michelle paints with emotion in Last Night Was Fun, a novel that begins where most stories end. <em>You’ve Got Mail </em>meets <em>The Hating Game</em>!<em> </em>Vying for a promotion against a bitter rival as the only female data analyst for a professional baseball team, Emmy finds solace in the text-flirting relationship that started as a wrong number exchange, unaware that the man she’s texting is the one she’s fighting for the promotion. Emmy Jameson lives by three no dating, no sharing personal news at work, and baseball above everything. As the only female data analyst for a professional baseball team, Emmy is constantly trying to prove herself.

Especially when she’s put up for a senior analyst position against her arrogant, infuriating coworker Gabe Olson. Sure, he’s gorgeous and smart and he was a baseball star in college who knows the sport inside and out, but so does Emmy. She is not going to lose to him again. There will be no distractions this summer…. Among the most talked-about books released in June 2025, this one demands attention.

Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

In a world of noise, Great Black Hope whispers its way into your heart and stays there. A gripping, elegant debut novel about a young Black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamour and tragedy, a friend’s mysterious death and his own arrest, from an electrifying new voice. An arrest for cocaine possession in the Hamptons on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a young queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not.

It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, a glamorous member of the Black elite, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle, as well as the lingering questions of how well he really knew his closest friend and what exactly happened to her that night. He flees to his hometown of Atlanta,… A top contender in the literary highlights of June 2025.

It earns its place on any shortlist of the best books of June 2025.

Six Wild Crowns by Holly Race

Genre: General Fiction

An emotional knockout wrapped in beautiful prose.

The rhythm of longing, the weight of memory, Six Wild Crowns is stitched together with both. The king has been appointed by god to marry six queens. Those six queens are all that stand between the kingdom of Elben and ruin. Or so we have been told. Each queen vies for attention. Clever, ambitious Boleyn is determined to be Henry’s favourite. And if she must incite a war to win Henry over? So be it. Seymour acts as spy and assassin in a court teeming with dragons, backstabbing courtiers and strange magic.

But when she and Boleyn become the unlikeliest of things – allies – the balance of power begins to shift. Together they will discover an ancient, rotting magic at Elben’s heart. A magic that their king will do anything to protect. A captivating epic fantasy filled with dragons, court politics and sapphic yearning, perfect for fans of The Priory of the Orange Tree and House of the Dragon. If you’re browsing June 2025 reading lists, don’t overlook this title.

Plays Well with Others by Lauren Myracle

Genre: General Fiction

A tender, thrilling, and entirely human story.

No book asks for your attention more gently, or holds it more fiercely, than Plays Well with Others. Bestselling children’s author Lauren Myracle makes her literary fiction debut with a gripping suspense novel about the dark side of “perfect” parents in a tightly knit suburb. Jacquelyn “Jake” Nolan has lost a lot: her stillborn son, her marriage, and her job and reputation. Still grieving, she makes a determined effort to start over. She settles into a new house, and, buoyed by a growing friendship with an upbeat woman named Mabel, begins to believe a brighter future is ahead. But this charming little neighborhood across the street from an elementary school conceals an undercurrent of darkness and rage. One of the defining releases of the June 2025 book cycle.

The Next Chapter by Camille Kellogg

Genre: General Fiction

Brimming with soul, suspense, and raw truth.

To open The Next Chapter is to tumble into a mood, a moment, a murmur you won’t forget. When a famous former child actress meets a tender masc West Village bookseller, sparks fly and complications ensue in this queer homage to Notting Hill by the author of Just as You Are. Katrina Kelly is a former child star with five blockbuster movies under her belt and a face that’s instantly recognizable to most of America. Unfortunately, her career ended with her teens.

Now she’s twenty-four, running out of money, and spends most of her nights alone Googling things like ‘how do I know if I’m bi or gay?’ She’s desperate to rebrand herself as a Serious Adult Actress and restart her career, at any cost. Jude Thacker, a butch bookseller at The Next Chapter, doesn’t want to admit she might be stuck. After all, she’s running the queer feminist bookstore of her dreams with a staff of chosen family. Sure, she hasn’t even tried… This novel is why readers will remember June 2025.

The English Masterpiece by Katherine Reay

Genre: General Fiction

A tender, thrilling, and entirely human story.

The English Masterpiece begins like a half-remembered dream, vivid, fragile, and impossible to ignore. Set in the art world of 1970s London, The English Masterpiece is a fast-paced read to the end, full of glamour and secrets, tensions and lies, as one young woman races against the clock to uncover the truth about a Picasso masterpiece. Perfect for fans of Kate Quinn and Ariel Lawhon. As the recently promoted assistant to the Tate’s Modern Collections keeper Diana Gilden, Lily helps plan a world-class Picasso exhibit to honor the passing of the great artist–and she’s waited her whole life for this moment.

The opening is beyond anyone’s expectations–the lighting, the champagne, the glittering crowd, and the international acclaim–until Lily does the unthinkable. She stops in front of a masterpiece and hears her own voice say, “It’s a forgery.” The gallery falls silent. Lily’s boss, Diana, is polished perfection, schooled in art, and descends from European high society. She’s worked hard… A new June 2025 release that blends storytelling and emotion brilliantly.

Another reason the June 2025 book season felt special.

So Far Gone by Jess Walter

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

Sometimes the quietest moments echo the loudest, and in So Far Gone, Jess Walter captures them with grace. A reclusive journalist is suddenly thrown into a wild, suspenseful journey to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren. A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter and her belligerent new husband, Rhys Kinnick finally snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched the jerk.

Immediately horrified by what he’d done, by the state of the world around him, and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out the car window and fled for a remote cabin in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. Seven years later, when his grandchildren show up on his doorstep, Rhys barely recognizes them. Their mother has disappeared, and they need a safer place to stay than with their father, who has taken up with a Christian Nationalist militia. So what if Rhys’s cabin has no electricity or indoor plumbing, and the… Perfect for fans of the best books of June 2025.

A Girl Walks Into the Forest by Madeleine Roux

Genre: General Fiction

A tender, thrilling, and entirely human story.

The pages of A Girl Walks Into the Forest rustle with secrets, each chapter pulling you deeper under its spell. <em>Midsommar </em>meets<em> The Shadows Between Us </em>in this alluring mash-up of horror and fairy tale from<em> New York Times </em>bestselling author Madeleine Roux, where a girl must embark on a harrowing journey through a deadly forest filled with otherworldly creatures, supernatural forces, and one maniacal villain who will stop at nothing to bring her down.<em> </em> For as long as she can remember, Valla’s been told her beauty would give her a life most people only dreamed of.

So when the mysterious Count Leonid calls on her to be his betrothed, Valla jumps at the chance to leave her small, bleak village. The only thing standing in her way? The journey through the dangerous Gottyar Wood that many don’t survive. Filled with deadly and cunning creatures, the Gottyar immediately delivers on its reputation with an attack that leaves Valla injured; her face torn to shreds…. This story adds depth to the most moving June 2025 books.

Far and Away by Amy Poeppel

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

If stillness could speak, it would sound like the opening lines of Far and Away. The “absolutely hilarious” (Real Simple) Amy Poeppel delights once again with a charming new novel about a house swap gone wonderfully awry. Perfect strangers Lucy and Greta have agreed to a house swap, and boy, are they going to regret it. Lucy’s hometown of Dallas has gone from home sweet home to vicious snake pit in the blink of an eye after her son makes a mistake he can’t undo.

And Greta’s beloved flat in Berlin is suddenly up for grabs when her husband Otto takes a dream job in Texas without even telling her. In their rush to leave town, Lucy and Greta make a deal, pack their bags, and, thanks to martinis, desperation, and some very rusty German, have absolutely no idea what they’re getting themselves into. Trading Southern charm and barbecue for European sophistication and schnitzel, the two women get a lot more than a… An essential part of any June 2025 reading list.

Making Friends Can Be Murder by Kathleen West

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

There’s thunder in the silence of Making Friends Can Be Murder, a novel where everything unsaid becomes everything urgent. Thirty-year-old Sarah Jones gets caught up solving a murder in her new neighborhood after unknowingly befriending a dangerous con artist (who’s nothing like what she seems) in this playful, twisty mystery from acclaimed author Kathleen West. It feels like kismet when Sarah Jones, newly relocated to Minneapolis after abruptly calling off her engagement, gets invited to join a group of women who share her same very common name.

For years Sarah has received all types of correspondence intended for different Sarah Joneses, but now it seems that this mistake has given her the opportunity for an instant community. What starts as a low-stakes meet-up called “The Sarah Jones Project” soon turns sinister when another local Sarah Jones is found dead, under suspicious circumstances, at the base of the downtown Minneapolis bridge. After fielding numerous calls from concerned loved ones ruling out their Sarah as the… Belongs on every shelf featuring notable books from June 2025.

The quietest of the books of June 2025, and one of the most lasting.

Sounds Like Love by Ashley Poston

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

Ashley Poston paints with emotion in Sounds Like Love, a novel that begins where most stories end. A hitmaking songwriter and a bitter musician share a startling and inexplicable connection that they’ll do anything to shake, in the next sparkling, magical book from Ashley Poston. Joni Lark is living the dream. She’s one of the most coveted songwriters in LA…and she can’t seem to write. There’s an emptiness inside her, and nothing seems to fill it. When she returns to her hometown of Vienna Shores, North Carolina, she hopes that the sand, the surf, and the concerts at The Revelry, her family’s music venue, will spark her inspiration.

But when she gets there, nothing is how she left it. Her best friend is avoiding her, her mother’s memories are fading fast, and The Revelry is closing. How can she think about writing her next song when everything is changing without her? Until she hears it. A melody in her head, lyric-less and… Part of what made June 2025 an exceptional month for fiction.

Gloves Off by Stephanie Archer

Genre: General Fiction

Brimming with soul, suspense, and raw truth.

In a world of noise, Gloves Off whispers its way into your heart and stays there. The only way to get my inheritance? Marry Alexei Volkov, the grumpiest enforcer in the NHL, a brutally handsome jerk, and the last man I’d ever fall for. In public, we act as besotted newlyweds, but in private, we’re at each other’s throats. He’s competitive, arrogant, and surly. The guy’s never cracked a smile in his life. He’s jealous of my ex, he glares at my high heels, and insists he’s not attracted to me. He’s only marrying me for citizenship.

Fighting with Alexei is more fun than expected, though, and beneath his grouchy exterior, Alexei is surprisingly caring, protective, and generous. He cooks for me and worries about my safety. The flowers he sends carry secret meanings, and he spends way too much money on me. He makes me sleep in his bed and calls me his wife. For a guy who said he’d never fall… This tale shaped the landscape of June 2025 literature.

Don’t Open Your Eyes by Liv Constantine

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

The rhythm of longing, the weight of memory, Don’t Open Your Eyes is stitched together with both. In this twisted psychological thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of the Reese’s Book Club Pick The Last Mrs. Parrish, a woman is tormented by nightmarish visions of her future, and then they start to come true. Annabelle has everything she’s ever wanted. A devoted husband, two wonderful daughters, and a career she loves. She couldn’t be happier. So why is she suddenly plagued by disturbing dreams of a future where she hates her husband and her daughters’ lives are at risk?

At first, she chalks the dreams up to an overactive imagination. But when details from her dreams, details she couldn’t possibly have predicted, begin to materialize, she realizes these aren’t just dreams but rather premonitions of a terrifying future. They all point to a singular choice, an unknown moment that holds Annabelle’s life in the balance. Then Annabelle has a dream that… Its release helped define June 2025 in books.

The Poppy Fields by Nikki Erlick

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

No book asks for your attention more gently, or holds it more fiercely, than The Poppy Fields. From the New York Times bestselling author of the smash-hit The Measure, a runaway bestseller and a Read with Jenna TODAY Show pick, comes a stunning speculative story of healing, self-discovery, forgiveness, and found friendship. What if there were a cure for the broken-hearted? Welcome to the Poppy Fields, where there’s hope for even the most battered hearts to heal.

Here, in a remote stretch of the California desert, lies an experimental and controversial treatment center that allows those suffering from the heartache of loss to sleep through their pain…and keep on sleeping. After patients awaken from this prolonged state of slumber, they will finally be healed. But only if they’re willing to accept the potential shadowy side effects. On a journey to this mystical destination are four very different strangers and one little dog: Ava, a book illustrator; Ray, a fireman; Sasha, an occupational therapist; Sky,… Standing strong among the most compelling June 2025 stories.

Proof that the books of June 2025 were not all noise and marketing.

The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau by Kristin Harmel

Genre: General Fiction

The kind of novel that changes how you see things.

To open The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau is to tumble into a mood, a moment, a murmur you won’t forget. Kristin Harmel, the New York Timesbestselling author who “is the best there is at sweeping historical drama” (Kelly Harms, author ofThe Seven Day Switch), returns with an electrifying new novel about two jewel thieves, a priceless bracelet that disappears in 1940s Paris, and a quest for answers in a decades-old murder.

Colette Marceau has been stealing jewels for nearly as long as she can remember, following the centuries-old code of honor instilled in her by her mother, take only from the cruel and unkind, and give to those in need. Never was their family tradition more important than seven decades earlier, during the Second World War, when Annabel and Colette worked side by side in Paris to fund the French Resistance. But one night in 1942, it all went wrong. Annabel was arrested by the Germans, and Colette’s four-year-old sister, Liliane, disappeared in the chaos… Ranks high among top June 2025 book releases.

This Princess Kills Monsters: The Misadventures of a Fairy-Tale Stepsister by Ry Herman

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

This Princess Kills Monsters: The Misadventures of a Fairy-Tale Stepsister begins like a half-remembered dream, vivid, fragile, and impossible to ignore. A princess with a mostly useless magical talent takes on horrible monsters, a dozen identical masked heroes, and a talking lion in a quest to save a kingdom, and herself, in this affectionate satire of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale The Twelve Huntsmen. Someone wants to murder Princess Melilot. This is sadly normal. Melilot is sick of being ordered to go on dangerous quests by her domineering stepmother. Especially since she always winds up needing to be rescued by her more magically talented stepsisters.

And now, she’s been commanded to marry a king she’s never met. When hideous spider-wolves attack her on the journey to meet her husband-to-be, she is once again rescued, but this time, by twelve eerily similar-looking masked huntsmen. Soon, she has to contend with near-constant attempts on her life, a talking lion that sets bewildering gender tests, and a king who can’t recognize his… This one added heart to the June 2025 lineup.

Murder Takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

Sometimes the quietest moments echo the loudest, and in Murder Takes a Vacation, Laura Lippman captures them with grace. Highly acclaimed <em>New York Times </em>bestseller Laura Lippman returns with an irresistible mystery featuring Muriel Blossom, a former private investigator and middle-aged widow whose vacation on a Parisian river cruise turns into a deadly international mystery…that only she can solve. Mrs. Blossom is not the kind of woman to play the lottery. She is practical, a devoted grandmother, and has a knack for blending into the background, which was an asset during her days assisting private investigator Tess Monaghan.

But when Mrs. Blossom finds a winning ticket in a parking lot, everything changes…including Mrs. Blossom. She is determined to see the world that sometimes feels as if it’s passing her by. But when Mrs. Blossom booked her cruise through France on the MS <em>Solitaire,</em> she did not expect to meet Allan on her transatlantic flight. He is the first man who’s sparked something inside her… A standout in the June 2025 new release crowd.

Someone Knows by Vi Keeland

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

The pages of Someone Knows rustle with secrets, each chapter pulling you deeper under its spell. An English professor’s deadly past comes back to haunt her in this chilling and sexy thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Vi Keeland. As a college English professor, Elizabeth looks forward to the start of each new semester teaching her creative writing seminar. At least until she reads chapter one of The Reckoning, a tale about a high school senior who has an affair with her teacher. To anyone else it would be the beginning of a great page-turner, but to Elizabeth it is the beginning of the end.

She knows this story. It’s all familiar because she lived it. The girl in the story was her best friend Jocelyn, and Elizabeth knows exactly how the story will end, with the professor dead. Because she was the one who killed him. Someone knows what Elizabeth did twenty years ago and her secret is about… This June 2025 book deserves more than just a glance.

No roundup of June 2025 books would be complete without it.

The Ripple Effect by Maggie North

Genre: General Fiction

The kind of novel that changes how you see things.

If stillness could speak, it would sound like the opening lines of The Ripple Effect. A grumpy burnt out physician and a sunshine psychologist must fake an engagement to save his whitewater canoeing/ relationship therapy startup in Maggie North’s sparkling second novel about starting over. Burned-out former ER doc Stellar J Byrd can solve any crisis except her own life. But with her financial prospects dwindling, she’d do anything to stay in her beloved, pricey wilderness town, even take a job as a camp physician at The Love Boat, an unspeakably touchy-feely whitewater canoeing/ relationship therapy startup. If there are sing-alongs, she’s calling in sick. What’s worse?

The founder is Lyle “McHuge” McHugh, the sunshiny psychologist she’s masterfully avoided since their disastrous hookup last year. Hardheaded relationship bean-counter Stellar plans to dodge his pathological generosity from now until September, but after a scathing article puts McHuge’s credibility into question, the two are forced into a fake engagement to salvage the camp’s… One of the most unforgettable reads of June 2025.

Fox by Joyce Carol Oates

Genre: General Fiction

An emotional knockout wrapped in beautiful prose.

There’s thunder in the silence of Fox, a novel where everything unsaid becomes everything urgent. A spellbinding novel of literary and psychological suspense about the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school, by the legendary author ‘who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers’ (<em>New York Times Magazine</em>) ‘Eerie, shocking, provoking, and beautifully written, <em>Fox</em> is yet further proof Oates is one of the greatest writers among us today’ Gillian Flynn Who is Francis Fox?

A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective… Critical to understanding what made June 2025 special in fiction.

A Far Better Thing by H.G. Parry

Genre: General Fiction

For readers who crave emotion as much as plot.

H.G. Parry paints with emotion in A Far Better Thing, a novel that begins where most stories end. H. G. Parry’s A Far Better Thing is a standalone, portal fantasy where Jonathan Strange & Mr. NorrelI meets A Tale of Two Cities in a heart-rending fantasy of faery revenge set during the French Revolution. I feared this was the best of times; I hoped it could not get any worse. The fairies stole Sydney Carton as a child, and made him a mortal servant of the Faerie Realm. Now, he has a rare opportunity for revenge against the fae and Charles Darnay, the changeling left in his stead.

It will take magic and cunning, cold iron and Realm silver, to hide his intentions from humans and fae and bring his plans to fruition. Shuttling between London and Paris during the Reign of Terror, generations of violence-begetting-violence lead him to a heartbreaking choice in the shadow of the guillotine. A must-read gem from the June 2025 publishing wave.

The Robin on the Oak Throne by K.A. Linde

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

In a world of noise, The Robin on the Oak Throne whispers its way into your heart and stays there. Can you trust the dark when you know that it lies? Kierse McKenna just shattered the Monster Treaty. Again. It wasn’t entirely her fault. The job was supposed to be simple: steal a goblin-made bracelet off of the Queen of the Nymphs in her own palace. Trade the bracelet for a way to uncover the truth about her past. Except everything goes sideways. And then he shows up to save her. Graves, the warlock who ensnared her, betrayed her, and left her to fend for herself. He’s a villain.

A monster draped in charm and shadows. And gods help her, he always knows exactly what she wants. But Graves never does anything for free. He has a job for his favorite little thief. One that will pit her against the most powerful monsters in existence, including his mortal enemy, the Oak King. An ancient artifact has… This book helped shape the literary voice of June 2025.

One more gem in a June 2025 book list that refuses to thin out.

Shaw Connolly Lives to Tell by Gillian French

Genre: General Fiction

It reaches into your chest and doesn’t let go.

The rhythm of longing, the weight of memory, Shaw Connolly Lives to Tell is stitched together with both. A page-turning, compelling thriller about a woman who will stop at nothing to uncover the truth behind her sister’s disappearance. Shaw Connolly is no stranger to trauma. As a fingerprints analyst, she’s one of the first on-site for crimes, including murder scenes and a mysterious string of arsons popping up throughout the rural Maine community her department serves.

But the tragedy of her little sister’s disappearance sixteen years ago has always weighed on her the most; Thea is never far from her thoughts or dreams, and Shaw knows that her obsession with finding the truth about Thea is driving her husband away and impacting her two boys. Still, she can’t let it go and has even started taking disturbing calls from a man named Anders Jansen who all but claims to have committed the crime. Anders taunts Shaw with hints and innuendo about what supposedly… June 2025 saw many books, this one stands out.

Next to Heaven by James Frey

Genre: General Fiction

It reaches into your chest and doesn’t let go.

No book asks for your attention more gently, or holds it more fiercely, than Next to Heaven. New Bethlehem, Connecticut is a town of picture-perfect lawns, manicured hedges, and multi-million-dollar homes, but beneath the designer yoga gear and country club memberships lies a darker reality. In this world of excess Devon and Belle have it all, beauty, money, status, but they want something more. Something dangerous. Something that makes them feel alive. Their solution? A party, a meticulously curated gathering of New Bethlehem’s elite, from a desperate ex-NFL quarterback to a hockey coach with a penchant for married women to a ruthless Wall Street “closer” who wields his wealth like a weapon. One night. Multiple betrayals. And a murder that will shatter New Bethlehem’s carefully constructed facade. Its emotional pull makes it a highlight of June 2025.

Rewind to Us by Molly Morris

Genre: General Fiction

An emotional knockout wrapped in beautiful prose.

To open Rewind to Us is to tumble into a mood, a moment, a murmur you won’t forget. Dixie Mulligan only has one plan for her annual California vacation this summer – to tell her best friend Sawyer that she’s in love with him. It doesn’t matter that things between them technically fell apart over spring break, and they haven’t spoken since – until Dixie arrives and realizes Sawyer has moved on (a fact made very apparent when she sees him kissing, um, someone else). Luckily, Dixie and her family have each been gifted with a Rewind.

All Dixie has to do is go back and redo the moment she thinks doomed hers and Sawyer’s relationship before it even began. But when family secrets start pouring out, Dixie’s not so sure even her Rewind will be enough to save what she and Sawyer had. Is the damage already done, or can she turn back the clock and give them one more chance? A nuanced release that made June 2025 memorable.

Hazel Says No by Jessica Berger Gross

Genre: General Fiction

A tender, thrilling, and entirely human story.

Hazel Says No begins like a half-remembered dream, vivid, fragile, and impossible to ignore. When a tight-knit family moves from Brooklyn to Maine, their lives are upended by an event that will alter their new community forever in this bighearted, sparkling debut for fans of Now Is Not the Time to Panic, Pineapple Street, and Schitt’s Creek Hazel Blum, please report to the principal’s office. Hazel Blum. When Hazel Blum’s father gets a tenured job at a prestigious college, she and her family relocate from the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn to a middle-of-nowhere college town in Maine.

With her mother, Claire, a clothing designer, and her father, Gus, an American Studies professor, Hazel and her eleven-year-old brother, Wolf, spend the summer at the town pool, where they acclimate to their new lives and connect with the town’s sprawling community. That is, until a dramatic fallout on the very first day of her senior year tips the fickle balance… Among the treasures June 2025 delivered to readers.

It sits comfortably among the top books of June 2025.

UnWorld by Jayson Greene

Genre: General Fiction

A tender, thrilling, and entirely human story.

Sometimes the quietest moments echo the loudest, and in UnWorld, Jayson Greene captures them with grace. From the author of Once More We Saw Stars comes a gripping novel about four intertwined lives that collide in the wake of a mysterious tragedy. Set in a near-future world where the boundaries between human and AI blur, the story challenges our understanding of consciousness and humanity. Anna is shattered by the violent death of her son, Alex, and tormented by the question of whether it was an accident or a suicide. Samantha is Alex’s best friend, and the only eyewitness to his death.

She keeps returning to the cliff where she watched him either jump or fall, trying to sift through the shards. Aviva is an “upload,” a digital entity composed of the sense memories of a human tether. But she’s “emancipated,” having left her human behind. Set free from her source and harboring a troubling secret, she finds temporary solace in the… This book enriched the June 2025 reading experience.

The Farmhouse by Chelsea Conradt

Genre: General Fiction

A story that lingers in your heart and your mind.

The pages of The Farmhouse rustle with secrets, each chapter pulling you deeper under its spell. Every woman who has lived on this farm has died. Emily just moved in. When Emily Hauk’s mother dies, it’s time for her and her husband, Josh, to finally leave San Francisco. A farm in rural Nebraska is everything they want for a fresh start: clear skies, low costs, and distance from the grief back home. They should have asked why the farm was for sale. Three years ago a teenage girl went missing from the farm. Soon afterward, the girl’s mother mysteriously died.

The deeper Emily digs the more stories she uncovers of women connected to her new home who’ve met their own dark ends. With each passing day Emily’s sanctuary slips further away. The barn seems to move throughout her property as though chasing her. Her mother’s favorite music drifts across the cornfield. She swears she saw blood in one of the farmhand’s… A core part of the June 2025 literary conversation.

The End of Summer by K.J. Micciche

Genre: General Fiction

The kind of novel that changes how you see things.

If stillness could speak, it would sound like the opening lines of The End of Summer. Gretchen Andrews is a homegrown Cape Cod lifer. She’s just a regular girl studying to be a teacher, making ends meet by waitressing at the Diamond Excelsior Resort. At least, that was the case before Memorial Day weekend. Brady Hawthorne is the Assistant Manager at the Diamond Excelsior’s main restaurant. That is, until Gretchen comes along and takes down his summer plans in one fell swoop.

Lesson learned: Never ask a girl who can’t walk in heels to be your lead server in private dining…unless you want to lose your job when she inevitably dumps a tray of hot seafood in a celebrity’s lap. Now in the height of tourist season, Gretchen and Brady find themselves wageless with mounting bills and few options for traditional employment. As the job search becomes dire, Gretchen seizes an opportunity working at the Cape’s premier, underground bachelorette-party destination, a… Recognized for elevating June 2025 fiction.

A Novel Murder: A Mystery by E.C. Nevin

Genre: General Fiction

Layered, lyrical, and alive with tension.

There’s thunder in the silence of A Novel Murder: A Mystery, a novel where everything unsaid becomes everything urgent. Welcome to the Killer Lines Crime Fiction Festival, the place for stars of the genre to meet their adoring fans . . . but be careful, this year the murders aren’t just on the page. Author Jane Hepburn is determined to make her time at the Killer Lines festival worthwhile. This is her chance to change her fortunes and make her fictional Detective Baker a household name.

And if she has to resort to sneaking into the book tent after hours to rearrange some books so hers are front and center, so be it. But when Jane encounters the dead body of renowned (and reviled) literary agent Carrie Marks, the festival takes on a decidedly different tone. Joined by Carrie’s newest client, debut novelist Natasha Martez, and the agency’s hapless intern, Daniel Thurston, Jane decides to put her fictional sleuthing skills to use in the… This title gave depth to the June 2025 releases.

Before Dorothy by Hazel Gaynor

Genre: General Fiction

Layered, lyrical, and alive with tension.

Hazel Gaynor paints with emotion in Before Dorothy, a novel that begins where most stories end. Long before Dorothy visits Oz, her aunt, Emily Gale, sets off on her own grand adventure, leaving gritty Chicago behind for Kansas and a life that will utterly change her, in this transporting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Hazel Gaynor. Chicago, 1924: Emily Gale and her new husband, Henry, yearn to leave the bustle of Chicago behind for the promise of their own American dream. But leaving the city means leaving Emily’s beloved sister, Annie, who was once closer to her than anyone in the world.

Kansas, 1932: Emily and Henry have made a life in the warmth of the community of Liberal, Kansas, and among the harsh beauty of the prairie. Their lives hold a precarious and hopeful purpose, until tragedy strikes and their orphaned niece, Dorothy, lands on their doorstep. The wide-eyed child isn’t the only thing to disrupt Emily’s… This novel is part of why June 2025 mattered to readers.

Bald-Faced Liar by Victoria Helen Stone

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

In a world of noise, Bald-Faced Liar whispers its way into your heart and stays there. Living a lie becomes a matter of life and death for a woman hiding from her past in a novel of mounting psychological suspense by the bestselling author of Jane Doe and The Hook. Traveling nurse Elizabeth May has a promising new home in Santa Cruz. And another new identity. It’s a pattern of reinvention for a woman escaping her traumatic childhood, and hiding from the decades of notoriety and destruction that followed. Invisibility has kept Elizabeth safe. Until now. After all these years, someone sees her for who she is.

Threat by threat, a vengeful stalker is dismantling Elizabeth’s carefully constructed lifetime of lies. And no one in her temporary circle can be trusted, not her fleeting new love interest, not the supportive friend she knows only from online forums, and certainly not the police. They’ve never been there for her. As fear sharpens to terror,… A brilliant representation of June 2025’s creative range.

I Did Warn Her by Sian Gilbert

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

The rhythm of longing, the weight of memory, I Did Warn Her is stitched together with both. A luxurious yacht, a gorgeous crew with secrets and rivalries…and murder! I Did Warn Her is a cunning locked room mystery set on a billionaire’s yacht, by the author of last year’s sensation She Started It. The Ophelia is your typical billionaire yacht: ridiculously luxurious, owned by a ruthless money man, and staffed by a crew whose only job is to indulge the guests’ every wish. Model-gorgeous Sasha is a last-minute hire for a weeklong Atlantic crossing. She joins fellow stewardesses Jade, Imogen, Euphemia, and Lola.

The Ophelia’s stewardesses are almost identical, blonde and model-gorgeous, and all were lured to the Ophelia by high wages and a chance to leave their problems behind when they set sail. But despite its sleek opulence, the Ophelia isn’t as heavenly as it seems. A stewardess on the previous charter died under mysterious circumstances, the guests’ expensive jewelry keeps disappearing, and… Among the best literary achievements of June 2025.

Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell

Genre: General Fiction

It reaches into your chest and doesn’t let go.

No book asks for your attention more gently, or holds it more fiercely, than Wearing the Lion. This second novel from Nebula Award-winning John Wiswell brings a humanizing, redemptive touch to the Hercules story in this mythological fantasy for fans of Jennifer Saint and Elodie Harper Heracles, hero of Greece, dedicates all his feats to Hera, goddess of family. Heracles’ mother raised him to revere Hera, as her attempt to avoid the goddess’ wrath. Unbeknownst to Heracles, he is yet another child Hera’s husband, Zeus, had out of wedlock. Hera loathes every minute of Heracles’ devotion. She finally snaps and sends the Furies to make Heracles kill himself.

But the moment Heracles goes mad, his children playfully ambush him, and he slays them instead. When the madness fades, Heracles’s wife, Megara, convinces him to seek revenge. Together they’ll hunt the Furies and learn which god did this. Believing Hera is the only god he can still trust, Heracles prays to Hera, who… Widely appreciated as a standout June 2025 novel.

Readers looking for standout books of June 2025 should start here.

Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

To open Bug Hollow is to tumble into a mood, a moment, a murmur you won’t forget. A decades-spanning family saga featuring the messy but loving Samuelson clan trying to make sense of the world after the loss of their son Ellis When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later.

From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep. Each Samuelson has sought their own solace: Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching and numbing her pain after the loss of her beloved son; her husband, Phil, had found respite in a love that… This story was made to be remembered from June 2025.

A Royal Mile by Samantha Young

Genre: General Fiction

The kind of novel that changes how you see things.

Samantha Young’s A Royal Mile opens like a half-remembered dream, vivid, fragile, and impossible to ignore. A steamy enemies-to-friends-to-lovers romance from New York Times Bestselling Author Samantha Young. It’s hard to stay in the friend zone when the attraction is this hot… Going into my senior year of university at war with a member of the British royal family wasn’t in my carefully laid plans. Sebastian Thorne might be the grandson of a princess, but it’ll take more than a royal pardon to get me to forgive him for pretending to be someone he’s not. But Sebastian is determined to be my friend.

Even if it means signing up to a psych experiment just to get me to talk to him. Who knew a sincere apology and him saying my name in that posh English accent would make me weak in the knees? This year was supposed to be about my dissertation and graduate school. Only, Sebastian has thrown my ordered… Its voice echoes in the halls of June 2025 fiction.

Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell

Genre: Domestic Thriller

The kind of novel that changes how you see things.

Sometimes the quietest moments echo the loudest, and in Don’t Let Him In, Lisa Jewell captures them with grace. From #1 New York Times bestseller Lisa Jewell, an author “at the very top of her game” (Lucy Foley), three women are connected by one man in this kaleidoscopic thriller. “Who are you? Who are you really?” Nick Radcliffe is a man of substance and good taste. He has a smile that could melt the coldest heart and a knack for putting others at ease. He’s just what Nina Swann needed in her life after her husband’s unexpected death.

But to Nina’s adult daughter, Ash, Nick seems too slick, too polished, too good to be true. Without telling her mother, Ash begins digging into Nick’s past. What she finds is more than unsettling… “Because there are things that don’t make sense, and I’ve been so patient, so very patient…” Martha is a florist living in a neighboring town with her infant daughter and her devoted husband… June 2025 was richer thanks to this book’s arrival.

The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

The pages of The Girls Who Grew Big rustle with secrets, each chapter pulling you deeper under its spell. From the author of Oprah’s Book Club pick and New York Times best seller Nightcrawling, here is an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle. Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida.

When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck. The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for… This one deepened the dialogue around June 2025 books.

The Compound by Aisling Rawle

Genre: General Fiction

Layered, lyrical, and alive with tension.

If stillness could speak, it would sound like the opening lines of The Compound. You wake up in a compound in the middle of the desert, along with nine other women. All of you are young, all beautiful, all keen to escape the grinding poverty, political unrest and environmental catastrophe of the outside world. You realise that cameras are tracking your every move, broadcasting to millions of reality TV fans. Soon, ten men will arrive on foot – if they all survive the journey. What will you have to do to win? And what happens to the losers? LORD OF THE FLIES meets LOVE ISLAND in this explosive, addictive debut novel, as bingeable as the best reality TV, with dark undercurrents of literary dystopia and consumerist satire. An emotional cornerstone of the June 2025 catalog.

It Happened on the Lake by Lisa Jackson

Genre: General Fiction

It reaches into your chest and doesn’t let go.

There’s thunder in the silence of It Happened on the Lake, a novel where everything unsaid becomes everything urgent. In an intense, twisty, Hitchcockian standalone spin on Rear Window from #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jackson, a woman returns to the Oregon town where a nightmare unfolded 20 years ago, and is waiting to engulf her again. For fans of J.T. Ellison, Paula Hawkins, Karin Slaughter, and Riley Sager. The huge Victorian house on Lake Twilight belongs to Harper Reed Prescott, as does the private island on which it sits. Harper wants little to do with either.

Twenty years ago, Harper’s grandmother died suspiciously while in her care, on the same night that Harper’s boyfriend disappeared. His body was never found, and no charges were filed. But the rumors haven’t faded. There have been other deaths, other accidents. All revolving around Harper and her family. Now Harper’s marriage is over, her college-age daughter is estranged, and Harper just wants to sell the property… It added brilliance to June 2025’s publishing timeline.

Whispers of the Lake by Shanora Williams

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

Shanora Williams paints with emotion in Whispers of the Lake, a novel that begins where most stories end. A marriage on the rocks, a missing friend, an investigative journalist, a tangle of shocking lies, and a peaceful North Carolina lakefront cottage converge in this irresistibly twisty new psychological thriller from New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, perfect for readers of Liv Constantine, Tarryn Fisher, Kellye Garrett, and Caroline Kepnes. At the peak of her career, investigative reporter Rose Howard is exhausted from trying to manage her seemingly perfect life.

With her marriage to her one true love collapsing, she desperately needs to rest, regroup, and decide which way to go next. The direction becomes clear when she discovers that her former best friend, Eve Castillo, isn’t responding to attempts to contact her at the North Carolina cottage where she’s vacationing. Rose knows Eve can be flaky and irresponsible, that’s why they fell out. Still, Rose heads to the tranquil small town of Sage… A book that reflects the power of June 2025 storytelling.

A Treachery of Swans by A.B. Poranek

Genre: General Fiction

Devastating, uplifting, and achingly real.

In a world of noise, A Treachery of Swans whispers its way into your heart and stays there. An enthralling sapphic retelling of Swan Lake, for fans of Allison Saft and V.E Schwab. Magic has long been outlawed in Auréal . Odile has always known she’d be the one to restore it. Raised by a sorcerer, Odile has spent years preparing for the heist of a lifetime. It’s perfectly simple. Impersonate a princess, infiltrate the palace, steal the king’s enchanted crown and restore magic to the kingdom.

But when the King is unexpectedly murdered, she’s forced to recruit the help of Marie d’Odette, the real princess, and the two begin to unravel a web of lies and deceit that leaves Odile uncertain of who to trust. Soon though Odile must decide – her mission or the girl she’s falling for? The fate of the Kingdom depends on her making the right choice. . . Not just a story, a June 2025 milestone.

It takes one of the boldest swings of the books released in June 2025.

Finders Keepers by Sarah Adler

Genre: General Fiction

Layered, lyrical, and alive with tension.

The rhythm of longing, the weight of memory, Finders Keepers is stitched together with both. Two estranged best friends find that a long-abandoned treasure hunt might be the key to a fresh start, for both their futures and their feelings, from USA Today bestselling author Sarah Adler. Last week, Nina Hunnicutt was a professor about to move into a gorgeous new apartment with her long-term boyfriend. Now, she’s single, unemployed, and living with her parents.

Even more surprising is the fact that Quentin Bell, her childhood neighbor (and okay, fine, crush), is also back in town, and wants to resume the treasure hunt that ended their friendship almost two decades ago. Hoping the reward promised to whoever finds the rumored riches left behind by the town’s eccentric turn-of-the-century seltzer magnate will help her get her life back on track, Nina agrees. Granted, last time the search resulted in a broken heart and seventeen years of silence. But Nina’s older and wiser now, surely… Belongs in every roundup of great June 2025 books.

Happy Wife by Meredith Lavender

Genre: General Fiction

Layered, lyrical, and alive with tension.

No book asks for your attention more gently, or holds it more fiercely, than Happy Wife. A young woman must find her missing husband and prove her innocence in this twisty, unputdownable novel set in an ultrawealthy Florida community where looks can kill. Nora Davies doesn’t exactly fit in to Winter Park, Florida, where old-guard Floridians mix with the tax-fleeing coastal elite. Twenty-eight and barely making ends meet working at a country club, Nora feels like she’s going nowhere fast. Enter Will a prominent forty-six-year-old lawyer, father to a teenage daughter and recently divorced.

The two set Winter Park’s social scene agog when they fall in love and marry after a whirlwind Cinderella-style courtship. But Winter Park is fully upended when Will disappears the morning after a birthday bash Nora throws for him. Going back and forth between Nora and Will’s romance and the search in the wake of Will’s mysterious disappearance, Nora must answer the question from all Where. Is…. Stands out for what it brought to June 2025 fiction.

The No-End House by Jeremy Bates

Genre: General Fiction

An emotional knockout wrapped in beautiful prose.

To open The No-End House is to tumble into a mood, a moment, a murmur you won’t forget. In the tradition of Saw and Eli Roth’s Hostel, but with the evil supernatural twists of Stephen King, Alma Katsu, and Christopher Golden, two strangers unwittingly volunteer for the ultimate haunted house challenge in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. Nine rooms. Nine tests. One chance to get out alive. Bestselling author Jeremy Bates invites you to spend the night in The No-End House. Where the nightmares begin as soon as you enter, and the terror never ends . . . It’s the ultimate haunted house challenge.

A crumbling stone mansion nestled in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, it may be the best-kept secret in Europe, a little-known attraction featuring nine escape rooms to explore, nine puzzles to solve, and a large cash prize for anyone who makes it to the end. There’s just one catch: no one makes it to the end of The No-End House. . . …. This book helped define the best of June 2025 releases.

Sunny Side Up by Katie Sturino

Genre: General Fiction

A story that lingers in your heart and your mind.

Sunny Side Up begins like a half-remembered dream, vivid, fragile, and impossible to ignore. From body-acceptance advocate and MEGABABE founder Katie Sturino comes a heartwarming and hilarious debut novel for fans for Emily Henry and Sex and the City Sunny Greene is thirty-five, recently divorced, facing the looming prospect of going solo to her little brother’s wedding, and currently trying to find anything plus-sized in the Bergdorf Goodman swimsuit department that doesn’t make her want to cry. It’s not going well. But isn’t rock bottom the perfect place to start a climb? She decides it’s now or never.

Sunny has her PR empire, her gorgeous Chelsea apartment, her two dogs, and her loyal best friends. Maybe it’s time to just love her body and accept herself for who she is. With a new commitment to confidence, her journey begins. Who says a plus-sized divorcee can’t put herself first, feel beautiful, and date up a storm? Of course things are… A vivid example of June 2025’s literary excellence.

The Ex-Girlfriend Murder Club by Gloria Chao

Genre: General Fiction

An emotional knockout wrapped in beautiful prose.

Sometimes the quietest moments echo the loudest, and in The Ex-Girlfriend Murder Club, Gloria Chao captures them with grace. In this laugh-out-loud murder mystery, three women dating the same man band together to get revenge, but when they discover his body, they’ll need to solve his murder before they go down for it. The body in the closet was going to be a problem. Kathryn Hu knew it. Yes, Tucker Jones was a cheating scumbag, and yes, she’d agreed to meet Olivia and Elle, Tucker’s <em>other</em> girlfriends, to exact revenge for all he’d put them through… But then they found him. Dead. Do they look guilty? Yes.

Do they feel guilty for having wished him dead just hours before? Maybe a little. But, solid motive and a crime scene covered in their DNA aside, they’re <em>innocent</em>. They swear. To clear their names, Kat, Olivia and Elle team up to find the real killer. But as they go undercover and lie to everyone, including the hot detective working the… June 2025’s identity is incomplete without this title.

The Undercurrent by Sarah Sawyer

Genre: General Fiction

It reaches into your chest and doesn’t let go.

The pages of The Undercurrent rustle with secrets, each chapter pulling you deeper under its spell. An overwhelmed new mother becomes obsessed with the unsolved disappearance of a young girl from her small Texas hometown, and unearths her own family’s dark secret. It’s 2011 and Deecie Jeffries’s missing person’s case in Austin, Texas, is still cold. New mom Bee, struggling with postpartum depression, is living in Portland, Maine, having left Austin–and those memories–far behind. Until Leo, her childhood crush and her estranged twin Gus’s best friend, suddenly resurfaces, drawing Bee back into their shared past.

Bee’s predictable life is upended, pushing her to return to her childhood home and piece together a neighborhood’s shattered history. Bee becomes consumed with a need to uncover the truth about Deecie’s disappearance and what happened to the families who lived across the field from one another, Gus, Leo, and their mothers: Mary, a homemaker, whose only escape is the local community theater, and Diana, a serious academic… Left its mark on the June 2025 literary landscape.

The Accidental Favorite by Fran Littlewood

Genre: General Fiction

Brimming with soul, suspense, and raw truth.

If stillness could speak, it would sound like the opening lines of The Accidental Favorite. From the New York Times bestselling author of Amazing Grace Adams comes a wryly resonant and deeply moving family dramedy investigating the question so many of us have asked ourselves: do my parents have a favorite? Vivienne and Patrick Fisher have done an excellent job raising their three daughters, Alex, Nancy, and Eva. They’re well-adjusted women with impressive careers, caring partners, exciting hobbies, and sweet children. So it’s with great anticipation that three generations of Fishers gather at a beautiful glass house in the English countryside for a weeklong celebration of Vivienne’s seventieth birthday.

But when Patrick’s reaction to a freak accident on the first day of the trip inadvertently reveals that he has a favorite daughter, no one is prepared for the shockwaves it sends through the family. Decades-old unresolved sibling rivalries are suddenly unmasked. And be it newly uncovered smoking habits, ancient crushes,… A conversation piece among June 2025’s best books.

A Magic Deep and Drowning by Hester Fox

Genre: General Fiction

Layered, lyrical, and alive with tension.

There’s thunder in the silence of A Magic Deep and Drowning, a novel where everything unsaid becomes everything urgent. Set in the waning days of the Dutch Golden Age, this enchanting, lush reimagining of The Little Mermaid is perfect for fans of Jesse Burton’s The Miniaturist and Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar. The Dutch Republic, 1650. One fine spring day in Friesland, twenty-year-old Clara van Wieren is faced with an ill omen: a whale, beached and rotting in the noonday sun.

But Clara doesn’t believe in magic and superstition, and this portent is quickly dismissed when a proposal from a wealthy merchant arrives, promising Clara the freedom she seeks from her mother’s overbearing rule. When her attempts at overseeing the household at the family’s estate lead to her chance encounter with a young man with russet hair and sparkling eyes the color of the sea, she finds herself strangely drawn to him. As Clara grows closer to Maurits, she must choose between the steady, gentle… A novel that resonated across June 2025’s readership.

A highlight among the many books June 2025 delivered.

The Four Engagement Rings of Sybil Rain by Hannah Brown

Genre: General Fiction

For readers who crave emotion as much as plot.

Hannah    Brown paints with emotion in The Four Engagement Rings of Sybil Rain, a novel that begins where most stories end. “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” meets “Anyone But You” in the second romantic novel from New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and “The Bachelorette” star Hannah Brown. Starling Ranch Inn promises to be a tropical paradise, and Sybil can’t wait to escape there, all expenses paid. Well technically the expenses were paid, last year, when she was supposed to go to Hawaii for her honeymoon with her then-fiancé Jamie.

But the wedding didn’t go as planned (or at all), and now she’s decided to use those hotel vouchers alone, before they expire. Sybil’s expecting mai tais, med spas and me-time, so she nearly plunges backwards into the infinity pool when she sees that Jamie has had the same idea! His family business is thinking of buying the resort, so he’s here with a gorgeous, tangerine bikini-clad “colleague” to give the property a once-over. Desperate to save… Elevated the expectations of June 2025 fiction.

When Javi Dumped Mari by Mia Sosa

Genre: General Fiction

Brimming with soul, suspense, and raw truth.

In a world of noise, When Javi Dumped Mari whispers its way into your heart and stays there. The USA Today bestselling author of The Worst Best Man is back with a fun and flirty rom-com about a pact between friends that goes awry when one of them unexpectedly announces they’re getting married. On the eve of their college graduation, best friends Javier Báez and Marisol Campos swore never to date someone the other doesn’t approve of. Now, ten years later, Javi has a problem.

Mari, the woman he’s secretly pined for since sophomore year, is planning to marry, and Javi didn’t even get the chance to vet the Pedro Pascal knockoff. Mari, a successful entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, is no longer seeking Javi’s dating advice or waiting for him to declare his love for her. Instead, she’s made a different pact, with herself. And to succeed, she’ll need to build a future with someone else. With his life and theater career finally on… Echoes with the emotional core of June 2025’s best stories.

The Dark Library by Mary Anna Evans

Genre: General Fiction

For readers who crave emotion as much as plot.

The rhythm of longing, the weight of memory, The Dark Library is stitched together with both. Can a family’s dark history repeat itself? Estella Ecker has returned to Rockfall House, the last place on earth she wants to be. Years after she ran away from her overbearing father, she has been forced back home to walk in his footsteps, teaching at the college he dominated and living in the fabulous home where he entertained artists and scholars for decades―and perhaps she owns it now, because her mercurial mother has disappeared.

At the center of everything―the whispers, the rumors, the secrets―is her father’s library of rare books, which she had been forbidden to touch while he was alive to stop her. Everyone in town is watching Estella, with her dead father’s name on their lips, and no one seems to care about her missing mother. Who were her parents, really, and is the answer hidden somewhere in the depths of Rockfall House?… This book belongs in every conversation about June 2025.

Julie Tudor Is Not a Psychopath by Jennifer Holdich

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

No book asks for your attention more gently, or holds it more fiercely, than Julie Tudor Is Not a Psychopath. Julie Tudor is Not a Psychopath. She is 49 and has a fantastic job (well-maintained spreadsheets are the lynchpin of an efficient office), a beautiful house (some may wonder how she got the money for it, but nothing has been proved) and the man of her dreams. Julie Tudor is Not a Stalker. Sean is 25 and the love of Julie’s life. The only problem is, he thinks he’s in love with someone else. And Julie Tudor is definitely, definitely not a serial killer.

But Julie has found herself in a similar situation before. And if there’s one thing Julie knows, it’s how to get rid of the competition… After all, what’s a little murder in the name of true love? It offered something unique to June 2025’s book lovers.

A Happy Marriage by A.R. Torre

Genre: General Fiction

Brimming with soul, suspense, and raw truth.

To open A Happy Marriage is to tumble into a mood, a moment, a murmur you won’t forget. What holds a strong and loving marriage together? Lies and secrets in a novel of twisting psychological suspense by a New York Times bestselling author. Los Angeles homicide detective Dinah Marino may have a complicated relationship with her family, but her psychiatrist husband, Joe, makes her feel safe, secure, and happy. She couldn’t want for a more loving or trusting man. But throughout their ten-year marriage, she’s been keeping a secret from him, a secret she’d take to the grave.

Dr. Joe Marino loves his wife more than anything in this world, but there are things he’s learned to keep close to the chest. When a missing woman tied to his wife’s latest case is admitted to his hospital, doctor-patient confidentiality lands their marriage on some new and uneven ground. As Dinah digs deeper into her case, tension works its way inside their picture-perfect home. Now… A defining voice in the June 2025 release lineup.

Total Dreamboat by Katelyn Doyle

Genre: General Fiction

For readers who crave emotion as much as plot.

Total Dreamboat begins like a half-remembered dream, vivid, fragile, and impossible to ignore. From the beloved author of Just Some Stupid Love Story, an irresistible rom-com about what happens when a cruise ship romance goes…overboard Hope Lanover needs a vacation. Her relationship has imploded, her creative ambitions have flatlined, and she can’t seem to locate the badass girl she used to be. So when her best friend, a lifestyle influencer looking for a rich husband, invites her along a luxury cruise, Hope goes along with it…despite hating cruises, and having no interest in a fling with their older clientele. Felix Segrave can’t imagine anything worse than a cruise.

Sober, determinedly single and a workaholic chef, he hates leaving his restaurant and routine. But when his parents surprise him and his sisters with tickets to celebrate their anniversary, he can’t say no, he’s disappointed them too many times in his troubled past. Hope and Felix are prepared to grin and bear it, until… Among the most talked-about books released in June 2025, this one demands attention.

Among Friends by Hal Ebbott

Genre: General Fiction

A story that lingers in your heart and your mind.

Sometimes the quietest moments echo the loudest, and in Among Friends, Hal Ebbott captures them with grace. The announcement of a major literary debut: What begins as a celebration takes a sudden turn when a shocking betrayal shatters the trust between families. It’s an autumn weekend at a comfortable New York country house where two deeply intertwined families have gathered to mark the host’s fifty-second birthday. Together, the group forms an enviable portrait of middle age.

The wives and husbands have been friends for over thirty years, their teenage daughters have grown up together, and the drinks, dinners, rituals, and games that form their days all reflect the rich bonds between them. This weekend, however, something is different. An unforeseen curdling of envy and resentment will erupt into an unspeakable act, the ramifications of which are enormous. Accusations, denials, and shattered illusions follow, driving wedges between friends, spouses, children and parents, and exposing the treacherous fault lines on which these families have… A top contender in the literary highlights of June 2025.

El Dorado Drive by Megan Abbott

Genre: General Fiction

Impossible to put down, unforgettable once finished.

The pages of El Dorado Drive rustle with secrets, each chapter pulling you deeper under its spell. When Harper moves in with her sister Pam, she’s surprised to find Pam doing so well financially after her messy divorce. After all, Pam’s ex-husband wiped their bank accounts, even stole from their kids. But Pam managed to find her way back, thanks to the Wheel. Twice a month the women of the Wheel meet. New members bring cash to add to a pool and then gift to one lucky member. It’s all about giving back. Lifting each other up, as women should, as they must. When Harper is invited, with the promise of an end to her financial burdens, the sisters inadvertently unleash a darkness lurking within the group. If they’re not careful it might just get them killed. If you’re browsing June 2025 reading lists, don’t overlook this title.

These books released in June 2025 reshaped our emotional landscapes, challenged our perspectives, and gave us unforgettable moments. From the best books of June 2025 to new favorites, this list represents the month’s finest storytelling.

June set a high bar, and the presses have not slowed since. For the industry view of what is coming next, Publishers Weekly tracks the season ahead, and our monthly roundups will keep sorting the shelf for you.