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Reading List 2025: 15 New Books

FRNKOW Book Club, reading list 2025

FRNKOW Book Club

Reading List 2025
15 New Books

FRNKOW Book Club






Reading List 2025:
15 New Books






FRNKOW Book Club, reading list 2025

           2025 brings an outstanding selection of new releases across genres. From masterful storytelling to gripping thrillers, poetic debuts and thought-provoking histories, this year’s lineup offers something for every reader. David Szalay’s Flesh explores love and ambition in 21st-century Europe, while Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness delivers a poignant tale of unlikely friendship. Han Kang’s We Do Not Part unearths buried traumas and Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me redefines the crime genre with haunting brilliance.

History buffs will be captivated by Michael Luo’s Strangers in the Land, a profound narrative on Chinese-American history, while fans of twists and thrills can dive into The Perfect Home by Daniel Kenitz or A Particularly Nasty Case by Adam Kay. Meanwhile, R.F. Kuang’s mysterious Katabasis and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s soaring Atmosphere take readers to bold new worlds.

Whether you’re drawn to searing essays, tales of love and loss or unforgettable characters, this list of 15 books promises to make 2025 a stellar year for readers everywhere.





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

Flesh

David Szalay

From Booker shortlisted author David Szalay, comes a propulsive, hypnotic novel, about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.

Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand and his life soon spirals out of control.

As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.

Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living and what breaks it.





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

The Emperor of Gladness

Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family and a community at the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing – formal innovation, syntactic dexterity and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness – are on full display in this story of loss, hope and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

Open, Heaven

Seán Hewitt

A stunning debut novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, reminiscent of Garth Greenwell and Justin Torres in the intensity of its evocation of sexual awakening.

Set in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each other’s lives.

James — a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old — is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his reach: autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned and his mother having moved to France for another man — Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him “like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre,” drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke’s bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.

Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

Strangers in the Land

Michael Luo

From New Yorker writer Michael Luo comes a masterful narrative history of the Chinese in America that traces the sorrowful theme of exclusion and documents their more than century-long struggle to belong.

Strangers in the Land tells the story of a people who, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan – Gold Mountain. Americans initially welcomed these Chinese arrivals, but, as their numbers grew, horrific episodes of racial terror erupted on the Pacific coast. A prolonged economic downturn that idled legions of white workingmen helped create the conditions for what came next: a series of progressively more onerous federal laws aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country, marking the first time the United States barred a people based on their race. In a captivating debut, Michael Luo follows the Chinese from these early years to modern times, as they persisted in the face of bigotry and persecution, revealing anew the complications of our multiracial democracy.

Luo writes of early victims of anti-Asian violence, like Gene Tong, a Los Angeles herbalist who was dragged from his apartment and hanged by a mob during one of the worst mass lynchings in the country’s history; of demagogues like Denis Kearney, a sandlot orator who became the face of the anti-Chinese movement in the late-1870s; of the pioneering activist Wong Chin Foo and other leaders of the Chinese community, who pressed their new homeland to live up to its stated ideals. At the book’s heart is a shameful chapter of American history: the brutal driving out of Chinese residents from towns across the American West. The Chinese became the country’s first undocumented immigrants: hounded, counted, suspected, surveilled.

In 1889, while upholding Chinese exclusion, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field characterized them as “strangers in the land.” Only in 1965 did America’s gates swing open to people like Luo’s parents, immigrants from Taiwan. Today there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States and yet the “stranger” label, Luo writes, remains. Drawing on archives from across the country and written with a New Yorker writer’s style and sweep, Strangers in the Land is revelatory and unforgettable, an essential American story.





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

I Want to Burn This Place Down

Maris Kreizman

A debut essay collection by the inimitable cultural critic Maris Kreizman — an introspective, searing account of the life experiences that have pushed this former “good Democrat” even further to the political left.

At the heart of this funny, acerbic and bravely honest book of essays is Maris Kreizman, a former rule follower and ambition monster who once believed the following truths to be self-evident: that working very hard would lead to admission to a good college, which would lead to a good job at a good company, which would then lead to personal fulfillment and a sense of purpose, along with adequate health care and eventual home ownership and plenty of money waiting in a retirement account. Like any good Democrat and feminist, she believed that if she just worked hard and played by the rules, she was guaranteed a safe and comfortable life.

Now in her forties, the only thing Maris Kreizman knows for sure is that she no longer has faith in American institutions or any of their hollow promises. Now she knows that the rules are meant to serve some folks better than others; and, actually, they serve no one all that well — not even Kreizman. Disturbed by the depth and scope of the liberal myths in which she once so fervently believed, Kreizman takes readers on an intimate journey that revisits some of her most profound revelations, demonstrating that it’s never too late to become radicalized.

With Kreizman’s signature wit and blunt self-reflection,and more than a little transformative rage, I Want to Burn This Place Down is a book for anyone who wishes they could go back in time to give their younger selves the real truth about the fractured country they have inherited — and the encouragement to rebuild something better in its place.





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

We Do Not Part

Han Kang

Like a long winter’s dream, this new novel by Nobel Prize winner Han Kang takes us on a journey from contemporary South Korea into its painful history.

One morning in December, Kyungha receives a message from her friend Inseon saying she has been hospitalized in Seoul and asking that Kyungha join her urgently. The two women have last seen each other over a year before, on Jeju Island, where Inseon lives and where, two days before this reunion, she has injured herself chopping wood. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation, Inseon has had to leave behind her pet bird, which will quickly die unless it receives food. Bedridden, she begs Kyungha to take the first plane to Jeju to save the animal.

Unfortunately, a snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and snow squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save Inseon’s bird – or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn’t yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness which awaits her at her friend’s house.

There, the long-buried story of Inseon’s family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter and in the archive painstakingly assembled at the house, documenting a terrible massacre on the island of 30,000 civilians, murdered in 1948-49.

We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination and above all a powerful indictment against forgetting. These beautiful pages form much more than a novel – they illuminate a traumatic memory, buried for decades, that still resonates today.





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

Death Takes Me

Cristina Rivera Garza

When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: ‘Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.’

After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? While more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems and the darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city.

From one of Mexico’s greatest living writers, Death Takes Me is a dark and dazzling literary thriller that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, in a world where death is rampant and violence is gendered. Unfolding with the charged logic of a dream in sentences as sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims – a word which, in Spanish, is always feminine – it explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

The Talent

Daniel D’Addario

Hollywood Wives meets A Visit from the Goon Squad in this emotional debut novel from Variety chief correspondent and a moderator of the Actors on Actors series about a group of actresses confronting their careers, their secrets and each other throughout one turbulent awards season.

As Hollywood prepares for its most glamorous evening, five actresses compete to see who will claim the top prize.

Adria, a dignified and highly regarded grand dame of the movie industry, is intent on cementing her legacy as one of the greatest thespians of all time, even as the younger generation creeps up quickly behind her. Bitty must keep a nervous breakdown — and an increasingly debilitating alcohol addiction — at bay, as she searches for genuine closeness in an unforgiving landscape. Contessa, a former child star, is determined to make the world and her leading man, take her seriously. Davina attempts to find her footing in superficial Los Angeles, a far cry from her roots as a serious London stage actress. And Jenny — always the underdog to her rival, Adria — sees this awards season as her personal redemption, a chance to atone for past mistakes and make up for missed opportunities.

With humor, wit and an insider’s insight, The Talent peels back the layers of women who are in the business of being perceived. And while they work to push their careers forward and maintain the public’s goodwill, all five are forced to confront truths about themselves that they would rather ignore: Could Adria and Jenny have been a team all these years, rather than bitter enemies? Is it their responsibility to offer a lifeline to poor Bitty, who is clearly teetering on the edge? Should Contessa and Davina dim their own rising stars to make those around them more comfortable? What do women in the spotlight owe each other and themselves?





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

The Three Lives of Cate Kay

Kate Fagan

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo meets First Lie Wins in this electric, voice-driven debut novel about an elusive bestselling author who decides to finally confess her true identity after years of hiding from her past.

Cate Kay knows how to craft a story. As the creator of a bestselling book trilogy that struck box office gold as a film series, she’s one of the most successful authors of her generation. The thing is, Cate Kay doesn’t really exist. She’s never attended author events or granted any interviews. Her real identity had been a closely guarded secret, until now.

As a young adult, she and her best friend Amanda dreamed of escaping their difficult homes and moving to California to become movie stars. But the day before their grand adventure, a tragedy shattered their dreams and Cate has been on the run ever since, taking on different names and charting a new future. But after a shocking revelation, Cate understands that returning home is the only way she’ll be a whole person again.





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

The Perfect Home

Daniel Kenitz

Fixer Upper meets Gone Girl in this suspenseful and witty domestic thriller set in the world of home renovation TV—featuring a woman who becomes public enemy #1 after a horrifying discovery prompts her to flee her celebrity husband with their twin babies.

Dawn Decker is an American everywoman and the salt to her husband Wyatt’s sweet, media-friendly charm on their Tennessee-based home renovation reality TV show, The Perfect Home. While Dawn bristles at the trappings of their D-list celebrity status, Wyatt hungers for greater fame. The couple also faces infertility issues stemming from Wyatt’s low sperm count. He secretly orders experimental fertility drugs and they conceive, but his personality takes a dark turn—he becomes moody, withdrawn and even cruel.

When Dawn discovers his horrifying plot to manufacture a tragedy in order to skyrocket their celebrity status, she takes their infant twins and goes on the run. Wyatt appears on national television to turn the public against her, painting Dawnas an unstable kidnapper suffering from postpartum psychosis. His charm is so compelling that even Dawn’s closest friends doubt her. She will have to dig deep into the past — both hers and Wyatt’s — to find allies, protect her children and beat this beloved all-American celebrity at his own game.

Told in dual perspectives from both husband and wife, this smart, captivating and twisty thriller is a fun, addictive read from the very first page.





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

Katabasis

R.F. Kuang

Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek. The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld. Two academic rivals from Cambridge must travel to hell to rescue the soul of their advisor. Getting there was easy. Surviving it – and each other – is another thing entirely.

That’s all we know in early 2025 about Kuang’s new novel who got huge attention for her Number One Bestseller “Yellowface”.





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

Atmosphere

Taylor Jenkins Reid

An epic novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle program and the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.

In the summer of 1980, astrophysics professor Joan Goodwin begins training to be an astronaut at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilots Hank Redmond and John Griffin; mission specialist Lydia Danes; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer. As the new astronauts prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined and begins to question everything she believes about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.

Atmosphere is supposed to be Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

A Particularly Nasty Case

Adam Kay

When a noxious hospital consultant dies of a heart attack, fellow doctor Eitan Rose smells foul play. But nobody else does, including some quite crucial players like the police and the coroner. Eitan’s colleagues are already treating him with suspicion following his recent breakdown and are sceptical of his increasingly wild theories. When another doctor dies in similar circumstances, Eitan becomes convinced there is more to these deaths than meets the eye. Is there really a killer marauding the wards or is Eitan losing the plot?

Deftly told and deathly funny, “A Particularly Nasty Case” is the unputdownable debut novel from Adam Kay, BAFTA-winning writer and author of multi-million global bestseller “This is Going to Hurt”.





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

Audition

Katie Kitamura

One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.





FRNKOW, reading list 2025, highly expected novels 2025

Twist

Colum McCann

A propulsive novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean — from the New York Times bestselling author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin.

“Everything gets fixed and we all stay broken.”

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the story of the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence — words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses — travels through the tiny fiber optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break at an unfathomable depth.

Fennell’s literary adventure brings him to the west coast of Africa where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own journey to London.

When the boat is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times.