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A top ten list only works if it tells a story, and this one starts with quiet middle grade courage and ends with a blockbuster prequel that cracked my no-tears streak wide open. I’m counting down the books that stayed with me in 2025—titles that challenged me, healed me, and sometimes made me argue with myself in the margins.

I move from the sharp empathy of Out of My Mind to the cross-country ache of The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise, where grief rides shotgun on a converted school bus. I pause in court with Helen Garner’s meticulous This House of Grief and step behind the velvet rope with Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, unpacking belief, power, and how institutions hold their people. Then it’s fiction’s turn to bruise: Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting coils family secrets into a tense, open-ended crescendo, and Let the Right One In turns loneliness into a haunting, human bond that lingers like a bruise.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous offers a letter that reads like a life, mapping queerness, migration, and memory in language that glows. Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel examines chosen childlessness, prognosis, and friendship without flinching, giving space to hard choices too often reduced to clichés. And at the top, Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins did the impossible: I knew the ending, looked it up on purpose, and still cried—hard. Continuity quibbles aside, the emotional calculus is undeniable, the character work devastating.

Along the way, I also admit something unexpected: four of this year’s picks came from the Dua Lipa Book Club after a previous year where those choices rarely landed for me. Taste shifts, curation sharpens, and when a list delivers, I’ll say it. Hit play to hear why each book earned its spot and where I think the debates will spark.

If this countdown gives you a new favorite—or a title you want to fight me over—share the episode, leave a review, and tell me your personal #1 for 2025. Let’s build a reading list worth arguing about.

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