Your December Reading List is here, and it’s stacked with the most talked-about, top-rated books of 2025 - the ones readers couldn’t stop raving about. From the windswept mystery of Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy to the gothic intrigue of The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig, this roundup crosses every genre we love: dark academia, mystery, romance, and everything in between.
Our own book club has tackled several of these standout titles this year - Katabasis, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, The Secret History, I Who Have Never Known Men, James, and Demon Copperhead - so consider this your curated guide to the stories truly worth cozying up with before the year ends.
1. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
About the Book: On isolated Shearwater Island, the last caretakers of a vast seed bank take in Rowan, a mysterious woman who washes ashore during a storm. As fragile trust grows, buried secrets - sabotaged radios, a hidden grave, and past tragedies - threaten their safety. With worsening weather, they must decide whether they can rely on one another to protect the island and its precious seeds.
From its Pages: “Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we’ll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other.” - Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore
2. Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros
About the Book: After eighteen months at Basgiath, Violet Sorrengail faces a war closing in from all sides and no one she’s sure she can trust. To protect the people and dragons she loves, she must venture beyond Navarre’s failing wards to find new allies while keeping a secret that could unravel everything. As a deadly storm approaches, Violet races to uncover the truth they need to survive.
From its Pages: “Xaden tilts his head, studying the king. “Violet.” My heart skips into double time. “My loyalty is to Violet first above everything, everyone else.” - Rebecca Yarros, Onyx Storm
3. Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
About the Book: Joan Goodwin, a quiet physics professor with a lifelong love of the stars, leaps at the chance to join NASA’s first class of women astronauts. Selected in 1980, she trains at Johnson Space Center alongside a remarkable group of candidates who become both friends and rivals. As Joan discovers new passion, purpose, and unexpected love, she begins to question her place in the universe, until everything changes in an instant during mission STS-LR9 in 1984.
From its Pages: “Just the act of falling in love was to agree to a broken heart.” - Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere
4. Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney
About the Book: After hearing his wife abruptly stop her car and disappear during a phone call, author Grady Green is left shattered, with her empty vehicle perched on a cliff and no answers. A year later, still consumed by grief and unable to write, he retreats to a remote Scottish island to rebuild his life - only to encounter a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.
From its Pages: “Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t. Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.” - Alice Feeney, Beautiful Ugly
5. Alchemised by SenLin Yu
About the Book: Helena Marino, once a promising alchemist, is now a captive of Paladia’s necromancers with her memories fractured. Though deemed insignificant by Resistance records, her lost months may hide vital secrets. Sent to the ruthless High Reeve, Helena must reclaim her past and survive the dark truths of her captor’s domain.
From its Pages: “Sometimes she wished she’d died in the hospital with her father, to be remembered and mourned for her possibilities, rather than live day by day growing ever lesser. Now it didn’t matter if she’d been an alchemist, or a healer, or anything else. To anyone who ever learned of it, she would only be that one thing. Women were always defined by the lowliest thing they could be called.” - SenLinYu, Alchemised
6. The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig
About the Book: Sybil Delling, a Diviner who receives visions of the future from six unearthly Omens, has spent nine years dreaming of having no dreams at all. As her service nears its end, her fellow Diviners begin to vanish, forcing her to seek help from knight Rodrick. Together, they face a dangerous world where only a heretic can challenge the gods.
From its Pages: “It is easier, swearing ourselves to someone else's cause than to sit with who we are without one.” - Rachel Gillig, The Knight and the Moth
7. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab
About the Book: Spanning centuries and continents, this is a story of hunger, love, and rage. From María in 1532 Spain, navigating a world where she is prized or pawned, to Charlotte in 1827 London, discovering freedom comes at a steep cost, to Alice in 2019 Boston, seeking answers and revenge after a life-altering mistake. Each woman faces desire, danger, and the choices that shape a life, and how it begins and ends.
From its Pages: “Bury my bones in the midnight soil, plant them shallow and water them deep, and in my place will grow a feral rose, soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.” - V.E. Schwab, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
8. Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
About the Book: Alice Law ventures into Hell to save her late mentor, Professor Grimes, alongside her rival Peter Murdoch. Armed with spells and determination, they face a perilous underworld where magic may not be enough, and their shared past could either save them or doom them.
From its Pages: “And if falling in love was discovery, was letting yourself be discovered the equivalent to being loved?” - R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
9. The Favorites by Layne Fargo
About the Book: Katarina Shaw and Heath Rocha rise from turbulent childhoods to become a world-famous ice dance duo, but a shocking Olympic incident ends their partnership. A decade later, Kat steps forward to tell the truth behind their bond, their passion, and the secrets that shaped their legacy.
From its Pages: “The thing is, when pushing your limits is all you know, when it seems normal to you...it's hard to remember you even have limits. Until you run right into them.” - Layne Fargo, The Favorites
10. The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown
About the Book: Robert Langdon races across Prague, London, and New York to find Katherine Solomon, a noetic scientist who has vanished with her groundbreaking manuscript, uncovering a secret that could change the way we understand the human mind.
From its Pages: “Far too many fear death and regard it as the worst disaster that can befall them: they know nothing of what they speak. Death comes as a dissolution from an exhausted body… Just as the body leaves the mother’s womb when it is mature in it, so also does the soul leave the body when it has come to perfection.” - Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets
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11. The Widow by John Grisham
About the Book: Lawyer Simon Latch’s quiet life changes when Eleanor Barnett, a wealthy widow, becomes his client. But after a car accident lands her in the hospital, Simon is accused of her murder. With the evidence stacked against him, he must uncover the real killer to prove his innocence before it’s too late.
From its Pages: “Even silence is a kind of testimony when no one wants to speak the truth.” - John Grisham, The Widow
12. Trust by Hernan Diaz
About the Book: By the 1920s, everyone in New York knows Benjamin and Helen Rask, a Wall Street tycoon and an aristocrat’s daughter who have risen to immense wealth. But as the decade of excess ends, the true cost of their fortune and the competing stories of their rise remains a tantalizing mystery.
From its Pages: “God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.” - Hernan Diaz, Trust
13. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
About the Book: Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.
From its Pages: “Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” - Donna Tartt, The Secret History
14. Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
About the Book: Alice Scott and Pulitzer-winner Hayden Anderson arrive on Little Crescent Island to write the biography of the elusive Margaret Ives. Given a one-month trial to win her trust, they navigate fragmented stories, strict NDAs, a growing rivalry and undeniable attraction. Realizing that how Margaret’s tale unfolds may depend as much on their own hearts as on the truths she reveals.
From its Pages: “It’s yours,” he offers. I laugh. “Oh? I can have the world?” “Mine,” he says, “yeah. You can have mine.” - Emily Henry, Great Big Beautiful Life
15. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
About the Book: Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned with no memory of how they arrived or any sense of time. When a fortieth girl appears—shunned and alone—she becomes the key to their escape and survival in the strange world waiting above.
From its Pages: “Even a person raised in captivity learns to want, yearns to see beyond their cage. How much of our humanity is intrinsic? How much remains, when all else is stripped away?” - Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men
16. James by Percival Everett
About the Book: When Jim learns he’s about to be sold and separated from his family, he runs away, while Huck fakes his death to escape his father. Together, they embark on a perilous journey down the Mississippi, seeking freedom and the uncertain promise of the Free States.
From its Pages: “At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.” - Percival Everett, James
17. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
About the Book: Demon Copperhead follows a boy in Appalachia, born to a teen mother with little but his wit and survival skills, as he navigates foster care, addiction, love, and loss. Inspired by Dickens, Barbara Kingsolver gives voice to a new generation of lost boys in a culture that overlooks rural lives.
From its Pages: “I got up every day thinking the sun was out there shining, and it could just as well shine on me as any other human person.” - Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
18. The Vegetarian by Han Kang
About the Book: Yeong-hye’s ordinary life unravels when haunting dreams drive her to renounce meat, a small act of independence that disrupts her marriage. As her family struggles to control her, their interventions escalate, subjecting her mind and body to invasive violations and plunging her into a disturbing estrangement from them and from herself.
From its Pages: “The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.” - Han Kang, The Vegetarian
19. I, Medusa by Ayana Gray
About the Book: Meddy, overshadowed by her immortal family, seizes the chance to train as Athena’s priestess and taste a life of purpose and power. But when Poseidon intervenes and she is punished with serpentine hair for a crime she didn’t commit. Meddy must embrace a new identity, as Medusa, mortal, martyr, and myth, to finally write her own story.
From its Pages: “That’s the curious thing about monsters,” she whispers. “The worst ones don’t bother hiding in the dark.” - Ayana Gray, I, Medusa
20. Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall
About the Book: When Gabriel, the man who broke her heart, returns to town with his young son, Beth is drawn back into a past she thought she’d left behind. As old jealousies and dangerous secrets resurface, she must navigate love, loss, and impossible choices, confronting the legacy of first love amid simmering passion and deadly consequences.
From its Pages: “The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.” - Clare Leslie Hall, Broken Country
As the year winds down, consider this your invitation to slow the pace, pour something warm, and lose yourself in the books that defined 2025. Whether you’re catching up on the titles everyone adored or revisiting a few of our own book club favorites, this list is meant to carry you through December. Here’s to ending the year with your next unforgettable read.
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