Best of Book Riot

Predicting the Biggest Book Trends of 2025

Rebecca Joines Schinsky

Chief of Staff

Rebecca Joines Schinsky is the Chief of Staff for Riot New Media Group and a co-host of the Book Riot Podcast. She can be reached at rebecca@riotnewmedia.com.

Welcome to The Best of Book Riot, our daily round-up of what’s on offer across our site, newsletters, podcasts, and social channels. Not everything is for everyone, but there is something for everyone.

Book Trend Predictions for 2025

We’re embarking on a new year of books, inevitably packed with buzzy new releases, surprising publishing news, and readerly fads that will get everyone talking. Here at Book Riot, we can’t help but peek at the tea leaves and guess at what the biggest book trends will be in the coming year. I asked my colleagues at Book Riot and some other folks in the publishing and bookselling world for their book trend predictions for 2025, including what kinds of books will hit bestseller lists, shifts in popular genres, and publishing moves that might impact what we see on the shelves.

The Most Anticipated Historical Fiction of the Year

There’s no shortage of new books from beloved and bestselling authors as well as debut releases generating all kinds of buzz, not to mention a new book from Zora Neale Hurston, which just feels like a literary jackpot. So narrowing my list of most anticipated historical fiction books down to just a few titles is no easy task—but between their bestselling authors and/or compelling storylines, I think these four books are top contenders for the most anticipated historical fiction of 2025.

8 Comics and Graphic Novels That Should Be Movies

No matter how sick of the Marvel or DC universe the world may be, Hollywood marches on. Comic book movies are an essential part of the film industry these days. Studios are rebooting and reviving many superhero comic book characters that we either know very well, or are long forgotten. So we’ll have both a Kraven: The Hunter movie and a Superman redux within the next year. As a lover of superhero comics, it’s easy to be excited by all of these properties, no matter how many. However, as a lover of comics in general, I think there should be more diversity in the choices for film projects. There are many comics and graphic novels that should be movies—ones that don’t involve superheroes.

Notable New YA Book Releases of the Week

As we find our groove in the new year, one thing we can rely on is this: there are going to be a lot of books to pop onto your TBR these first couple of weeks of 2025. It’s interesting because the first two or three weeks of the year are packed, and the number of books hitting shelves tends to drop off in the latter half of January and into February before roaring back in March. You’ll see this play out over the next month or so of this weekly new release roundup.

But this week, we’ve got a pile of new YA books to get excited about. We’ve got some historical fiction, an anthology of verse short stories, thrillers, and so much more.

The Literary Adaptations to See and Stream This Season

Randy Winston of The Black List joins me and Jeff O’Neal to discuss the season’s most interesting adaptations and a few notable recent releases.