This year has seen the return of literary legends such as Dan Brown and Richard Osman to the eagerly anticipated top titles from the likes of Taylor Jenkins Reid and Rebecca Yarros earlier in 2025. There is a lot to be excited about in the book world.
Here is a list of the current top 10 books that Waterstones says you need to read this year, from stories of love, identity and warring academics, to name a few.
10. The Secret of Secrets: (Robert Langdon Book 6) – Robert Langdon (Hardback) Dan Brown
The book’s synopsis reads: “The world’s most celebrated thriller writer returns with his most stunning novel yet—a propulsive, twisty, thought-provoking masterpiece that will entertain readers as only Dan Brown can do.
“Robert Langdon, esteemed professor of symbology, travels to Prague to attend a groundbreaking lecture by Katherine Solomon—a prominent noetic scientist with whom he has recently begun a relationship. Katherine is on the verge of publishing an explosive book that contains startling discoveries about the nature of human consciousness and threatens to disrupt centuries of established belief. But a brutal murder catapults the trip into chaos, and Katherine suddenly disappears along with her manuscript. Langdon finds himself targeted by a powerful organization and hunted by a chilling assailant sprung from Prague’s most ancient mythology. As the plot expands into London and New York, Langdon desperately searches for Katherine . . . and for answers. In a thrilling race through the dual worlds of futuristic science and mystical lore, he uncovers a shocking truth about a secret project that will forever change the way we think about the human mind.”
Available from: September 9
9. Not Quite Dead Yet (Hardback) Holly Jackson
The book’s synopsis reads: “In seven days Jet Mason will be dead. Jet is the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Woodstock, Vermont. Twenty-seven years old, she’s still waiting for her life to begin. I’ll do it later, she always says. She has time. Until Halloween night, when Jet is violently attacked by an unseen intruder. She suffers a catastrophic head injury. The doctor is certain that within a week, the injury will trigger a deadly aneurysm. Jet has never thought of herself as having enemies. But now she looks at everyone in a new light: her family, her former best friend turned sister-in-law, her ex-boyfriend. She has at most seven days, and as her condition deteriorates she has only her childhood friend Billy for help. But nevertheless, she’s absolutely determined to finally finish something: Jet is going to solve her own murder.”
8. The Impossible Fortune: Exclusive Edition – The Thursday Murder Club (Hardback) Richard Osman
The book’s synopsis reads: “Who’s got time to think about murder when there’s a wedding to plan?
“It’s been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy with table plans and first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his favourite criminal.
“But when Elizabeth meets a wedding guest who’s in trouble, kidnap and death are hot on their heels once more. A villain wants access to an uncrackable code, and will stop at nothing to get it. Plunged back into action once more, can the gang solve the puzzle and a murder in time?”
Available from: September 25
7. Dream Count (Hardback) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The book’s synopsis reads: “A publishing event ten years in the making—a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists—the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.
“Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until — betrayed and brokenhearted — she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America – but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.
“In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.”
6. Atmosphere (Hardback) Taylor Jenkins Reid
The book’s synopsis reads: “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, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.
“As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe. Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.”
5. Boleyn Traitor: Signed Edition (Hardback) Philippa Gregory
The book’s synopsis reads: “#1 New York Times bestselling author and “queen of royal fiction” (USA Today) Philippa Gregory returns with a dazzling historical novel of ambition, betrayal, and survival in the court of Henry VIII.
“Jane Boleyn watches from the shadows of the Tudor court, where secrets are currency, every choice is dangerous, and even the faintest whisper can seal the fate of queens.
“For Jane, survival demands playing every role required of her: a loving wife who conceals her doubts, a devoted sister to Anne Boleyn at the height of her power, and an obedient spy who carefully wields her words. But in a court ruled by ambition and a tyrant’s sword, Jane must rely on her sharp wit and skillful maneuvering to outthink those around her, knowing that one wrong move could cost her everything.”
Available from: October 14
4. The Artist: Exclusive Edition (Hardback) Lucy Steeds
The book’s synopsis reads: “All Joseph wants is to be let into Tartuffe’s world. All Ettie wants is to escape it.
“The year is 1920. The place is a remote farmhouse in Provence, home to the reclusive painter Edouard Tartuffe and his niece, Ettie. Into this strange, silent house walks a young journalist hoping to write an article about Tartuffe. But the more he entangles himself in the peculiar household, the more Joseph’s curiosity grows . . .
“Ettie cooks and cleans for her uncle. She prepares his studio, scrubs his paintbrushes, and creates the perfect environment for him to work. She has never gone further than the local village. She is sharp-eyed and watchful. But beneath her cool exterior, Joseph senses something simmering. Ettie, Joseph and Tartuffe circle each other throughout the hot, crackling summer, until finally they collide.
“The Artist is about two people grabbing the other by the hand and pulling each other into life.”
3. Buckeye: Signed Exclusive Edition (Hardback) Patrick Ryan
The book’s synopsis reads: “In the small Ohio town of Bonhomie, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past. Cal’s wife, Becky, has a spiritual she is a seer who can conjure the dead, helping families connect with those whom they’ve lost. Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving on a Navy cargo ship; she will soon learn that he may have perished in a predawn attack in the Philippine Sea.
“As the country reconstructs in the postwar boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie, but nothing stays buried forever in a small town. Twenty-five years later, as another war convulses America, the consequences of that long-ago encounter set in motion a series of events that will upend the next generation of both families as they head toward a new century.
“Sweeping yet intimate, rich with piercing observation and the warmth that comes from profound understanding of the human spirit, Buckeye captures the universal longing for love, and for goodness.
Available from: September 2
2. What We Can Know: Signed Edition (Hardback) Ian McEwan
The book’s synopsis reads: “2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.
“2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.
“Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining island archipelagos, pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.
“What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.”
Available from: September 18
1. The Land of Sweet Forever: Exclusive Edition (Hardback) Harper Lee, Casey Cep
The book’s synopsis reads: “From one of America’s most beloved authors, a posthumous collection of newly discovered short stories and previously published essays and magazine pieces, offering a fresh perspective on the remarkable literary mind of Harper Lee.
“Harper Lee remains a landmark figure in the American canon – thanks to Scout, Jem, Atticus, and the other indelible characters in her Pulitzer-winning debut, To Kill a Mockingbird; as well as for the darker, late-’50s version of small-town Alabama that emerged in Go Set a Watchman, her only other novel, published in 2015 after its rediscovery. Less remembered, until now, however, is Harper Lee the dogged young writer, who crafted stories in hopes of magazine publication; Lee the lively New Yorker, Alabamian, and friend to Truman Capote; and the Lee who peppered the pages of McCall’s and Vogue with thoughtful essays in the latter part of the twentieth century.
“The Land of Sweet Forever combines Lee’s early short fiction and later nonfiction in a volume offering an unprecedented look at the development of her inimitable voice. Covering territory from the Alabama schoolyards of Lee’s youth to the luncheonettes and movie houses of midcentury Manhattan, The Land of Sweet Forever invites still-vital conversations about politics, equality, travel, love, fiction, art, the American South, and what it means to lead an engaged and creative life.
“This collection comes with an introduction by Casey Cep, Harper Lee’s appointed biographer, which provides illuminating background for our reading of these stories and connects them both to Lee’s life and to her two novels.”
Available from: October 21