Mercantile Librarians' favorite reads of 2025

Every year, we ask our Librarians to give us their favorite reads of the year. And every year, they grumble. When you read stacks and stacks of great books, it's hard to whittle the list to Top 5.

But for the sake of your TBR lists, they did the work and offer up these recommendations from a year of reading:

John Faherty

• The Candy House, Jennifer Egan — Very odd, very good.

• Solito, Javier Zamora — A rare re-read. Wrenching.

• The Secret Hours, Mick Herron — Smart and funny.

• The Grammarians, Catherine Schine — Words and siblings? Sign me up.

• Small Mercies, Dennis Lehane — My family history runs through Southie and Dorchester. The language is familiar.

Hillary Copsey

• Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li

• Now in November, Josephine Johnson

• These Heathens, Mia McKenzie

• The Listeners, Maggie Stiefvater

• Is A River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane -- These last two are best read together!

Amy Hunter

• Blacktop Wasteland,S.A. Cosby

• So Far Gone,Jess Walter

• The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, John U Bacon

• Loved One, Aisha Muharrar

• The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told, Bill Janowitz

Michael Link

• Crying in H-Mart, Michelle Zauner

• Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead

• Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar

• Brawler, Lauren Groff

• Run for the Hills, Kevin Wilson

Al Lloyd

• Run for the Hills, Kevin Wilson

• The Correspondent, Virginia Evans

• Vanishing Treasures, Katherine Rundell

• Save Me, Stranger, Erika Krouse

• So Far Gone, Jess Walter

Chris Messick

• Tonight in Jungle Land, Peter James Carlin

• So Far Gone, Jess Walter

• James, Percival Everett

• Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, Will Hermes

• Heartbreaker, Mike Campbell

Cedric Rose

• Orwell's Roses, Rebecca Solnit

• Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis

• On the Theory and Practice of Rivers, Jim Harrison

• Soil: The story of a Black mother's garden, Camille Dungy

• The Wayfinder, Adam Johnson

Kara Willis

• It Was Always About The Work, Melvin Grier

• Praise Songs for The Kitchen Ghosts, Crystal Wilkinson

• Neighbors & Other Stories, Diane Oliver

• There's Always This Year, Hanif Abdurraqib

• Beloved, Toni Morrison