Our favorite books we read in 2025

Our favorite books we read in 2025 These are the books that made the biggest impact on the Engadget team this year. This was the kind of year that felt 100 years long, so who could blame us for leaning into a bit of escapism? Some of us buried our noses in books in 2025, and thankfully, there were plenty of good reads to get lost in. Here are some of the Engadget team’s top picks from the year. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy Wild Dark Shore pulls off a magnificent balancing act of telling an intimate, personal story coupled with the backdrop of impending climate disaster. A father and two children are living on a remote island near Antarctica, taking care of a vast seed bank that was part of an abandoned research facility. They’re literally trying to stay above water for a few months until they get bailed out from the island along with as much of the seed bank as they can save before it goes under when a woman named Rowan washes up on shore. She survives, is nursed back to health, and starts forming bonds with her rescuers and their mission - but at the same time, she has some unexpected connections to the island and the former research team that lived there that she keeps to herself. The magic of this book is in the way Charlotte McConaghy builds tensions from many sources throughout the book; you feel a lingering sense of discomfort through, waiting for the other shoe to fall even as Rowan gets closer and closer to the family. It’s a small-scale story at its heart, but with the backdrop of disaster looming the stakes feel extremely high. And McConaghy is a master at putting these feelings on the page in gorgeous prose. As she showed in her previous work Migrations , she has a real talent for realistically describing near-future climate disasters, but Wild Dark Shore raises the personal stakes in a visceral way. - Nathan Ingraham, Deputy Editor Moonflow by Bitter Karella This book is a chaotic and deeply weird rollercoaster ride that repeatedly gave me whiplash, and I loved it. Fair warning, it's not for the weak-stomached. It is horrifying, hilarious, nauseating and somehow a very good time and a very bad time simultaneously. Moonflow is told through dual narratives, one following Sarah, a trans woman and mushroom dealer who has found herself in a desperate situation, and the other following the henchwomen of a deranged cult that's made its home in a cursed forest. After Sarah ventures into these woods in search of the King's Breakfast, a rare mushroom said to grant divine understanding to those who consume it, all hell breaks loose. Karella's writing is immersive, and this is the kind of book you can see, feel, hear and smell, for better and worse. Every person in this book is like a caricature of someone I've crossed paths with at some point in life, and the...

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