Alta Journal ’s Best Books of 2025
From noir to oral history to visionary speculative fiction, this year’s standout titles reveal the stories shaping life in the West and beyond.
Works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that grapple with our present moment, without forgetting historical context, mark the literary landscape of 2025. Together, they demonstrate that today’s writers are exploring a world in flux. Their stories of surveillance and resistance, community and rupture, and grief and reinvention are rooted in the West, and trace the culture and emotional specifics of places that Alta Journal covers closely. Below, we highlight 10 books that rose to the top.
THE DREAM HOTEL, BY LAILA LALAMI
In this riveting speculative novel, Laila Lalami imagines a United States where algorithmic surveillance drives a private company’s pre-crime detentions of individuals. Historian Sara T. Hussein is held in a retention center near Los Angeles after her dreams, captured by a neuroprosthetic device, raise her Risk Assessment score, a measure that looks at how likely it is, based on someone’s dreams, that they will commit a crime. But, as Sara discovers, “private, personal recordkeeping is an act of resistance.” Her fight for autonomy becomes a mirror for our own tech-entangled lives.
CROWN, BY EVANTHIA BROMILEY
Set over three tense days in the pandemic-era Southwest, Evanthia Bromiley’s debut follows nine-year-old twins Virginia and Evan and their pregnant mother, Jude, as they face uncertainty and eviction from their trailer park. Told through alternating first-person voices, Crown is an original portrait of resilience forged in scarcity, capturing both the “raucous joy” the children create and the cruelty of the systems stacked against them.
STARTLEMENT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, BY ADA LIMÓN
The U.S. poet laureate’s 2025 collection meditates on astonishment—fear, awe, and the jolt of sudden awareness. Ada Limón articulates the emotional contours of her inner life but pays close attention to the particularities of the world she encounters. These beautiful poems embody the cosmic with clarity, warmth, and lyrical precision.
THE PACIFIC CIRCUIT: A GLOBALIZED ACCOUNT OF THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF AN AMERICAN CITY, BY ALEXIS MADRIGAL
Oakland receives the deep dive it deserves in the hands of Alexis Madrigal, who maps the city across a century of global trade, labor struggle, and environmental injustice. Woven through this broader history is the story of Margaret Gordon, whose continuing fight against pollution in West Oakland grounds the book’s sweeping scope. Oakland becomes “the physical starting point for the Pacific Circuit,” connecting Asian manufacturing to Western ports—and Madrigal’s book reveals who pays the price.
SO MANY STARS: AN ORAL HISTORY OF TRANS, NONBINARY, GENDERQUEER, AND TWO-SPIRIT PEOPLE OF COLOR, BY CARO DE ROBERTIS
Caro De Robertis gathers 20 oral histories from trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and Two-Spirit people of color, weaving them into a fluid “collage” that spans questions of emergence, chosen family, activism, and future-building. Structured in thematic movements, the book captures what De Robertis calls the “roaring rapids of a story” and honors lives too often overlooked.
THE WILDERNESS, BY ANGELA FLOURNOY
The long-awaited second novel from Angela Flournoy traces the evolving relationships of five millennial Black women across Los Angeles and New York. Moving back and forth through time, The Wilderness explores home, loss, political consciousness, and the emotional architecture of long friendships. Flournoy writes of “networks of human beings” who refract one another, thereby illuminating how we become ourselves through our connection with others.
SACRAMENT, BY SUSAN STRAIGHT
The 10th novel from the prolific Susan Straight brings the realities of COVID-19 into clear cultural focus through three nurses—Cherrise, Larette, and Marisol—who are relocated to care for patients in San Bernardino while their families stay behind. The novel blends frontline urgency with the Inland Empire’s deep-rooted traditions, from lowrider funeral processions to the shared language of music. One scene captures the mood of the book: “Everyone in the cars knew this song.… Nothing would change in this world, cars or songs or clothes or love—except the ones who are gone.”
ONLY WAY OUT, BY TOD GOLDBERG
Tod Goldberg trades his usual haunt of the desert for the Oregon coast in this hilarious, violent noir about a disgraced cop, a vanished van full of illicit safe-deposit boxes, a brilliant enforcer fresh out of prison, and a long con decades in the making. With biting satire—especially of true-crime culture and small-town gentrification—the novel showcases Goldberg’s sharp comic edge and mastery of the genre.
WATER, MIRROR, ECHO: BRUCE LEE AND THE MAKING OF ASIAN AMERICA, BY JEFF CHANG
In this monumental biography, Jeff Chang reframes the martial artist and cultural icon Bruce Lee as a foundational figure of Asian America. Drawing on diaries, letters, and exclusive archives, Chang reveals Lee as a thinker who wrestled with both Hollywood’s racial constraints and the philosophical traditions that shaped him. Lee’s pursuit of creative self-determination resonates throughout.
LIGHTBREAKERS, BY AJA GABEL
Aja Gabel’s lustrous novel explores the physics of grief and the allure of the past. A scientist joins an eccentric billionaire’s clandestine time-travel project with his second wife, who is an artist. He hopes to reexperience his memories of his deceased toddler with the knowledge he has in the present, but the project severely tests the couple’s relationship. Known for her musical prose and emotional acuity, Gabel maps surprising connections.
The Year in Literary Rediscoveries
The California Book Club’s 2025 Highlights
California Book Club Picks That Got Us Talking
Alta Journal ’s Top Book Reviews of 2025
