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Meet the Winners of the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards!
The 17th Annual Goodreads Choice Awards are now in the books! With a new record of more than 7.5 million votes cast, the 2025 awards continue the Goodreads tradition of honoring readers’ favorite books of the year.
This year, we’ve got 15 separate categories with 300 nominated books total. You can find the winners in each genre category presented below, along with a link to all the nominees in each individual group.
We had several returning winners, including Emily Henry, who scored her fifth consecutive win for Readers’ Favorite Romance with Great Big Beautiful Life. Other returning winners include Suzanne Collins, John Green, Grady Hendrix, Taylor Jenkins Reid, V.E. Schwab, and Rebecca Yarros.
First-time winners this year include Fredrick Backman, Shari Franke, Holly Jackson, Lynn Painter, Aisling Rawle, SenLinYu, and co-authors Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi.
Congratulations to all the winners and nominees—thank you most sincerely for giving us another year of great reading. Thanks, too, to the global Goodreads community and everyone who voted. And now, the winners of the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards…
This year, we’ve got 15 separate categories with 300 nominated books total. You can find the winners in each genre category presented below, along with a link to all the nominees in each individual group.
We had several returning winners, including Emily Henry, who scored her fifth consecutive win for Readers’ Favorite Romance with Great Big Beautiful Life. Other returning winners include Suzanne Collins, John Green, Grady Hendrix, Taylor Jenkins Reid, V.E. Schwab, and Rebecca Yarros.
First-time winners this year include Fredrick Backman, Shari Franke, Holly Jackson, Lynn Painter, Aisling Rawle, SenLinYu, and co-authors Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi.
Congratulations to all the winners and nominees—thank you most sincerely for giving us another year of great reading. Thanks, too, to the global Goodreads community and everyone who voted. And now, the winners of the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards…
Swedish author Fredrik Backman celebrates the redemptive power of art with this story of a remarkable painting and the eternal ache of adolescence. This is the first GCA win for Backman. Speaking of the redemptive power of art, Backman’s 2020 novel, Anxious People, placed second in this category…by five votes, the narrowest margin in a GCA contest ever.
See all of this year’s Fiction nominees here.
See all of this year’s Fiction nominees here.
Taylor Jenkins Reid returns to her stomping grounds of richly drawn historical fiction with Atmosphere, set in and around NASA’s Space Shuttle program in the 1980s. This is Reid’s fourth win in this category, following Daisy Jones & the Six (2019), Malibu Rising (2021), and Carrie Soto Is Back (2023).
See all of this year’s Historical Fiction nominees here.
See all of this year’s Historical Fiction nominees here.
It’s a pretty neat trick: With her first adult mystery-thriller, YA specialist Holly Jackson assembles a scenario where our desperate heroine must solve her own murder. It gets weird. Impending aneurysms are involved. Jackson was previously nominated for her 2019 YA thriller, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder.
See all of this year’s Mystery & Thriller nominees here.
See all of this year’s Mystery & Thriller nominees here.
Reigning queen of the romance genre, Emily Henry notches her fifth consecutive GCA win with Great Big Beautiful Life, a tale concerning a sunny aspiring writer, a cranky literary icon, a shady octogenarian heiress, and lots of tension, sexual and otherwise.
See all of this year’s Romance nominees here.
See all of this year’s Romance nominees here.
Also the winner in this year’s Audiobook category, Onyx Storm continues author Rebecca Yarros’ complete domination of the Romantasy genre since Fourth Wing flew onto everyone’s radar in 2023. Old bonds are tested and new alliances forged in this latest chapter of the smash-hit Empyrean series.
See all of this year’s Romantasy nominees here.
See all of this year’s Romantasy nominees here.
Veteran fantasy and sci-fi author V.E. Schwab delivers a sweeping sapphic vampire epic that moves from 16th-century Spain to 1827 London to contemporary Boston. Schwab folds in elements of horror, historical fiction, and gender politics, too. This is Schwab’s third GCA prize, with previous wins in both the YA and adult categories.
See all of this year’s Fantasy nominees here.
See all of this year’s Fantasy nominees here.
The go-to description for this startling debut novel from author Aisling Rawle is that it’s Love Island meets Black Mirror: Beautiful young people compete in a ruthless reality show as the outside world burns. But just beneath the plot you’ll find sharp observations on consumer and performance culture.
See all of this year’s Science Fiction nominees here.
See all of this year’s Science Fiction nominees here.
Set in Florida circa 1970, Grady Hendrix’s old-school horror novel centers on a sinister group home for pregnant teens where shame has been weaponized. But when a friendly(?) librarian introduces the girls to witchcraft, the power balance shifts violently. Hendrix continues his impressive run as a modern horror master.
See all of this year’s Horror nominees here.
See all of this year’s Horror nominees here.
Powered by a huge and ferociously loyal online fan base, the dark fantasy romance of Alchemised swept to victory for Readers' Favorite Debut Novel. Fans of (really) dark-side storytelling will find cruel necromancers, derelict mansions, and strange alchemies in this tale.
See all of this year’s Debut Novel nominees here.
See all of this year’s Debut Novel nominees here.
Readers’ Favorite Audiobook: Onyx Storm
by Rebecca Yarros, narrated by Rebecca Soler, Teddy Hamilton, Justis Bolding, and Jasmin Walker
by Rebecca Yarros, narrated by Rebecca Soler, Teddy Hamilton, Justis Bolding, and Jasmin Walker
The third installment in Rebecca Yarros’ hugely popular Empyrean romantasy series chronicles the further adventures of dragon rider Violet Sorrengail in the kingdom of Navarre. Congratulations are also in order for narrators and voice actors Rebecca Soler, Teddy Hamilton, Justis Bolding, and Jasmin Walker.
See all of this year’s Audiobook nominees here.
See all of this year’s Audiobook nominees here.
A landslide winner, this latest chapter in Suzanne Collins’ epic Hunger Games series flashes back to 24 years before the events of the first novel to offer the (sad, doomed) origin story of Haymitch Abernathy.
See all of this year’s YA Fantasy & Sci-Fi nominees here.
See all of this year’s YA Fantasy & Sci-Fi nominees here.
This latest love story from YA and romance specialist Lynn Painter finds childhood friends reuniting as teenagers in their hockey-loving Minnesota hometown. It turns out that teenage relationships are a bit more complicated. This is Painter’s first win after several previous nominations in both the YA fiction and adult romance categories.
See all of this year’s YA Fiction nominees here.
See all of this year’s YA Fiction nominees here.
Beloved YA author John Green (The Fault in Our Stars) is also a tireless public health advocate, as evidenced by his extensive research for this new book about the world’s deadliest curable disease. Green blends personal narratives with science, history, and urgent questions concerning health care inequalities.
See all of this year’s Nonfiction nominees here.
See all of this year’s Nonfiction nominees here.
Initial revelations of the Franke family child abuse case shocked the world in 2023. This year’s highly anticipated memoir from the family’s eldest daughter, Shari, candidly reveals the awful truth behind the 8 Passengers YouTube channel, the potential toxicity of influencer culture, and the peril of cultish life-coaching programs.
See all of this year’s Memoir & Autobiography nominees here.
See all of this year’s Memoir & Autobiography nominees here.
Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell, hosts of the fascinating Witches of Scotland podcast, present a deeply researched investigation into actual witch trials and the systemic oppression of women throughout history. The book also draws a lot of persuasive parallels between yesterday’s tragedies and today’s imminent threats.
See all of this year’s History & Biography nominees here.
See all of this year’s History & Biography nominees here.
Thank you to all the readers who make the Goodreads Choice Awards such a success every year! Happy reading!
