American novelist Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is no friend as loyal as a book.” While many of us may still be catching up on our reading goals for the year, there’s always inspiration to be found in the booklists curated by avid readers. One such much-awaited list is
Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of 2025.
The former US President’s annual recommendations are known for their range and relevance. The 2025 list features a compelling mix of award-winning literary fiction and critically acclaimed non-fiction, spanning genres such as memoirs, US politics, journalism, history, climate change, and pressing civic issues.
Obama began the tradition of sharing his favourite reads during his time at the
White House, and it has since become a ritual eagerly followed by readers around the world. A strong advocate of reading as a lifelong practice, he often speaks about books as essential to understanding society, democracy, and the human experience.
Whether you’re a casual reader or a committed bibliophile, Obama’s 2025 book recommendations offers thoughtful, timely picks, making it well worth bookmarking.
1. Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America
Author: Beth Macy
Release Date: October 7, 2025
Publisher: Penguin Press
Paper Girl is a gift of courage, empathy, and insight. Beth Macy has turned to face the darkness in her family and community, people she loves wholeheartedly, even the ones she sometimes struggles to like. She has found sparks of human dignity that she has used to light a signal fire of warning but also of hope.
2. Flashlight
Author: Susan Choi
Release Date: June 3, 2025
Publisher: Penguin Random House Ireland
Long-listed for the
Booker Prize, the novel has been termed as “almost impossibly heartbreaking,” by New York Magazine. The astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century, ranging from post-war Japan to suburban America and the North Korean regime
3. We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution
Author: Jill Lepore
Release Date: September 16, 2025
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation (US edition)
In this landmark, lavishly illustrated book, Harvard professor of history and law Jill Lepore argues that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. The Economist in its review says, “An arresting chronicle of Americans striving–if sometimes failing–to remake their republic.”
4. The Wilderness
Author: Angela Flournoy
Release Date: September 16, 2025
Publisher: Mariner Books (an imprint of HarperCollins)
The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy’s masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.
5. There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
Author: Brian Goldstone
Release Date: March 25, 2025
Publisher: Crown (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
In this gripping and deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city.
6. North Sun
Author: Ethan Rutherford
Release Date: March 11, 2025
Publisher: A Strange Object
North Sun is the finalist for the 2025 National Book Awards for
Fiction. With one foot firmly planted in the traditional sea-voyage narrative, and another in a blazing mythos of its own, this debut novel looks unsparingly at the cost of environmental exploitation and predation, and in doing so feverishly sings not only of the past, but to the present and future as well.
7. 1929: The Inside Story of The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History
Author: Andrew Ross Sorkin
Release Date: October 14, 2025
Publisher: Penguin
This is not just a story about money. 1929 is a tale of power, psychology, and the seductive illusion that “this time is different.” It’s about disregarded alarm bells, financiers who fell from grace, and skeptics who saw the crash coming, only to be dismissed until it was too late.
8. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Author:
Kiran Desai
Release Date: September 25, 2025
Publisher: Penguin Random House
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people. They navigate the many forces that shape their country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next.
9. Dead and Alive
Author: Zadie Smith
Release Date: October 30, 2025
Publisher: Penguin Group
Throughout this thrilling collection, Zadie Smith shows her unrivalled ability to think through critically and humanely some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times.
10. What We Can Know
Author: Ian McEwan
Release Date: September 18, 2025
Publisher: Jonathan Cape (UK edition)
Shortlisted for the NERO Book Awards (Fiction 2025), What We Can Know is a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind. A literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
11. The Look
Author: Michelle Obama
Release Date: November 18, 2025
Publisher: Mitchell Beazley
In this celebration of style, from the moment she entered the public eye during her husband’s U.S. Senate campaign.
Michelle Obama shares how she uses the beauty and intrigue of fashion to draw attention to her message.
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