Six Contemporary Novels I Loved in the Past Year
- The Bossy Bookworm
- 4 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Six Favorite Contemporary Fiction Reads
I love looking over my favorite reads from the past year and considering my favorite 2025 reads in each genre. This is the first of three contemporary fiction lists I'll have for you as I mine my recent-past reading for the best of the best.
You can explore the twelve titles on My Very Favorite Bossy 2025 Reads to find out about my overall favorite reads from last year, you can read about past Bossy contemporary fiction favorites here.
If you've read any of these titles, I'd love to hear what you think!
What are some of your favorite contemporary fiction reads, whether from the past year or beyond?
01 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
This was my favorite read of 2025!
This quiet, epistolary novel witnesses the creaky, sometimes difficult shifts and realizations that a septuagenarian achieves around her health, children, past secrets, friendship, romantic relationships, and previously unknown blood relatives near the end of her life.
I feel like this book and I have been circling each other since early May, and I was so delighted as I finally dove into this charming novel.
Sybil Van Antwerp has written letters her whole life--letters to dear friends and family, letters of complaint, letters of praise and wonder to authors of books she's loved, and more. She reflects, sorts out her thoughts and makes sense of the events of the world.
Now Sybil is in her late 70s, she's set in her ways, she's sometimes out of step and old-fashioned, often grumpy--and she's facing immense changes. We find out early on that she faces the impending loss of her sight, that she is somewhat estranged from her daughter, that deep tragedy has shaped her life and closed off her heart, and that she may be stumbling into information about her biological parents.
It's lovely to witness Sybil's slowly allowing herself to face the past, addressing difficult issues in the present, and allowing for surprising adventures in her life. The Correspondent offers messy, imperfect characters in often difficult situations, and they find their way through having changed and grown.
This was charming and I loved both reading this novel and listening to the audio version of this title. The Correspondent was the right book at the right time for me.
I received a prepublication version of this title courtesy of NetGalley and Crown Publishing.
I love a novel told through letters. To find Bossy reviews of other books I've read, please check out the titles at this link.
02 Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson
In Kevin Wilson's latest gem, his quirky characters are irresistible and his heartwarming story is messy, strange, and lovely as a chosen-family element overshadows past tragedies and disappointments.
Mad and her mother have run their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee, ever since Mad's father disappeared twenty years ago. Mad is a loner, and that's okay. But when a stranger who calls himself Rube shows up in a rented PT Cruiser and a story about how Mad is his half sister--explaining that their father has more kids spread across the country as well--Rube and Mad head out on an awkward, nerve-racking mission to find their siblings--and then try to track down their father.
The tone of Run for the Hills feels reassuring in that everything seems headed toward resolutions. Wilson allows for confrontation, and he doesn't spare our characters a messy, somewhat unsatisfying reckoning involving their dad. He is, after all, an imperfect person whose fear of failure caused him to abandon each chance at a wonderfully imperfect life. The most tragic aspect isn't that his children were left, but that he missed out on time with these quirky, caring, wonderful oddballs who find that he is, ultimately, a relatively minor note in their newly formed, forever sibling family.
Kevin Wilson is also the author of Now Is Not the Time to Panic, Nothing to See Here, Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine, The Family Fang, Perfect Little World, and Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories.
For my full review, please check out this link.
03 She's a Lamb! by Meredith Hambrock
She's a Lamb! offers a delusional, self-congratulatory, single-minded, relentless would-be performer and builds tension and outrageously high stakes as the novel traces each of the unsympathetic protagonist's professional missteps and cutthroat choices, pushing toward what feels like an inevitable, disastrous climax to the campy story.
In Meredith Hambrock's darkly funny, satirical novel, Jessamyn St. Germain is a performer as over the top as her name. She's booking occasional commercial jobs, but she firmly believes she's destined to become famous and perform on Broadway, singing and dancing her way to superstardom.
She's hired to mind the bratty child actors for a community theatre production of The Sound of Music, but she's got her heart set on capturing the role of Maria von Trapp, and her systematic destruction of the show unfolds in gruesome detail as her powerful delusions about her talent and her deservedness shape each cutthroat decision she makes to try to propel herself onstage as the lead.
After all, she hasn't sacrificed, obsessed, planned, spent all her money on voice lessons, and humiliated herself with men in powerful positions for a mediocre acting life. Not by a long shot.
I often have a tough time reading about protagonists who are making poor choices, but the book's dark satire is skillful, and the situation is increasingly over-the-top. Jessamyn is so far gone, even I could give in to the fascination of reading about the growing life-and-death whirlwind of destruction she's causing. Readers will likely have a clear sense that our main character is prepared to burn it all down on her ill-advised, sledgehammer-unsubtle journey to achieve stardom, and I found it irresistible to wonder how dark things would get in her relentless quest.
Meredith Hambrock's debut novel was Other People's Secrets.
Please click here for my full review of She's a Lamb!
04 Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart's story of an uncommonly intelligent fifth-grader, Vera, allows for a precocious child's point of view and observations that are delightfully spot-on and insightful. This is zany, heartwarming, often funny, and just lovely.
Through precocious fifth-grader Vera's point of view in Vera, or Faith, we get to know her family, the Bradford-Shmulkins, and its various dynamics.
The family lives in New York City, and Vera's parents, Anne Mom (her stepmother, a stay-at-home-mom at times derogatorily called Trad Wife) and Daddy (a culturally Russian, self-aggrandizing magazine editor and sometimes-writer), struggle to cope with financial pressures and relationship issues, while young Vera tries to simply make a friend at school and find her biological mother--while avoiding her annoying little brother's roughhousing and meathead games.
This was wryly funny, sometimes zany, and so very heartwarming.
Gary Shteyngart is also the author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, Super Sad True Love Story, and other novels.
I received a prepublication edition of this title, which was published July 8, courtesy of Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley.
For my full review, please check out Vera, or Faith.
05 Definitely Better Now by Ava Robinson
In Ava Robinson's debut novel, she offers an appealingly imperfect main character making missteps and forging a path forward while adjusting to romantic, family, and work complications after a year of sobriety.
Emma is friendly but reserved with her coworkers. She's focused on extending her one year of sobriety--a fact that she doesn't share easily with others, except at her frequent recovery support meetings.
When she's assigned to assist on the committee for the office's extravagant upcoming holiday party, she's thrown together with a cheesy, persistent executive who unfortunately spotted her joke of a dating profile before she pulled it down--and Ben, the intriguing IT manager she can't stop thinking about.
I fell in love with Emma and her imperfect, determined path forward, her sometimes-regretful reckonings with her past, and her fight to be vulnerable for a potential relationship she begins to believe in. Her missteps felt relatable, and I was hooked by her difficult decision-making and her bravery.
This is a great example of a light-fiction-feeling romance that deals with weighty, meaningful themes. It's a combination I love.
This is Ava Robinson's first novel. Abby Jimenez and Carley Fortune are two more authors who offer deep, heartfelt situations, messy complications, and real-life consequences within a romantic structure.
For my full review please check out Definitely Better Now.
06 A Family Matter by Claire Lynch
Claire Lynch's novel shapes two timelines separated by decades into an engrossing, complicated family story of forbidden love, secrets, impending death, and second chances, against a backdrop of everyday minutiae. I read this in a day; I loved it.
In A Family Matter, we track a British family along two timelines. In 1982, Dawn, a young mother in a fine but loveless marriage finds happiness in a socially unacceptable relationship, and the legal backlash causes her to lose custody of--and contact with--her beloved young daughter Maggie.
In 2022, Heron, Maggie's father, has just received terrible news about his health, and he works to come to terms with it within his carefully prescribed daily routine and regular banal conversations with Maggie and family.
It becomes clear that Maggie is unaware of the particular circumstances around her parents' divorce and the reason for her mother's subsequent disappearance--until a clean-out of her childhood home reveals long-held secrets.
I read this engrossing family story in a day and can't wait to read future fiction by Claire Lynch.
Claire Lynch is also the author of Irish Autobiography and Small: On Motherhoods.
For more family stories I've loved, check out the books at this link.
For my full review of this book please see A Family Matter.Â