BookTok – the community of readers on TikTok – continues to be a tremendous force in international publishing. Despite a small fracas in which the platform was temporarily banned in the US earlier this year, 2025 has already been a massive year of major releases for the BookTok community.
Below is a list of the books that have made the biggest splash in the first three months of 2025.
The highly anticipated third instalment of the romantasy Empyrean series didn’t just bust open BookTok. It also became the fastest selling adult fiction book since The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown over 20 years ago.
Contemporary romance BookTok darling Ali Hazelwood’s 2025 release veers away from her established track record of romances based in academic science. Instead, Hazelwood produced a bestselling turn into the ever-popular sports romance category with Deep End, a story about a championship swimmer overcoming injury (and falling for a colleague simultaneously).
Suzanne Collins returns with a fresh take on her blockbuster Hunger Games series. The prequel focuses on a young Haymitch Abernathy in a fight against the dystopian government. Fans have lauded the book as a brilliant addition to the series. Cynics will say it’s a cash-grab, but others insist Collins’ allegory for political protest against brutal regimes is more urgent than ever.
Beloved British mystery writer Alice Feeney returns with a classic premise: a missing wife, a baffled husband and a tiny, windswept Scottish island. The promotional tagline swept through BookTok in early 2025: “Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t. Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.”
Pulpy BookTok favourite McFadden returns with a taut thriller. Eight months pregnant and stranded, Tegan is forced to accept the help of an isolated couple. No one knows anyone else’s intentions, and the frequent twists have been the subject of many online read-alongs.
Horror writer Hendrix returns with another female-centred kick-butt story focused on a group of misfit girls who stumble into the occult. What follows is a fun and gory uprising against their overly-strict parents and teachers.
Jones returns to historical horror, placing this book at the top of any fan’s to-be-read (TBR) list. It’s 1912 and there’s a vampire on the loose. The book’s narrator, a Lutheran priest who is witness to growing violence, details the events of this Native American revenge story.
