Three PRH Titles Spotlighted in the NYT's 2025 Surprise Hits
©The New York Times
In 2025, some of the year’s bestselling titles came from delightfully unexpected places. Several debut novels and books by lesser-known authors topped the charts alongside highly-anticipated titles. The New York Times identified five surprise hit novels of the year, and we’re proud to share that three Penguin Random House titles were featured!
Congratulations to everyone involved for recognizing these standout works early, nurturing new talent, and amplifying our authors’ voices. Our talented teams continue to bring breakthrough stories to readers everywhere.
Read the full New York Times piece here.
Penguin Random House’s Featured Titles:
Discover the word-of-mouth hit hailed by Ann Patchett as “A cause for celebration”—an intimate novel about the transformative power of the written word and the beauty of slowing down to reconnect with the people we love.
Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime.
In this riveting dark fantasy debut, a woman with missing memories fights to survive a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy—and the man tasked with unearthing the deepest secrets of her past.
Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner—of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed.
In the aftermath of a long war, Paladia’s new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers, whose vile undead creatures helped bring about their victory, holds Helena captive.
A glorious sweep of a novel” (Ann Patchett) that weaves the intimate lives of two midwestern families across generations, from World War II to the late twentieth century.
In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past. Cal’s wife, Becky, has a spiritual gift: She is a seer who can conjure the dead, helping families connect with those they’ve lost. Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving on a Navy cargo ship, out of harm’s way—until a telegram suggests that the unthinkable might have happened.
Later, as the country reconstructs in the postwar boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie—but nothing stays buried forever in a small town. Against the backdrop of some of the most transformative decades in modern America, the consequences of that long-ago encounter ripple through the next generation of both families, compelling them to reexamine who they thought they were and what the future might hold.