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Hidden Brilliance: 10 Underrated Books Worth Your Attention in 2025
The underground favourites breaking through — critically acclaimed fiction that's about to become your next obsession.
Quiet brilliance. Bold storytelling. These are the novels flying just under the radar — for now. In the crowded landscape of contemporary literature, where viral sensations dominate headlines and algorithm-driven recommendations shape reading lists, exceptional books can slip through the cracks. The most rewarding literary discoveries often come not from bestseller lists or splashy marketing campaigns, but from the whispered recommendations passed between passionate readers.
Discovering a great book before it hits the mainstream is one of the purest joys for any reader. There's something deeply satisfying about being an early champion of a novel that later becomes beloved, about recognizing literary merit before the critical consensus forms. This list is for the literary treasure hunters — those who crave emotionally resonant fiction, unexpected structure, or simply something that lingers long after the final page. These are books that challenge conventional storytelling, that trust readers enough to demand their full attention, that offer rewards proportional to the engagement they inspire.
Each title here has been carefully selected based on critical acclaim, passionate reader reviews, and exceptional literary merit — yet they remain relatively undiscovered by mainstream audiences. These are the books being quietly championed in independent bookstores, discussed in literary blogs, and passed hand to hand between discerning readers. All are available in multiple formats, with strong reviews from those who have discovered them.
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
Set in 1920s Penang, this novel elegantly layers colonial politics, queer desire, and narrative artifice into a deeply affecting story. The book centres around the unexpected visit of novelist W. Somerset Maugham to the island of Penang, where he becomes entangled in the lives of British expatriates and local inhabitants navigating the complexities of colonial rule. Through interwoven storylines spanning decades, Tan Twan Eng explores how stories shape our understanding of history and how the personal becomes political in times of social upheaval.
With prose as precise as it is lush, Tan Twan Eng proves again that literature can be quiet and shattering at once. The novel's structure mirrors its themes, with stories within stories revealing how narrative itself becomes a form of resistance and survival. His ability to evoke the sensory details of colonial Penang — from the humid air to the tensions simmering beneath polite society — creates an immersive reading experience that transports readers to another time while maintaining urgent contemporary relevance.
Goodreads: 4.11 | Amazon UK: 4.4
Perfect for fans of: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, literary fiction with colonial settings, and narratives that blur the line between history and fiction.
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Stay True by Hua Hsu
Ostensibly a memoir, but stylistically novelistic, Stay True is a devastating meditation on friendship, identity, and grief in 1990s California. The book chronicles Hsu's friendship with Ken, a fellow Asian American student at UC Berkeley who initially irritated him with his mainstream tastes but gradually became one of his closest friends. When Ken is killed in a carjacking, Hsu must grapple not only with profound loss but with how to honour a friendship that was still in the process of becoming.
Its cultish grip on literary Reddit is well-earned — this one's for the reflectives. Hsu's exploration of identity formation through music, film, and literature creates a portrait of '90s alternative culture that feels both deeply personal and broadly resonant. His writing style perfectly captures the intellectual pretensions and genuine searching of college years, while never losing sight of the profound grief at the story's centre. The result is a book that functions as memoir, cultural criticism, and philosophical inquiry all at once.
Goodreads: 4.01 | Amazon UK: 4.2
Perfect for fans of: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, Goodbye, Again by Jonny Sun, Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, memoirs that read like novels, and explorations of Asian American identity in the '90s.
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The Book of Fire by Christy Lefteri
In contemporary Greece, a devastating wildfire sweeps through a small village, leaving destruction and questions in its wake. The story centers on Irini, a music teacher, and her husband Tasso, a forest ranger haunted by the fire's aftermath. As the couple struggles to rebuild their lives and relationship, Lefteri weaves together multiple perspectives to explore how natural disasters expose both human resilience and fragility. The narrative moves between the present and the days leading up to the fire, gradually revealing the complex web of relationships and secrets that bind the community together.
Lefteri's prose captures both the physical devastation of wildfire and its emotional aftermath with remarkable sensitivity. Drawing from real events and extensive research with fire survivors, she creates a narrative that feels both intimately personal and urgently relevant to our climate-changed world. The novel explores themes of guilt, survival, and community solidarity while never losing sight of the human stories at its heart. Her ability to render both the beauty of the Greek landscape and its violent transformation demonstrates a literary voice of exceptional range and empathy.
Goodreads: 3.82 | Amazon UK: 4.3
Perfect for fans of: The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri, The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel, The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, environmental disaster fiction, and contemporary Greek literature.
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Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
When Sonia returns to Haifa after years in London, she's seeking refuge from a failed relationship and stalled acting career. Her sister Haneen, a committed activist, reluctantly involves her in an Arabic production of Hamlet being staged in the West Bank. As Sonia becomes immersed in the production, she finds herself navigating the complex realities of contemporary Palestine — checkpoints, permits, and the daily negotiations required to create art under occupation. The play becomes both an escape from and confrontation with political reality, forcing Sonia to examine her own relationship to homeland and resistance.
Hammad's sophomore novel demonstrates remarkable control over both intimate character development and broader political narrative. Her portrayal of theater as both artistic expression and form of resistance creates multiple layers of meaning, with Shakespeare's Danish prince serving as unlikely mirror for Palestinian experience. The novel's strength lies in its refusal to simplify — neither the political situation nor Sonia's personal journey offer easy resolutions. Through precise, elegant prose, Hammad explores how art and politics intersect in contested spaces, and how returning home can be both healing and destabilizing.
Goodreads: 4.11 | Amazon UK: 4.0
Perfect for fans of: The Parisian by Isabella Hammad, A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, politically engaged literary fiction, and novels about art under occupation.
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Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan
This sharply observed novel explores how a single moment can ruin or define a life — and how media, class, and grief all play a part. When a young child goes missing in 1990s London, suspicion falls on the Greens, an Irish family already marked as outsiders. Through shifting timelines and perspectives, Nolan examines how tragedy reverberates through generations, how class and nationality shape public perception, and how the media's hunger for narrative can destroy lives.
Short, devastating, and quietly gaining ground. Nolan's economical prose packs enormous emotional weight into relatively few pages. Her exploration of how poverty and prejudice compound tragedy feels urgently contemporary despite the historical setting. The novel's structure — moving between past and present, between different family members' perspectives — creates a kaleidoscopic view of how trauma shapes identity. This is a book about ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances, and Nolan's empathy for her characters makes their failings all the more heart-breaking.
Goodreads: 3.73 | Amazon UK: 4.0
Perfect for fans of: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka, Betty by Tiffany McDaniel, novels about class and prejudice, and explorations of how media shapes tragedy.
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The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen
Set in 19th-century Scandinavia among the Sámi reindeer herders, this novel blends spiritual hunger with cultural conflict and icy lyricism. When Lutheran minister Lars Levi Laestadius arrives in Lapland, his evangelical fervour collides with traditional Sámi beliefs, setting off a religious awakening that divides families and communities. Through the perspectives of various characters — including Laestadius himself, a Sámi family caught between worlds, and a troubled settler — Pylväinen explores how colonialism operates through religion and how indigenous cultures resist erasure.
A historical novel with mythic weight and atmospheric pull. Pylväinen's prose captures both the harsh beauty of the Arctic landscape and the complex social dynamics of cultural collision. Her respectful treatment of Sámi culture and spirituality avoids both romanticisation and condescension, while her portrayal of religious fervour shows how faith can be both destructive and transformative. The novel's meditation on belonging, belief, and cultural survival feels particularly relevant in our current moment of reckoning with colonial histories.
Goodreads: 3.92 | Amazon UK: 4.2
Perfect for fans of: The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, Arctic literature, and historical fiction exploring indigenous perspectives.
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The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut
This mind-bending literary biography-fiction hybrid explores John von Neumann's genius and madness. The book traces the Hungarian-American mathematician's life from his prodigious childhood through his work on the atomic bomb and early computers, examining how one of the 20th century's greatest minds helped create our modern world while grappling with its moral implications. Labatut employs multiple narrators — colleagues, friends, rivals — to create a prismatic portrait of genius that questions the relationship between brilliance and destruction.
It's a cerebral but deeply readable dive into the edge of science, logic, and moral collapse. Labatut's approach blends rigorous research with speculative fiction, creating a work that feels both historically grounded and philosophically adventurous. His exploration of how mathematical abstraction enabled both technological progress and mass destruction makes this a timely meditation on scientific responsibility. The novel's fragmented structure mirrors the fractured nature of its subject, suggesting that some minds are too complex for conventional biography.
Goodreads: 4.34 | Amazon UK: 4.5
Perfect for fans of: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf, scientific biography with fictional elements, and explorations of genius and morality.
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Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
Told through a fictional biography of a rebellious performance artist, this novel asks what history leaves out — and who controls the narrative. When celebrated artist X dies, her widow CM begins researching her wife's mysterious past, discovering layers of deception, multiple identities, and connections to an alternate American history where the South successfully seceded. As CM's investigation deepens, questions about art, identity, and historical truth multiply rather than resolve.
Formally inventive, intimate, and quietly incendiary. Lacey's creation of an entire alternate history — complete with different cultural movements, political figures, and artistic scenes — demonstrates remarkable imaginative scope. The novel functions simultaneously as literary experiment, love story, and political allegory, examining how personal and national histories intertwine. Through CM's obsessive quest to understand X, Lacey explores the impossibility of truly knowing another person and the stories we tell to make sense of loss.
Goodreads: 3.82 | Amazon UK: 3.9
Perfect for fans of: The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, Trust by Hernan Diaz, The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner, experimental biography, and fiction that interrogates historical narrative.
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The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue
Set in post-crash Ireland, this coming-of-age novel follows twenty-one-year-old Rachel Murray as she navigates her first real job at a Dublin bookshop, her intense friendship with her gay colleague James, and a complicated affair with her married English professor. When Rachel and James become entangled with the professor and his pregnant wife, their choices set off a chain of events that will reverberate through their lives. O'Donoghue captures the messiness of early adulthood with both humor and heartbreak, creating a portrait of a generation shaped by economic uncertainty and shifting social norms.
O'Donoghue's witty, perceptive prose brings early 2010s Dublin to vivid life, from cramped house shares to pretentious literary parties. The novel excels at depicting the intensity of young adult friendships and the ways they can both sustain and complicate our lives. Her exploration of sexuality, class, and ambition feels refreshingly honest, avoiding both judgment and sentimentality. This is a novel about the mistakes we make when we're young enough to believe we're invincible, and how those mistakes shape the people we become.
Goodreads: 4.08 | Amazon UK: 4.4
Perfect for fans of: Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney, My Education by Susan Choi, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Irish millennial fiction, and coming-of-age stories with moral complexity.
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Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
From viral job interviews to failed relationships, this short story collection dissects modern ambition, loneliness, and cringe with painful accuracy. Each story follows characters navigating various forms of rejection — romantic, professional, social — with Tulathimutte's signature blend of dark humor and genuine pathos. His protagonists are often millennials caught between ambition and reality, whose attempts at connection frequently result in humiliation rather than fulfillment.
A sharp, satirical standout that's just starting to circulate. Tulathimutte's ability to capture the specific anxieties of contemporary life — from dating app disasters to professional networking nightmares — makes these stories feel urgently relevant. His prose style combines internet-era irony with surprising moments of vulnerability, creating characters who are simultaneously ridiculous and deeply human. The collection's exploration of how rejection shapes identity resonates particularly in an era of constant evaluation and comparison.
Goodreads: 3.86 | Amazon UK: 4.0
Perfect for fans of: You Are Having a Good Time by Jenny Zhang, Elif Batuman's fiction, The Verificationist by Donald Antrim, millennial anxiety fiction, and satirical short stories about modern life.
Discovering Tomorrow's Literary Treasures Today
These ten books represent the cutting edge of contemporary literature — works that challenge conventional storytelling, trust their readers' intelligence, and offer rewards proportional to the engagement they demand. What unites them is not genre or style but quality: each demonstrates the kind of literary ambition and execution that creates lasting impact. They're books that generate passionate discussion rather than passive consumption, that linger in the mind long after reading, that change how we see the world or ourselves.
The trajectory from critical darling to mainstream recognition often happens gradually in our literary ecosystem. Books that begin as quiet recommendations in independent bookstores can slowly build momentum through word-of-mouth, eventually finding their wider audience. But there's something special about encountering a book in its early stages, before the broad consensus forms, when your reading experience isn't shaped by widespread opinions or expectations.
These selections span continents, centuries, and consciousness itself — from colonial Penang to Arctic Scandinavia, from ancient Rome to alternate Americas. They include debuts and established authors experimenting with form, translations bringing global perspectives to English readers, and homegrown talents pushing the boundaries of their genres. What they share is that ineffable quality that marks truly exceptional literature: the ability to surprise, to move, to challenge, and ultimately to expand our understanding of what fiction can achieve.
If you found these recommendations valuable, consider exploring our other curated lists:
✦ The Lure of the Strange: 10 Liminal Books That Feel Like a Dream
✦ Unlimited Potential: 10 Unputdownable Kindle Books to Read This Month
Want more curated discoveries like this? Every week, we spotlight smart, emotionally resonant fiction that's worth your time — and not just what's trending.
Until next time, happy reading.
— The Page Sage
Thumbnail Photo by Sneha Sivarajan on Unsplash
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