End of the Year: What You Bought + What We Thought
Bestsellers + the best books you may have missed
What you bought + what we thought / a tasty dip into your favorites and ours!
“ Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know. ”
Wow - what a year! 2024 ended with storms that rocked our beautiful city. From there, we banded together, and with 2025 we had personnel changes, new hires, fun events, and most important of all, YOU. We wanted to talk about the books that YOU bought and tore through this year, and also had our Book Director, Dominic, pick his top 5, just in case you missed them the first go around! Thanks for making this year so special!
Book + Bottle’s Top Five Best Selling Books of 2025:
1. Largo goes loony for horror
Over a hundred people followed us to the gorgeous Largo Library, where we had the beautiful chance to partner with them for one of the most fun events we have ever done; we were their bookseller for Grady Hendrix, who made his way through our beloved swamp to visit!
He signed books, shook hands, and made us cackle as he talked about the trials and tribulations of selling a haunted house, and then made us cry as he discussed the importance of ghosts and what we owe ourselves and the dead.
The reviews poured in and people loved his take on a 1970’s St. Augustine (we LOVE a Florida book) - add creepiness, feminism, and wit, and it made it our top seller of the year!
2. Midnight releases are soooo back
May 18th was not the release date for Great Big Beautiful Life, Emily Henry’s most literary tale yet, but it was an important one. It was the day before it’s release, an on May 18th, at 9:00 pm, we invited you to our store to celebrate everything Emily Henry, one of the biggest authors of the last ten years. And you know what…you came out!
You dressed up, you brought your friends, you made a whole night of it as we played games, turned on club music, and celebrated the release of your favorite’s newest book…at MIDNIGHT! It brought us so much joy to see you so excited and so ready to stay up all night and be the first to get her book in your hands. It’s that childlike wonder that books still bring.
That, along with Henry’s ability to still surprise and delight, kept A Great Big Beautfiful Life at the top of our bestseller list all year!
3. A handbook for tyrannical times
We are living in hard times, and only seeming to get harder by the day. Kindness seems woefully out of fashion as our political leaders bully and shout from the pulpit. For that reason, and many more, On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder was one of the few nonfiction books that graced our top lists. Able to fit in your pocket, this tiny tome leads us through the rise of authoritarianism, describing how our founding fathers began this country to fight the demise of democracy.
A handbook, a survival guide, and a shot in the dark for hope, this book kept you out of the doldrums even when the shadows persisted.
Together, we rise, especially with books by our side.
4. A classic comes back
It’s 2025. There are fires in California raging. A housing crisis looms, and the rise of fascism has made our America one we can barely recognize. Sound familiar?
Because this is also Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel. How many times have we heard the old truism, that if you don’t learn from the mistakes of the past, we are doomed to repeat them? How about a new truism - if a writer, especially as one as prescient and brilliant as Butler, speaks about their lived experiences through the lens of dystopic fiction, we don’t wait for our society to begin to collapse to listen to them?
Timely as ever, the Parable of the Sower (especially the newest edition with Gloria Steinhems rhapsodic introduction) stayed at the forefront of our minds, allowing us to commiserate in our shared burdens, but also dig out a possibility to a more holistic future through the power of empathy.
5. A love letter To Bookstores
Independent Bookstore Day always falls the last day of April, and so for Fiction Book Club, we decided on a kind, slim, and comforting Japanese translation by Satoshi Yagisawa. The book was like a hug - about a young woman who goes through intense grief, and is held by the books and stories in her ‘crazy’ uncle’s bookstore. While the book provided relief against the incoming heat of summer, the best part was the end of book club - all attendees received a piece of paper and a pen, and we wrote ‘Thank You’ letters to the people that showed us a bigger world through books.
For some, it was a librarian. For others, it was a parent. Some even handed our booksellers a handwritten note, thanking them for their time, their ideas, and their suggestions. It was a testament to bookstores and our need for this third place for us to feel safe, learn new things, and be comforted.
And now, the five you may have missed…
1. ‘I don’t care about the american dream…I care about Americans who dream’
Doystevseky meets Vonnegut meets a lightning storm of earnestness that can only be described as a revolution towards softness, with Vuong being the captain through the storm. Ocean Vuong’s first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was a cultural moment - in his sophomore effort, he doubles down on writing that sings and soars about a young boy ready to end it all when an older woman suffering from dementia convinces him to stay on Earth a little bit longer.
A book about found family, about sitting with yourself and all the scuffs and scars, a book about love, a book about hope, a book about death, a book that establishes the novel as a vehicle for holding not the historical record, but the emotional record. A phenomenal effort.
2. How do you love at the end of the world?
Julia Armfield meets Raymond Carver in this dystopic but all-too-real debut by Nini Berndt. Mikey is dead, and Hailey loved him. Mikey’s sister comes to town, but doesn’t tell Hailey who she is. The wold is collapsing, but what does that matter when the world already collapsed when a person shaped hole appears?
A book that is a broken heart held together by bubble gum, a book that is queer love with a capital L. We had the utmost pleasure of serving Nini Berndt some wine while she was in town, and just fell in love talking with her about the ‘process’, about ghosts, about telling our truth in fiction.
We will read anything she writes, and you should too.
3. A war Story told like never before, in one ruinous sentence
This story about a group of soldiers in World War 1 finding a downed angel and bringing her back to base is propulsive like a bullet. We have all read war stories, seen war movies, heard the songs about how war is hell, but that can be hard to translate in art.
Daniel Krauss, though, is a butcher mid-baptism, reaching for heaven with blood on his hands. He uses a single sentence to overwhelm us, to astound us, to make us feel as tired as Bagger and the rest of his crew. It’s a magic trick that works, and even through the sorrow and the violence, we yearn to keep reading until it’s fascinating and cosmic end.
4. A witch, a scarecrow, and a dust storm…stop me if you’ve heard this one
Karen Russel became a central literary Florica figure in 2012, when her novel about an eccentric family adrift in its failing alligator-wrestling theme park was a finalist for the Pullitzer Prize. In her newest novel, The Antidote, she marries her literary chops of that often talked about novel with her surreal short story sensibilities, delivering a historical fiction novel that plays, swings, jumps, and punches.
Featuring multiple points of view, magical realism that never flys too far away from reality, and while genre-defying is often a term too loosely thrown around, this novel absolutely lives there, rent free.
5. Grab the tissues, you’re gonna need them
There’s a love triangle. Intrigue. You read, and you read, and you start to realize, the love triangle maybe isn’t between two men, but between the imagined self and the real self, between a future you longed for and the future you crafted for yourself.
Now, you aren’t intrigued - you are FULLY sat, satiated by every meteroic sentence. Lily King gifts us gold, spinning at her typewriter a tale of beauty, of love lost and love found, missed opportunity and the intensity of first loves.