The 30 Best BookTok Books

If you loved “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” you’ll love “The Guest.” This story of Hamptons-coded destruction follows a young girl summering on Long Island who, after being asked to leave by the older man housing her, decides not to return to the city and instead house surf across the island. She spends a week in and out of the houses of others, a feat only manageable by manipulation and emotional navigation.

The main characters at play in “Such a Fun Age” are Alex and Emira, a wealthy GirlBoss and her babysitter, a young black woman who is confronted at the supermarket, accused of kidnapping the white child she cares for. This novel is all about race, privilege, and transactional relationships. It’s sharp and impossible to put down.

This novel focuses on grief and mental illness, following a young girl who visits with the ghost of her father 10 years after his death. Through his memory, she digests her own childhood, her relationship with her mother and the people in her life, and her own existence.

A story about addiction, and more specifically the opioid crisis, this novel follows a young girl named Emory and her stoner brother Joey who, after their involvement in a deadly car crash, goes to rehab to kick his drug habit. When he returns from rehab, their small town is not exactly ready to accept him, or her for that matter, with open arms.

Big trigger warning on this one. “The Way I Used To Be” follows Eden, a bright young girl whose world is turned upside down when she is sexually assaulted by her brother’s best friend. The novel unpacks the complex feelings that arise from trauma, following Eden through four years of high school, and the highs and lows of healing.

Booktok likes to be sad sometimes. This heartbreaking novel follows 17-year-old Charlie Davis, opening with her experience of mental illness and time in a treatment center, and exploring her traumas, from the people she’s lost to the little she has left. TW: self-harm.

Love on the brain, “If He Had Been With Me” follows two young friends (read: unrequited lovers), Autumn and Finn, who part ways and drift from each other, only to be pushed back together by questions of “what if?”

Tiktok’s favorite historical fiction is undoubtedly "The Nightingale." The story takes place in France 1939, following a woman forced to live with German Nazi’s in her home after her husband leaves for the war. “The Nightingale” is an epic WWII story, highlighting the untold stories of the women who endured it.

This novel—which will soon appear on the screens of Apple TV+ users—follows a female chemist in the early 1960s working on an all-male research team. She falls in love with another scientist, not long before finding herself a single mother and star of a cooking show for housewives. She brings her chemistry knowledge to the kitchen, to the dismay of men everywhere, and makes it her mission to challenge the status quo.

From the same author as “Happy Place,” comes “Beach Read,” which follows a jaded romance writer and a literary fiction writer who spend the summer living next door to each other, both suffering from cases of writers’ block. To solve their problems, they decide to swap genres, trading fluffy, optimistic romance with “the next Great American Novel,” all the while helping each other explore their new genres.

New England Summer vibes and heartbreak meet in this novel, which follows a seemingly perfect couple who break up, decline to tell their friends, and are forced to share a room on their annual weeklong trip to Maine, all the while keeping up the facade of romance for their friends.

This Booktok favorite follows a psychotherapist who transfers to a new psychiatric hospital to work with an infamous patient who murdered her husband, then never spoke again. While balancing his own crumbling personal life, Theo makes it his mission to get her to speak, convinced that no one knows the truth of what happened to her. The final twist in this story is, let’s just say, shocking.

This epic novel follows two friends through three decades of life as they meet, fall in and out of love, and together develop a multi-million dollar gaming company. If you’re a gamer, you’ll love this. If you’re not a gamer, you’ll also love this, and you’ll learn a lot. The story is expansive and heartbreaking and the world-building, both in and out of gameplay, is top notch.

Ali Hazelwood's debut became an instant BookTok sensation, and it's pretty obvious why. Olive Smith lies to her friend that she's currently seeing someone and ends up kissing the first guy she spots in the hallway to prove her right. Turns out, the random dude is actually her program's toughest professor, Dr. Adam Carlson. They now have to pretend to be in a relationship to help sell the lie and yes, it does get very steamy.

Holly Black finally returns to the fairie world of Elfhame over 15 years after Tithe was released. Now the story follows Jude Urgate, a mortal who was kidnapped and taken to live among the fey. Even without powers of her own, she tries to prove herself against those who don't believe she belongs by teaming up with a powerful group and trying to take the crown down.

After her brother leaves for a special year-long volunteer opportunity, Ava Chen has to learn to deal with his very cold best friend, Alex Volkov. But while he knows she's off-limits as he tries to protect her, love has other plans for these two.

This heartbreaking but also uplifting novel will remind you not to take any second of your life for granted. Two teenage guys both get a horrible call saying they will die that day. Deciding to spend their final moments together, Meteo and Rufus try to make the most of what they have while also giving love one last chance.

After lying to her family about having an American boyfriend all this time, Catalina Martin quickly accepts her colleague's offer for him to pretend to be her long-time BF ahead of her sister's wedding. But what starts as a fake relationship turns into something neither of them expected in this slow-burn romance.