The 2025 AP Lit Exam happened just two weeks ago and I’ve had some time to read the prompts. I’m always the most interested in studying the titles used on the open question. While students are not limited to these titles in any way, the ones chosen be illuminating. These titles can be studied for trends, used to cultivate a classroom library, and even help choose new curriculum for future years. Here’s my breakdown of what I learned from studying the 2025 AP Lit open question.
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New Titles
There were 14 brand new titles suggested in 2025 between the two released exams. Here are the books with short descriptions (taken from Goodreads.com). These books are great for cultivating a diverse classroom library!
Afterlife by Julia Alvarez (pub. 2021)
Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves—lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack—but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words.
American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson (pub. 2020)
What if your sense of duty required you to betray the man you love? One woman struggles to choose between her honor and her heart in this enthralling espionage drama that deftly hops between New York and West Africa.
It’s 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She’s brilliant, but she’s also a young black woman working in an old boys’ club. Her career has stalled out, she’s overlooked for every high-profile squad, and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork. So when she’s given the opportunity to join a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic, revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention, she says yes.
Yes, even though she secretly admires the work Thomas is doing for his country. Yes, even though she is still grieving over the mysterious death of her sister, whose example led Marie to this career path in the first place. Even though a furious part of her suspects she’s being offered the job because of her appearance and not her talent.
In the year that follows, Marie will observe Thomas, seduce him, and ultimately have a hand in the coup that will bring him down. But doing so will change everything she believes about what it means to be a spy, a lover, a sister, and a good American.
Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid (pub. 1997)
Annie John is a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua. A classic coming-of-age story in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Kincaid’s novel focuses on a universal, tragic, and often comic theme: the loss of childhood.
An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived an idyllic life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful presence, who is the very center of the little girl’s existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother’s benign shadow. Looking back on her childhood, she reflects, “It was in such a paradise that I lived.”
When she turns twelve, however, Annie’s life changes, in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she instinctively rebels against authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing Annie as a “young lady,” ceases to be the source of unconditional adoration and takes on the new and unfamiliar guise of adversary. At the end of her school years, Annie decides to leave Antigua and her family, but not without a measure of sorrow, especially for the mother she once knew and never ceases to mourn.
Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue (pub. 2017)
Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty—and Jende is eager to please. Clark’s wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses’ summer home in the Hamptons. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future.
However, the world of great power and privilege conceals troubling secrets, and soon Jende and Neni notice cracks in their employers’ façades.
When the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Jongas are desperate to keep Jende’s job—even as their marriage threatens to fall apart. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.
Big Fish by Daniel Wallace (pub. 2012)
In his prime, Edward Bloom was an extraordinary man. He could outrun anybody. Bloom never missed a day of school. He saved lives and tamed giants. Animals loved him, people loved him, women loved him. He knew more jokes than any man alive.
At least that’s what he told his son, William. But now Edward Bloom is dying, and William wants desperately to know the truth about his elusive father — this indefatigable teller of tall tales — before it’s too late. So, using the few facts he knows, William re-creates Edward’s life in a series of legends and myths, through which he begins to understand his father’s great feats, and his great failings. The result is hilarious and wrenching, tender and outrageous.
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (pub. 2015)
“You’ve long set your heart against it, Axl, I know. But it’s time now to think on it anew. There’s a journey we must go on, and no more delay…”
The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years.
Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in nearly a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge, and war.
Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine by Lynn Nottage (pub. 2005)
Knocked-up and seriously broke, a successful publicist is plunged into a topsy-turvy world of welfare mothers and drug addicts, and forced to confront the family she left behind. Fabulation is a darkly comic rags-to-riches-to-rags tale of falling down and reaching up to find the goodness within. A L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance Daniel Breaker, Saidah Arrika Ekulona, Jon Matthews, Gary Perez, Melle Powers, Myra Lucretia Taylor, John Wesley and Charlayne Woodard.
The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat pub. 2013
The Farming of Bones begins in 1937 in a village on the Dominican side of the river that separates the country from Haiti. Amabelle Desir, Haitian-born and a faithful maidservant to the Dominican family that took her in when she was orphaned, and her lover Sebastien, an itinerant sugarcane cutter, decide they will marry and return to Haiti at the end of the cane season. However, hostilities toward Haitian laborers find a vitriolic spokesman in the ultra-nationalist Generalissimo Trujillo who calls for an ethnic cleansing of his Spanish-speaking country. As rumors of Haitian persecution become fact, as anxiety turns to terror, Amabelle and Sebastien’s dreams are leveled to the most basic human desire: to endure. Based on a little-known historical event, this extraordinarily moving novel memorializes the forgotten victims of nationalist madness and the deeply felt passion and grief of its survivors.
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (pub. 1995)
Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit.
The number one bestseller in Mexico and America for almost two years, and subsequently a bestseller around the world, Like Water For Chocolate is a romantic, poignant tale, touched with moments of magic, graphic earthiness, bittersweet wit – and recipes.
A sumptuous feast of a novel, it relates the bizarre history of the all-female De La Garza family. Tita, the youngest daughter of the house, has been forbidden to marry, condemned by Mexican tradition to look after her mother until she dies. But Tita falls in love with Pedro, and he is seduced by the magical food she cooks. In desperation, Pedro marries her sister Rosaura so that he can stay close to her, so that Tita and Pedro are forced to circle each other in unconsummated passion. Only a freakish chain of tragedies, bad luck and fate finally reunite them against all the odds.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards (pub. 2006)
On a winter night in 1964, Dr. David Henry is forced by a blizzard to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy. Yet when his daughter is born, he sees immediately that she has Down’s Syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split-second decision that will alter all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. But Caroline, the nurse, cannot leave the infant. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child herself.
So begins this story that unfolds over a quarter of a century—in which these two families, ignorant of each other, are yet bound by the fateful decision made that long-ago winter night. Norah Henry, who knows only that her daughter died at birth, remains inconsolable; her grief weighs heavily on their marriage. And Paul, their son, raises himself as best he can, in a house grown cold with mourning. Meanwhile, Phoebe, the lost daughter, grows from a sunny child to a vibrant young woman whose mother loves her as fiercely as if she were her own.
People of the Whale by Linda Hogan (pub. 2009)
Raised in a remote seaside village, Thomas Witka Just marries Ruth, his beloved since infancy. But an ill-fated decision to fight in Vietnam changes his life forever: cut off from his Native American community, he fathers a child with another woman. When he returns home a hero, he finds his tribe in conflict over the decision to hunt a whale, both a symbol of spirituality and rebirth and a means of survival. In the end, he reconciles his two existences, only to see tragedy befall the son he left behind.
Linda Hogan, called our most provocative Native American writer, with “her unparalleled gifts for truth and magic” (Barbara Kingsolver), has written a compassionate novel about the beauty of the natural world and the painful moral choices humans make in it. With a keen sense of the environment, spirituality, and the trauma of war, People of the Whale is a powerful novel for our times.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt (pub. 1992)
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.
The Sound of a Voice by David Henry Hwang (pub. 1998)
The Sound of a Voice explores how intimacy is achieved between people who have lived in seclusion. In the first part, an aging Japanese warrior arrives at the home of a mysterious woman who lives like a hermit deep in the woods. Has he come as her suitor, or her assassin? Does she intend to love him, or to imprison him forever, like the flowers she cultivates so assiduously?
The battles of love become a deadly contest in this tale, blurring the distinctions between hero and coward, between victor and vanquished. In the second part, an elderly Japanese writer visits a mysterious brothel, which caters to men near the end of their lives by providing them with a means to relive their youth. The writer’s initial contempt for the house gives way first to acceptance, then to regular visits. Ultimately, he finds his dreams and fantasies exposed before the brothel’s elderly Madame, and embarks with her on an ethereal journey beyond sex and love.
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (pub. 2013)
With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds is a groundbreaking novel about the costs of war that is destined to become a classic.
“The war tried to kill us in the spring,” begins this breathtaking account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger.
Bound together since basic training when their tough-as-nails Sergeant ordered Bartle to watch over Murphy, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes impossible actions.
Trending Titles
Another thing you do with the titles on the AP Lit open question are study trending titles, the works mentioned the most in the past 10 years. Here are the most suggested titles from the past 10 years:
- Great Expectations (7 times)
- Wuthering Heights (7 times)
- Beloved (6 times)
- Invisible Man (6 times)
- Jane Eyre (6 times)
- Frankenstein (5 times)
- Native Son (5 times)
- A Raisin in the Sun (5 times)
- The Awakening (4 times)
- Brave New World (4 times)
- Catch-22 (4 times)
- Kindred (4 times)
- The Kite Runner (4 times)
- The Portrait of the Lady (4 times)
- The Scarlet Letter (4 times)
Trending titles don’t just show a title’s versatility but can tell us the titles that College Board question writers like to use time and time again. This is the list I study the most when choosing curriculum and cultivating my classroom library.
Interesting Trends
The last thing I like to do is study the extensive list of ALL titles used on the AP Lit exam. AP Lit goddess Sandra Effinger first compiled this list (which can still be found online here!). I also have a version free in my TpT store and my free resource library. Here are some things I noticed in the titles used (or ignored) from this list:
Out of favor classics
Some “classics” seem to be falling in popularity. The following titles were popular before, but now are noticeably absent from recent years:
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (referenced 15 times but not mentioned since 2013)
- All the Pretty Horses (referenced 8 times but not mentioned since 2013)
- As I Lay Dying (referenced 10 times but only mentioned once since 2009)
- The Jungle (referenced 8 times, but only once since 1996)
- Hedda Gabler (referenced 6 times, but not since 2005)
- The Hairy Ape (referenced 5 times but not since 2000)
- 1984 (referenced only once since 2009)
“Young” titles coming back
I’ve been studying this list for over a decade and always wondered why so many common 9-10th grade titles weren’t suggestions on the exam. I figured they were considered too young or too widely read. However, these titles are finally making an appearance as suggested titles on the AP Lit open question of the exam. Here are common 9-10th grade titles and how often they appear on the exam:
- Fahrenheit 451 – referenced for the first time in 2022 and again in 2023.
- The House on Mango Street – referenced four times between 2008 and 2021
- Of Mice and Men – referenced only twice, in 2001 and 2025
- Romeo and Juliet – referenced four times between 1990 and 2008
- To Kill a Mockingbird – referenced 7 times, but wasn’t referenced until 2008
- Night – Referenced once in 2015
Hot Contemporary Titles
These titles are new publications, but have shown up consistently on the AP Lit open question. They are great choices for adding to your curriculum and classroom library!
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini – Published in 2003, referenced 8 times
- Atonement by Ian McEwan – Published in 2001, referenced 6 times
- The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri – Published in 2003, referenced 6 times
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – Published in 2005, referenced 5 times
- A Gesture Life by Chang-Rae Lee – Published in 1999, referenced 5 times
- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi – Published in 2016, referenced 3 times
- On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong – Published in 2019, referenced 3 times
- Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng – Published in 2017, referenced 3 times
- All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr – Published in 2014, referenced 2 times
- Dominicana by Angie Cruz – Published in 2019, referenced 2 times
- The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt – Published in 2013, referenced 2 times
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (Published in 1938, this is NOT a contemporary title. Since it’s been turned into a Netflix movie in 2020, it has seen a resurgence in young readership.) It was referenced for the first time in 2024 and again in 2025.
- There There by Tommy Orange – Published in 2018, referenced 2 times
Best overall choices
These titles have been referenced on the exam time and time again. If you’re wondering which titles to teach, these have shown themselves to be the most versatile and reliable titles in AP Lit.*
*It is worth taking into consideration the date that each title was published. Some more contemporary works have been referenced many times but are still quite new, in relation to older classics.
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (referenced 33 times since 1976)
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (referenced 28 times since 1971)
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (referenced 26 times since 1979)
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (referenced 23 times since 1978)
- King Lear by William Shakespeare (referenced 20 times since 1977)
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (referenced 19 times since 1976)
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (referenced 19 times since 1971)
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (referenced 18 times since 1971)
- Beloved by Toni Morrison (referenced 17 times since 1990)
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (referenced 16 times since 1982)
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (referenced 16 times since 1976)
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (referenced 16 times since 1988)
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (referenced 15 times since 1982)
- Native Son by Richard Wright (referenced 15 times since 1979)
- Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (15 times since 1976)
- A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (referenced 15 times since 1987)
- Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko (referenced 14 times since 1994)
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker (referenced 13 times since 1992)
- Othello by William Shakespeare (referenced 13 times since 1979)
- Billy Budd by Herman Melville (referenced 12 times since 1979)
- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (referenced 12 times since 1986)
- The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams 12 times since 1971)
- Light in August by William Faulkner (referenced 12 times since 1971)
- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (referenced 12 times since 1981)
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (referenced 11 times since 1989)
- A Passage to India by E. M. Forster (referenced 11 times since 1971)
- Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (referenced 11 times since 1988)
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (referenced 11 times since 1983)
- A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (referenced 11 since 1991)
- Sula by Toni Morrison (referenced 11 times since 1991)
Recap
After the exam, I asked my class what titles they used for the open question. Most used The Kite Runner, which excited me. This was the first year I used that book as a whole class read and it definitely paid off. One more used Frankenstein, our first novel of the year, the rest used independent reads.
I hope you found this data interesting and insightful in making plans for next year. Please bookmark this website and keep it in mind when doing research and preparation for AP Lit. And remember, I have a TpT store with dozens of AP Lit resources, including a download of ALL my AP Lit units (valued at more than $600!)
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