My Favourite Books of 2025

In no particular order and without any ado, here are my favourite reads of 2025.

Glorious Exploits - Ferdia Lennon

It’s a novel set during the Pelopponesian war about two bored Syracusan potters bribing a dying cohort of Athenian prisoners of war into staging a Euripides play in a quarry. It’s witty, morbid, and despite the absurd sounding premise, so compellingly human in how its characters are moved and changed by art, friendship and respect for their enemies. Written in contemporary Irish vernacular that you quickly forget about as you read it, Glorious Exploits is a furiously fun tragicomedy that any great Greek playwright would have been proud of.

A Little Trickerie - Rosanna Pike

This fiendishly beautiful book features one of the most memorable characters you’ll ever meet. Tibb Ingleby is a vagrant in search of a roof in Henry VII’s England. As she slowly comes out of the oyster shell of her trauma, guilt and grief, helped by an equally charismatic cast, the pursuit of that goal drives her and her friends to one great and risky trick. There’s a lovely sense of balance to this book. Scepticism and faith. Cruelty and kindness. Darkness, and yet plenty of light. This is ultimately a hopeful book, weighing the virtue of a life lived small against a life lived not at all, or against a life lived short but in the fullness of love. The book develops Tibb’s distinctive voice instantly (partly through judicious use of ‘kennings’, two-word metaphors used instead of concrete nouns), dragging you immediately into her orbit by the scruff of the neck (no lordly ruffs for these urchins). From there, it never lets go, the flash forwards setting up a tragedy you hope and pray Tibb can find one last trick to avert. Ingenious.

Orbital - Samantha Harvey

The winner of the 2024 Booker Prize is a little gem of a novel. Deeply intimate, playing on the claustrophobia and paradigm-shifting, time-warping detachment of its space station setting, the book will make you think deeply about the little orb we live on. Do yourself a favour and read this during a plane journey - it’s short enough to lend itself to that and the book lends itself to reading in a burst because there’s little plot to speak of and make you race back to. You’ll want to spend the rest of the flight looking out of the window instead of at a screen.

The Examiner - Janice Hallett

It would be easy to start taking Janice Hallett for granted, so consistently does she produce extraordinary books. The Examiner is just as deliciously clever and propulsive as Hallett’s previous work. By which I mean it’s just about as page-turning, engrossing a novel as it's possible to find. Told in essays and coursework, Whatsapps and emails, The Examiner asks you, the reader, to take on the titular role and discover which, if any, of the mature students on Royal Hastings University’s new art course has been murdered, by whom, and why. If you feel like you read enough emails and group chats during the work day, don’t let that put you off. This is still joyous escapism, and the genius of the structure is that each email or message is so quick that you won’t want to stop reading what is both a cosy and darkly devious tale. Hallett is firmly established as a buy on sight author for me, and I have both The Killer Question and A Box Full of Murders ready to dive into.

The King's Mother - Annie Garthwaite

Annie Garthwaite set high expectations with her sparkling debut, Cecily. The King’s Mother picks up where that left off without missing a beat, forcing Cecily to deal not with war against a rival house but with escalating fighting within her own walls. Cecily’s golden boy, Edward, is king, but, as many kings have found, winning a throne can be a lot more fun, and a lot easier, than keeping it. And what of their mothers? Well, if fighting is a theatre in which it is harder for a woman to act, where waiting and praying and powerlessness must have been tortuous, then ruling is one where she can perhaps wield plenty of influence, if, and it is the big if,  she’s listened to. Cecily increasingly finds herself mediating between her sons, forced to help sound the alarm for threats against her family’s rule. Her struggle here is every bit as captivating as it was in the first novel. Also as before, Garthwaite is a consummate character writer. Her prose is sharp, polished, and undeniably beautiful, letting the reader deeply into Cecily’s head, without ever letting the pace drop. A wonderful duology.

Birnam Wood - Eleanor Catton

How do you follow up becoming the youngest winner of the Booker Prize? A decade on from the success of the 800 page historical mystery The Luminaries, Catton’s answer was to do something different. Birnam Wood, borrowing its title from Shakespeare, is a thoughtful thriller following a guerrilla gardening group that get in over their head with a too-generous benefactor. Catton’s narrator is a treat, observant, cutting, and distinctly old-fashioned in some ways. The pairing with a very contemporary setting full of drones, vegans, and prepping billionaires wouldn't work in less capable hands, but of course, in Catton's it does.

Loot - Tania James

Great writers find inspiration in the most unlikely spots, but even by those standards, an 18th century toy tiger currently housed in the V&A is at the more unusual end. At once tight and sprawling, the quest for possession of the tiger automaton created by young woodworker Abbas and his master, an exiled Frenchman, for Tipu Sultan hums along just as the novel’s themes of artifice, ownership (what claim should an artist have on their creation?), and parentage are explored with depth and nuance. I've seen it labelled as a heist novel, but a bit like The Curse of Pietro Houdini, which I also loved this year, it's much more than that.

Loot is, quite simply, a hoot.

The Rules of Civility - Amor Towles

There is an unmistakeable urgency and sharpness to great fiction, and perhaps no contemporary writer emodies it better than Amor Towles, whose second and third novels have long been among my most recommended and gifted. His debut established Towles as a seriously sharp writer of characters and transportive locations, in this case 1930s New York. Overflowing with wit and wisdom, the reader watches Katey Kontent’s star rise and Tinker Grey’s fall. There’s a nice bit of thesis writing here too in the novel’s argument that some moments and years of choice matter more than others. Save it for a trip to Manhattan if there’s one on the horizon.

Held - Anne Michaels

One of the first books I read in 2025 remains one of the most unusual. This scrapbook of a novel, which is told non-chronologically, is undoubtedly demanding, asking readers to let words wash over them or to put up with regular ambiguities and uncertainties. But it rewards them with some of the most beautiful cadences and deepest interior writing you could hope to read. The plot is spectral, not quite irrelevant but definitely not central either. The characters are, unlike many on this list, not memorable ones. Somehow despite those major impediments, it remains a powerful, haunting book, albeit one I’d only recommend to very specific readers.

Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi

Right from the title, this book is unsettling. This is no neat homecoming, but something messier and more challenging. Distilling 400 years of history on two continents into 300 pages, Gyasi’s chief victory here is in seeking the specific over the general, though of course in doing so she invites the reader to reflect on the number of people who suffered similarly thanks to slavery and its long legacy, including incarceration and addiction. The 14 stories, each one heading further down the family tree of one of two sisters, conjure their protagonists quickly and assertively. Doing this in a novel of connected short stories, where each character and setting gets such limited breathing room is one of the hardest feats of alchemy to achieve in fiction, but it can lead to some of the most memorable novels you’ll read (think things like Cloud Atlas or North Woods).

Honourable mentions

Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan

Quantum of Menace - Vaseem Khan

Written on the Dark - Guy Gavriel Kay

Water Moon - Samantha Sotto Yambao

A Drop of Corrupton - Robert Jackson Bennett

Tyll - Daniel Kehlmann