Reader's Report 2025

The standout books of 2025, which turned out to be a very good year of reading for me:

• I loved Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me. The voice, the spirit, the fearlessness: they lit me up. What a hero. If I had to pick one book of the year maybe it would be this one.

• Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was my fave novel of the year and maybe of the past many years. Big, immersive, rich – I lost myself in it, and because it was long I spun it out and just enjoyed being in that world for as long as I could. I loved its sweeping style of storytelling that reminded me of reading John Irving’s novels in my twenties. A bit Dickensian perhaps. Who’s writing these books now? Maybe on another day I’d pick this as my book of the year. Here is a lovely conversation on Substack between Kiran Desai and Junot Diaz.

• I had expected Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives to be good but didn’t realise it would be so engrossing. But of course it was! What a life in the world of books – what lives. What I loved was her utter self-possession, her authority and her wit, and how she deploys these qualities in her writing as well as her public life in the name of justice. Another hero. What a brilliant read.

• I had a copy of Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones for a few years before I finally read it in anticipation of seeing the movie Pillion. I adored both: funny, bittersweet, real. I especially appreciated each for their presentation of complex truths without judgement. Something that truly impressed me was its economy – so much packed into 120 pages. Also its voice – it really committed to Colin’s perspective. What a clever and moving and strange book – same for the film, though that leaned into the laughs a little more. Also: it’s good to read gay fiction that’s not written for straight tourists. (I’m still very excited to see Heated Rivalry when it arrives on UK tv next month though. I mean, we take these gifts when they come along.) Maybe on another day I’d choose Box Hill as my novel or even book of the year.

I really, really loved these books. Any one of them would have been enough to crown a year of reading, so the pleasure of reading all four was an utter treat. Such reading is enlarging, and transformative. My pal Bhanu Kapil talks about the practice of deep reading – these are books with depths to return to.

Other highlights included:

• Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes. The superficiality was entirely the point, and the subjects most worthy of skewering. (I think we are all the subjects of this one.)

• Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte – filthy, funny, and very smart short stories on relationships in the digital age. (Which is basically all relationships now, right.)

• The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong – I again realised some books aren’t meant to be rushed; one critic wrote a mean, petty and wrong-headed review, while another called it a sentimental novel, which I feel is a more useful way to understand it. I was also lucky to see Ocean speak at the Southbank Centre, and here is a super interview for Bella Freud’s podcast – also found as video, someone noted, on YouTube. Great for writers – among many gems, yes, the sentence is not just a butler; poesis, not just mimesis.

• Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate by Wendy Johnson – a mix of memoir, horticulture and garden history, and my meditation companion for the first half of the year. I love reading about compost.

• Raucous Invention by Mark Hearld made me want to pick up pen, paper and scissors.

Among others, I particularly enjoyed Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, In the Footsteps of Baal by Warren Singh-Bartlett, Shattered by Hanif Kureishi, The Palace on the Higher Hill by Karim Kattan (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman), Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, Every One Still Here by Liadann Ní Chuinn, and The Best of Everything by Kit De Waal.

If I had finished Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business, it might have made these lists too, but I have about thirty pages left as well as the other two volumes of The Deptford Trilogy. It’s my next book club read, and I am loving it. So why rush. More expansive storytelling.

This year I really think we have been blessed with some rich and entertaining books, but it was only when I got to October that I really found those of this year’s books that entranced me as a reader. Much of my reading before the autumn left me unsatisfied, and there were also some real duds. Predictably, a lot of cookie-cutter stuff from the cookie-cutter writing schools. What on earth are they teaching them there?!

With the notable exception of the glorious Sonia and Sunny, a rather downbeat realism prevailed in what I’ve read in another six titles so far of this year’s Booker Prize longlist. Each has its moments, but much also felt like rambling first thoughts of morning pages, and I felt a drab sameness. I often say there’s no accounting for taste, but here we can account for the judges. Four of them this year were fiction writers, and perhaps a prize needs greater diversity in that area. Next year’s panel includes an academic, a poet, a musician and a journalist as well as a novelist. That feels more promising.

Maybe I was just disappointed that the very different Sonia and Sunny didn’t win, but I found the winner’s showing relentless, its setting sketchy, and the rise and fall of its protagonist unbelievable. He felt like a version of a person rather than someone real. It’s not that bad really, but I expect more magic from a winner. I mostly found this book: boring. If something is ultra-mimetic, whatever is being mimed could be more interesting. Readers’ descriptions of its style as ‘spare’ also grew hackneyed, and an op ed on the victorious return of masculinity in literary fiction felt ridiculous given that women wrote the winning books in only three of the last twelve years; perhaps the masculinity of four gay-themed novels during that time counts for little at the Guardian?

Taste: it’s a thing. It would be boring if we all liked the same things. The new tv version of Amadeus has been slated, but we’ve really enjoyed it this week.

Bookfluencers continue to bookfluence, and I do find a lot of the best and most reliable recommendations for books via Instagram. Substack continues to need good editors.

I was pleased to see the publication of various books by friends this year, including Jo McMillan’s The Accidental Immigrants (shortlisted for the Orwell Prize), Eleanor Anstruther’s In Judgement of Others, Fiona Melrose’s Even Beyond Death, Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar, Kate Beales’s Broken Horses, Emma Darwin’s The Bruegel Boy, Bhanu Kapil and Blue Pieta’s Autobiography of a Performance, and JP Evans’s Studies in Hysteria.

I’ve decided to read more Charles Dickens in 2026, inspired in part by my enjoyment of Kiran Desai and Robertson Davies, and also after seeing a super production of A Christmas Carol here in Twickenham this month. I’ve sometimes found Dickens hard-going in the past, but I think I’m ready. Timing is a thing too. It helped to read David Copperfield as the fantastic audiobook narrated by Richard Armitage a few years ago. I’m starting now with novels I’ve never read, Oliver Twist first because I am seeing the West End show early next year with visiting Americans. I took part in a school production in 1975, and I still know the words to the tunes.

If anyone cares to read along with any particular Dickens novels, let me know and perhaps we can arrange something. I thought it could be fun to read different books with different readers.

Praise be to the librarians! Who’d imagine that the work that they do would become such a battlefield. May they find courage and inspiration in the work of writers mentioned here, especially Margaret Atwood and Arundhati Roy.

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First posted on my blog on 31 December 2025. You can sign up for my mailing list and newsletter here.