The best books of 2025
We read over 110 books in 2025. Possibly too many? Here’s the top of the tops.
Plenty of new books which garner near-universal praise turn out to be annoyingly mediocre or downright trash.
Not so these ones.
Take our word on Shortlist’s 2025 picks for the best books of the year, across fiction, non-fiction, memoir and biography with sci-fi, music, comedy, history, nature and politics all covered. We've read them all so you don't have to — but you really should, as these are enlightening and entertaining in equal measure.
Get stuck in.
FICTION
Perfection (Vincenzo Latronico)
This is a brutally funny book, a future classic. Anna and Tom are a millennial couple, digital creatives living in Berlin, chasing a very specific dream: unique, ethical, cosmopolitan culture before it tips into ugly, identikit gentrification. In just 120 pages, Perfection somehow captures in words and vibes what we all see in images day in, day out: curated, dissociated lives, lived for the camera or the style or the anecdote. Foyles’ Fiction Book of the Year for good reason.
The Wax Child (Olga Ravn)
Read this for the writing, read it for the witch trial hysteria, read it for the Nordic folklore, seriously just read it. Olga Ravn’s retelling of a series of real-life accusations and trials in 17th century Denmark is a suspenseful and mystery-filled masterpiece with confessions, betrayals and curses. Based on Ravn’s play HEX and translated beautifully here by Martin Aitken, The Wax Child is a rich, complex and heady brew.
The Expansion Project (Ben Pester)
The best literary sci-fi gets at how societal and technological change makes us feel, without needing to painstakingly predict exactly how our gadgets and interfaces and meta-bodies will be transformed. That’s what Ben Pester’s The Expansion Project does so successfully. Tom Crowley works at the Capmeadow Business Park and loses his kid on ‘bring your daughter to work day’, thus triggering a series of strange encounters, disorienting journeys and existential crises. On the Debut Fiction shortlist for the Nero Book Awards and rightly so.
Slags (Emma Jane Unsworth)
Slags is just so, so easy to recommend: it’s make-you-snort funny, while tenderly getting into some crunchy themes, features a campervan road trip that stirs up family and teenage memories (ugh, classic) and its thoroughly lived-in characters, sisters Sarah and Juliette, have real, slightly disappointing lives and in their youth, went to real schools on real buses. You can never have too many mouthy broads in literature. A big thumbs up.
What We Can Know (Ian McEwan)
Ian McEwan’s latest is still making us sad, months after we read it. He’s that good. If you’re ready for your face to feel funny, it’s well worth it. What We Can Know moves between a near-future archipelago, 100 years from now, and a 2010s literary dinner party in the countryside. An academic tries to piece together the dynamics of a group of friends and family in order to find a lost poem that has become a symbol of climate discourse. As is McEwan’s way, the central mystery is quietly devastating. Deservedly on plenty of best-of-the-year lists.
The Deserters (Mathias Enard)
Reading The Deserters will spoil other fiction for you. Mathias Enard, translated from French to English by Charlotte Mandell, tells two stories in parallel, one very specific, emotional and cerebral, the other more universal, immediate and visceral, both dealing with war, conflict and 20th century Europe. The precise, near-cinematic way he approaches the minutiae of a soldier moving through nature, with its overlooked beauties and unforeseen dangers, in particular is phenomenal.
The Catch (Yrsa Daley-Ward)
This is probably the book which got us the most in terms of the mood it created this year. The Catch picked us up and enveloped us in a kind of David Lynch-esque headspace while reading. Twins Clara and Dempsey are both living in a magical realist London - one ultra successfully, one not so - when they encounter a doppelganger of their late mother. Dark, unpredictable and inventive, Yrsa Daley-Ward gets you right in the feels with her debut novel. A writer to watch.
Muckle Flugga (Michael Pedersen)
We can never resist a good lighthouse story and this is a doozy. From Edinburgh Makar (Poet Laureate) Michael Pedersen, who clearly love-love-loves words, Muckle Flugga is a wild, weird tale of a father (The Father), a son (Ouse), the son’s imaginary friend/spirit (Robert Louis Stevenson) and an outsider (Firth) who comes to the remote Scottish island and upsets the rather delicate balance. A scene with a Russian, a monkey and some pumpkin punching is still making us laugh. Magic.
NON-FICTION, MEMOIR & BIOGRAPHY
The Secret Painter (Joe Tucker)
This might be our favourite book of 2025. The “secret painter” of the title is screenwriter Joe Tucker’s uncle Eric Tucker, a seemingly regular bloke from Warrington who unloaded trucks, drank a lot of pints, went to the bookies, lived with his mother in a terraced house and… died leaving hundreds and hundreds of very accomplished, very alive paintings of the people, pubs and neighbourhoods which made up his life. Joe Tucker has a light touch when it comes to thinking about place, class, art and value when it comes to his uncle. This book is laugh-out-loud funny, sensitive to everyday victories and tragedies and a testament to never counting anyone out. Unbelievably moving.
Is A River Alive? (Robert Macfarlane)
The golden rule is that the answer to questions in headlines is usually “no” but the excellent nature writer Robert Macfarlane makes a mighty compelling case for “yes” in Is A River Alive? The prose is elegant, searching and transportive, the characters he meets are unique and quietly heroic and the adventures, to the Ecuadorian cloud forests of Los Cedros and the Mutehekau Shipu river rapids in Canada, are thrilling and awe-inspiring. A modern masterpiece.
Indignity (Lea Ypi)
We’ve seen quite a few semi-fictionalised memoirs and biographies in the past few years, and Lea Ypi’s account of tracing her grandmother’s life is one of the most fascinating. She constructs a life story from family tales, photographs, historical accounts and declassified archives of informants’ reports about Leman Ypi’s daily comings and goings in post-World War 2 Albania, turning to fiction to make sense of it all. After searching through material covering the fascists, communists and monarchists across these pivotal decades in the region, Ypi reflects on memory, grief, legacy and dignity, personally and philosophically.
Night People (Mark Ronson)
Mark Ronson paints such a picture of hip hop DJing in 90s Manhattan that you can almost smell the sweat and the booze in those clubs. Night People hones in on the scenes, the characters and the spots that gave him his early music education and by the end of it, you’ll be nostalgic for certain lost to time side-rooms you’d never even heard of. Biggie, Q-Tip and Jay-Z all show up but it’s boy Ronson’s obsession with spinning records that really lights this music memoir up. No notes.
How To Defeat The Far Right (Nick Lowles)
A very British, very contemporary take on this question, HOPE Not Hate’s founder Nick Lowles has given us a survey of the past 25 or so years of work fighting fascism, racism and xenophobia on the streets of places like Burnley, Oldham and Barking and Dagenham. Lowles has example after example of real-world campaigns, thorny challenges and hard-won insights into what works and what doesn’t. An absolute must-read.
The Message (Ta-Nehisi Coates)
Ta-Nehisi Coates does a couple of remarkable things for a public intellectual to do in his latest book, The Message. He returns to his most known and consequential work, The Case For Reparations, and admits what he now believes he got wrong in his arguments. And he takes all the credits he has been awarded by the media, by his peers, by institutions for that work and his subsequent books and spends them almost entirely on a single issue: Palestine. The Message opens with Coates’ visit to Dakar, Senegal, in search of some imagined ancestral home, moves back to US book banning and the spectre of Confederate heroes in South Carolina before recounting his 10-day trip to Palestine and what he learned there about race, colonialism, violence and the many uses of stories.
Baltic: The Future of Europe (Oliver Moody)
If the only time you encounter the Baltic states is the Eurovision Song Contest, you need to read this book. The Times’ Berlin bureau chief Oliver Moody put out this survey of the culture, history, politics and foreign policies of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, as well as looking at Finland, Poland and the Baltic sea itself, this Spring. It’s comprehensive without being dull, incredibly well-sourced and includes multiple scenarios of how the next decade might play out for Europe if and when Putin expands his war.
El Generalísimo (Giles Tremlett)
A difficult book to put down, this hefty Franco biography has a hell of a lot to tell us about the current moment we’re living in. From the weaponisation of religion to alliances between dangerous figures in different countries, the threads might have changed a bit since the mid 1930s but the playbook, depressingly, has not. Giles Tremlett follows the caudillo through his military career in Morocco, through to the Spanish Civil War and beyond to his long, hard reign. A great winter read.
THE BEST OF THE REST
Want the low down on everything else we read this year? Here's our seasonal picks from throughout 2025:
Fiction:
- 10 new fiction books you need to read in 2025
- 10 must-read fiction books to see you through spring
- 10 new fiction books for summer to get you through the heatwave
- 10 seriously good new fiction books for Autumn reading
- 10 must-read winter fiction books to get you through the cold snap
Non-fiction:
- 10 new non-fiction books to soup-up your brain in 2025
- 10 new non-fiction books you need to read this Spring
- 10 new non-fiction books for school’s-out reading this summer
- 10 new non-fiction books to read for your Autumn reset
- 10 new non-fiction books to super-charge your winter reading
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