BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Which books this year have made your pulse race, your heart sing, your synapses fire? Our editors and critics looked back over everything we had read and reviewed in 2025 and picked 40 of the best for this end-of-year extravaganza – as well as asking friends and contributors such as Mick Herron, Elif Shafak, Lenny Henry and Deborah Levy for their recommendations.
Looking over the choices, a few things jump out. It has been another cracking year for Irish fiction: Wendy Erskine, John Patrick McHugh and Liada Ní Chuinn all make our list (and if those are unfamiliar names, they won’t be for long).
Memoir in all its forms is in rude health, with diaries (Helen Garner and Jenny Uglow), family secrets (Joe Dunthorne), and accounts of last days (Sarah Perry) and writerly roots (Margaret Atwood). And children’s books – recently celebrated by Penelope Lively in The Observer – get their beautiful due: if you’ve walked into a bookshop recently you will know about the latest in Katherine Rundell’s terrific Impossible Creatures series, and the epic conclusion to Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust – but let us guide you towards Patrice Lawrence’s gripping People Like Stars and, for delightful bedtime reading, the irresistibly titled Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob. All of human life is here – as, we hope, are most of your Christmas presents.
The Observer’s books of the year | 2025’s best children’s books
Writers recommend: Mick Herron, Elif Shafak and more
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Chris Power’s paperback choice
We Live Here Now by CD Rose
The 2025 Goldsmiths prize-winner is set in the surreal environs of the modern art world, focusing on the mysterious work of the fictional installation artist Sigismunda Conrad. The fifth book by the Mancunian author CD Rose channels Tom McCarthy, M John Harrison and Robert Aickman, Chris writes in his forthcoming review, combining “McCarthy’s interest in systems and theory with Harrison’s blend of the mundane and arcane, and Aickman’s subtle way with the eerie and strange”. Does it work? Not always, but when it does it has a brilliant, immersive quality that makes you lose track of reality. Read the review | Buy the book
Three books on winter
The Scottish crime writer Val McDermid has long been drawn to winter – so much so that she has written a memoir exploring her relationship with it. For our regular column, she has picked three books that are especially evocative of the darkest, coldest time of the year, spanning Narnia and the Shetlands. Read the list
Julian Barnes on the imagination
Plato banished poets from his ideal state, points out the novelist Julian Barnes: “And in a way he was right, because the imagination is dangerous when seen from the other side. It is an alternative power. It can warn us, and it can make us dream. It can picture a better, cleaner, fairer world than the authorities are able or willing to seek. It can conjure up both utopias and dystopias.” Barnes’s powerful micro-essay, published in The Observer this week, is the introduction to the 2026 Redstone Diary. Incidentally, the themed Redstone diaries – begun in 1987 by the Redstone Press founder Julian Rothenstein – are beautiful books in their own right, and this one is scattered with texts chosen by Barnes and images curated by Rothenstein: a panel from a 1930s comic in which a young girl imagines wreaking havoc on her school; a gorgeous, delicate William Blake etching of a ladder to the moon. Read the essay | Buy the diary
ENDNOTES
Born in East Berlin during the Cold War, Jenny Erpenbeck spends most of her time writing unsettling, vividly imagined fiction – she won the International Booker Prize in 2024 for her novel Kairos – but her new book is an equally beguiling collection of essays. From her home in central Berlin, Erpenbeck spoke to Ellen Peirson-Hagger this week for The Observer. Here’s Ellen:
“Disappearance is surely no less powerful than love,” writes Jenny Erpenbeck in Things That Disappear, “but it remains astonishing that thin air can sometimes have just as much weight as something that is really there.” Few writers could find such feeling in a book about nothingness – but who else would even try? What I love most about Erpenbeck’s writing is how naturally such eccentric yet deeply humane provocations come, and the same was true throughout our hour-long conversation. Erpenbeck didn’t care for small talk, instead quickly exposing her tantalisingly dark humour when speaking of death, telling me: “We struggle our whole lives to see people who were dear to us pass away, and we need to…” She interrupted herself. “We don’t need to, of course, we can also jump out of the window… But if we want to live on, we need to learn to deal with the fact that we are mortals.” Read the interview
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Illustration by Charlotte Durance