Illustrations by Luke Best
We asked some of our favourite authors to each choose something new – their book of 2025 – and something old they’ve discovered or rediscovered in the past 12 months. Their choices cover everything from Seamus Heaney to Susan Sontag, Wilkie Collins to Arundhati Roy – and if you’re looking for the Observer’s picks, here is our guide to the year’s best fiction, nonfiction, poetry and graphic novels.
DEBORAH LEVY
Something new The big bang of Claire-Louise Bennett’s recent novel – circling memory, desire and repulsion – is language. To make intimate thought live on the page in the way it lives in the mind is very difficult, but Bennett (being something of a genius) invents cadence, repetition and rhythm to shake off the dust of worn literary techniques. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye (Fitzcarraldo Editions) is invigorating, as the narrator records what it feels like (in the mind and body) to touch and be touched.
Something old In turbulent times, it is a relief to return to the lucidity and coherence of Susan Sontag’s writing on art and culture in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (Penguin Modern Classics). This is critical thinking of the highest order. Sontag’s ambition for the essay form to “deepen reality” while “widening the imagination” is awesomely made manifest here.
Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein is published in April 2026 by Hamish Hamilton
MICK HERRON
Something new Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field (David Fickling) is the conclusion to Lyra Silvertongue’s story, which began 30 years ago in Northern Lights. One of Pullman’s extraordinary talents is to make the reader feel empathy with his fantasy creations – Lyra’s relationship with her daemon Pantalaimon is one of the most affecting in fiction – and another is to create set pieces that linger long in the memory. Pullman is equally at home describing battles between gryphons and murder-birds, and meditating on the primacy of the imagination, and his book is a triumph.
Something old This year I caught up with Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle (Doubleday), which has everything a novel needs. Its sweeping plot captures the history of flight through one of its pioneers, Marian Graves. Vivid and enthralling; barnstorming in every sense.
Mick Herron’s ninth Slough House novel, Clown Town, is published by Baskerville
LENNY HENRY
Something new The book I was most excited about reading this year was Elizabeth Gilbert’s follow-up to Big Magic. In All the Way to the River (Bloomsbury), she writes about her deceased best friend and lover, Rayya. They become friends, then best friends, then inseparable. Love blossoms, unexpectedly, then Rayya gets sick. It’s beautifully written, and I love it.
Something old I adore Jokes My Father Never Taught Me by Rain Pryor (HarperCollins), daughter of the brilliant comedian Richard Pryor. I saw her at the Edinburgh festival, and she was great, but you could sense the weight of her father’s legacy. It is moving, funny and, as you’d expect, given her father’s proclivity for self-destruction, tragic.
The Big Payback by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder is published by Faber
ELIF SHAFAK
Something new This year Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, wrote a remarkable book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul (Hutchinson Heinemann). It tells the story of the Inter-Continental, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel, which has endured civil wars and the fall and rise of the Taliban. It is a moving history of a country that is often neglected. I am now reading The Deserters by Mathias Enard (Fitzcarraldo), about a lone soldier fleeing a nameless war. The result is a timely story about loss and the search for meaning in the face of madness.
Something old I have been revisiting The Butterfly’s Burden by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (Bloodaxe). The lyricism of his writing and imagination, and his attachment to his land, feel all the more important today.
Elif Shafak’s most recent book, There Are Rivers in the Sky, is published in paperback by Penguin
PHILIPPE SANDS
Something new In these torrid times, there is much to be said for a work of devastatingly lucid explication, as offered by Giuliano da Empoli’s The Hour of the Predators (Pushkin). But I need an uplift, and The Safekeep, by Yael van der Wouden (Penguin), does exactly that. Published this year in paperback and the winner of the Women’s prize for fiction, it illustrates the point that justice can be a long and intimate game; one that follows an unexpected path. I did not want it to end.
Something old Seamus Heaney’s The Haw Lantern (Faber) and, in particular, From the Republic of Conscience. Written for Human Rights Day, it’s a reminder of what we might yet be: “The woman in customs asked me to declare / the words of our traditional cures and charms / to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.”
Philippe Sands is the author of 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
KATHERINE RUNDELL
Something new I loved Natalie Haynes’s No Friend to This House (Mantle), a telling of the story of Medea and Jason and the golden fleece. It’s superb: sharp, funny, inventive, powerfully humane. (After I’d read it, I came across her radio series, Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics, which I’ve now listened to hours of; she is one of the most brilliant women in the media.)
Something old I’d never read Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (Penguin Classics), and was electrified by it. It’s a 24-carat high-drama, absurdly plotted thriller, but also a vision of the vulnerability of 19th-century women to the deliberate cruelties of men. Gladstone cancelled a theatre date and stayed up all night to read it.
Katherine Rundell’s latest children’s book, The Poisoned King, is published by Bloomsbury
WILLIAM BOYD
Something new Richard Holmes comes up trumps yet again with his fascinating study of Tennyson’s life up to his appointment as poet laureate in 1850. In The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief (William Collins), Holmes makes us rethink the received image of the eminent Victorian bard and presents us with a portrait of a troubled man wrestling with the discoveries of the age.
Something old Another biography I read this year was Richard Aldington’s 1950 study of DH Lawrence, Portrait of a Genius, But… (Macmillan). Aldington knew Lawrence well but clearly came to detest him. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more hostile account of a writer’s life, which makes it hugely entertaining. I came away with a very clear picture of what Lawrence, the man, was like.
William Boyd’s most recent novel is The Predicament (Viking)
BERNARDINE EVARISTO
Something new My two book choices represent two extremes of masculinity. Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women (William Collins), by the foreign correspondent Christina Lamb, is an account of war’s biggest secret: the systemic rape and brutalisation of women. Hard-hitting, enraging, harrowing – everyone should read this book so that when sexual violence against women is omitted from the narratives of war, we don’t fall for it.
Something old As an antidote, The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican Memoir of Plants and Dreams by the poet Jason Allen-Paisant (Hutchinson Heinemann), exemplifies an inspiring masculinity. It is the most exquisitely written meditation on family, childhood and nature; Allen-Paisant is soft and vulnerable as he explores a cellular connection to the land, memory and history. This gorgeous, nourishing book encourages us to live in spirit.
Bernardine Evaristo’s Manifesto: On Never Giving Up is published by Penguin
FINTAN O’TOOLE
Something new Arguably the literary event of the year has been the publication of the magnificent The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavin and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis (Faber & Faber). It combines scholarly rigour with sheer joy. The individual volumes Heaney published in his lifetime are supplemented by more than 200 poems that appeared in journals or newspapers, plus two dozen harvested from his archives. As the times darken, Heaney’s ability to move with grace and dignity through periods of horror, and find the miraculous in the mundane, stiffens the spine and keeps open the path to transcendence.
Something old In preparation for the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, I dug out my Penguin Classics edition of The Federalist Papers, written by John Jay, James Madison and (mostly) Alexander Hamilton. We don’t have to forget their appalling failures to confront slavery or the genocide of the Indigenous peoples or the refusal to envisage the possibility of women being citizens to be struck, nonetheless, by the quality of the thinking and writing that animated the American revolution. We know who is going to claim the legacy of the Founding Fathers in 2026, and it is good to be reminded how total their contempt would have been for him.
Fintan O’Toole’s latest book is We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 (Apollo)
ROBERT HARRIS
Something new One of this year’s books I most enjoyed was The Greyhound Diary by Judy Montagu (Zuleika), describing her bus journey across the United States in 1949, aged 26. It sounds unpromising, but the well-connected Judy – daughter of Venetia Stanley and first cousin of Mary Churchill – travels armed with letters of introduction giving her entry to a vanished world. She writes with verve and insight of her encounters on the bus, travelling through the segregated southern states, and her odyssey culminates in an affair with the future Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. The diary lay unread for 75 years and has been carefully and wittily edited by Montagu’s daughter, Anna Mathias.
Something old I had a private Philip Larkin festival over the summer, reread the poems and various biographies, and relished in particular Selected Letters, edited by Anthony Thwaite (Faber). Larkin’s reactionary horror at the modern world – when the Australian cricket captain, Richie Benaud, appears in the BBC’s test match commentary box, he feels as if “Göring has turned up at the Farnborough Airshow” – is as funny as Evelyn Waugh.
Robert Harris’ Precipice is published in paperback by Penguin
RACHEL CLARKE
Something new For exquisite, absorbing and thought-provoking nonfiction, you’d struggle to find anything published this year to match Adam Weymouth’s Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe (Hutchinson Heinemann). I adored every page of his account of a 1,000-mile journey retracing, on foot, the wolfsteps of a GPS-tracked animal named Slavc across Slovenia, Austria and northern Italy. The wolf – one of man’s most feared species – is a lens through which he explores a continent grappling with economic, climate, migratory and social upheavals, all while interrogating the fraught coexistence of human and animal. Every page sings.
Something old In eager anticipation of the film adaptation coming out in January, I recently reread Maggie O’Farrell’s unforgettable novel Hamnet (Tinder Press). What an absolute treat. The book centres not on Shakespeare himself but his wife and their young son, Hamnet, who dies from bubonic plague. This shattering loss inspired Shakespeare to write his most famous play – and O’Farrell is simply magnificent on the astonishing power of grief.
Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart is published by Abacus
NICOLA STURGEON
Something new Unusually, my book of the year is not a novel – it is Arundhati Roy’s outstanding memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me (Hamish Hamilton). Roy’s life story is truly remarkable. Her account of it – rooted in her troubled relationship with her mother – affords a real appreciation of the person she became. She shows there is no fixed boundary between fiction and nonfiction in the hands of a skilled writer. Roy rails against injustice and stands up for the values intrinsic to her worldview.
Something old Fair Stood the Wind for France by HE Bates (Penguin Classics) is a novel about a British fighter pilot who crash lands in occupied France during the second world war. It is a beautiful love story, all the better for its spare, understated prose. It was written before the outcome of the war was known, heightening the power of the narrative.
Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir, Frankly, is published by Macmillan
JONATHAN COE
Something new Nicholas Royle is one of the great unsung heroes of modern literature, with seven novels and five short story collections to his name, but not nearly enough in terms of acclaim or recognition. His latest collection, Paris Fantastique (Confingo Publishing), offers a genre-hopping array of stories themed around the French capital: some of them dabbling in the uncanny, some edging towards nonfiction, but all showcasing dry humour and characters who tend to be marked by a certain endearing obsessiveness.
Something old Delving back into the 1930s, allow me to join the chorus of praise for Persephone Books, who uncovered a real lost treasure in Crooked Cross by Sally Carson. The cross in question is the swastika, because this is a forgotten English writer’s take on the impact of encroaching Nazism on a small Bavarian village. I wouldn’t be the first to point out that there are certain obvious, chilling parallels with Europe and America today.
Jonathan Coe’s The Proof of My Innocence is published in paperback by Penguin
GEOFF DYER
Something new Here’s a philosophical question: did I really love László Földényi’s collection of essays, Dostoevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears (Yale), as much as I think I did or was I just seduced by the title? I do know I loved Paul Farley’s latest helping of poems, When It Rained for a Million Years (Picador). Farley, I feel sure, has become a metaphysical poet, even though I don’t quite know what I mean by that.
Something old Without doubt the most enjoyable – hilarious, brilliant and poignant – novel I read this year was Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Vintage).
Geoff Dyer’s memoir, Homework, is published by Canongate
NAOMI ALDERMAN
Something new There is no living writer whose new books I fall on with greater delight than Laurent Binet. Each of his books is different, inventive, exciting. Perspectives (Harvill Secker) is a proper treat from the author of the dark HHhH. It’s a murder mystery set in Renaissance Italy, filled with both allusions and illusions. I particularly enjoyed the reference to Assassin’s Creed.
Something old Susan Sontag’s Illness As Metaphor (Penguin) hits particularly hard in the era of GLP-1 inhibitor drugs. She details how if we can’t explain an illness we tend to treat it as a sign of moral weakness. That Katherine Mansfield and Kafka died of TB while telling themselves they needed to have more willpower is heartbreaking. I have been thinking that I might write a short book: Fatness As Metaphor.
Naomi Alderman’s Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today is published by Fig Tree
VINCENZO LATRONICO
Something new Alba de Céspedes’s 1938 debut There’s No Turning Back (Pushkin) is a new discovery for most of us. The daring story of eight young women at boarding school under fascism, it was long out of print in English until Ann Goldstein’s magnificent new translation.
Something old Over the summer, I fell into a Janet Malcolm rabbit hole after reading an article that quoted the opening to The Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” I’ve now read all her books and my favourite is 1994’s The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Granta), about Plath’s biographers, in which she shows how porous the boundary between fiction and nonfiction can be.
Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection, translated by Sophie Hughes, was shortlisted for this year’s International Booker prize
SARAH PERRY
Something new Two great Irish writers have given me joy this year. Seán Hewitt’s debut novel Open, Heaven (Jonathan Cape) contains all the rapture, longing and delicate, intelligent inquiry of his poetry and nonfiction: I’m hoping it will be only the first of many novels to come.
Something old Following the death of Edna O’Brien last year, I returned to her work, reading first her Country Girls trilogy and then, hard on its heels, her glorious memoir Country Girl (Faber). It’s as emotionally astute and beautifully, often strangely expressed as her fiction, but there’s an added guilty pleasure in seeing her drop names like spoor, and navigate her own fame: it only made me love her more!
Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry is published by Jonathan Cape
SUNJEEV SAHOTA
Something new This year, as my parents refuse to stop ageing, Tom Paulin’s Namanlagh (Faber) was a mainstay. Brittle moments that accumulate towards defiance and settled wounds that are anything but. Poems that lay bare the hope of life.
Something old A different kind of hope was offered by Zohran Mamdani’s election in New York, a win that had me dipping back into some formidable recent works that synthesise sociology, social theory and politics: Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix (Harvard), Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders (University of Minnesota), Touré Reed’s Toward Freedom (Verso). Read them all.
Sunjeev Sahota’s The Spoiled Heart is published in paperback by Vintage
IRVINE WELSH
Something new Muckle Flugga by Michael Pedersen (Faber) is my novel of 2025. Two confused but well-meaning young men try to develop a life-changing bond under the oft-malevolent stewardship of a tragic, doomed patriarch. The book is set in a barren, isolated spot that veers from garden of Eden to oppressive prison in the blink of an eye. This most northern outpost of Scotland thus serves as a simile for the country. Tragic and uplifting, told in a poet’s lush but drum-tight voice, sharp on characterisation and as arresting as an airport thriller, Muckle Flugga is the one you want to read before new year.
Something old I reread Ned Beauman’s debut novel, Boxer, Beetle (Sceptre), from 2010, this year. I was falling out of love with contemporary fiction, but this book got me excited back then. And it has again.
Irvine Welsh’s new novel, Men in Love, is published by Jonathan Cape