Best Books of 2025

James

Percival Everett · 2024

James won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2025. It retells The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim — the enslaved man Huck believes he is heroically rescuing. Percival Everett’s Jim is nothing like Twain’s Jim: he is literate, philosophically sophisticated, and running a careful performance of ignorance that keeps him alive in a world that will kill him for being what he actually is. The novel was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024. The Pulitzer judges called it “an accomplished reconsideration of Huckleberry Finn that gives agency to Jim to illustrate the absurdity of racial supremacy and provide a new take on the search for family and freedom.” Barack Obama named it one of his favourite books of the year.

James does the hardest thing in literary fiction: it takes a story that has been canonical for a hundred and forty years and shows you exactly how it looks from the other side. Huck’s innocent adventure is Jim’s life-or-death performance. That structural inversion — simple to describe, devastating to experience — changes how you read every account of freedom that is told entirely from the perspective of the person doing the freeing. It is also, unexpectedly, one of the funnier novels of the year. Everett earns every comparison to Twain and surpasses him on the only axis that matters.

→ More essential literary fiction on my best fiction list

Flesh

David Szalay · 2025

Flesh won the Booker Prize 2025, making David Szalay the first Hungarian-British author to win the prize. The novel follows István — a man who moves from poverty to wealth and back again across decades and countries — in prose that is spare, hypnotic, and precise. Szalay has been described by Esquire as “the shrewdest writer on contemporary masculinity we have,” and Flesh is his most fully realised novel: a portrait of a man driven by appetite and undone by forces he does not fully understand and cannot control. The chair of the Booker judges, Roddy Doyle, called it “captivating, hypnotic, virtuosic.”

What Szalay does better than almost anyone writing about men today is to show the gap between what a man wants, what he believes he wants, and what his behaviour actually reveals. Flesh is not a sympathetic portrait and not an indictment — it is an examination, conducted with extraordinary precision, of how a person can move through decades of a life without fully choosing any of it. The novel asks whether a man who is always responding to circumstances rather than making choices can be said to have a self at all. It is uncomfortable in the right ways.

The Safekeep

Yael van der Wouden · 2024

The Safekeep won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025, having already been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024. Isabel is a meticulous, controlled woman living alone in a pristine Dutch house when her brother’s girlfriend Ev arrives — everything Isabel is not: messy, warm, uncontainable. What begins as a charged portrait of two incompatible women sharing a space slowly reveals itself as something much darker: a novel about the Holocaust’s long aftermath in the Netherlands, about stolen property, about what was taken from Jewish families and quietly absorbed into ordinary Dutch life, and what was never returned. Judge Kit de Waal called it a future classic.

The Safekeep is one of the finest debut novels of the decade because it holds a historical horror inside an intimate domestic story without reducing either. The charged tension between the two women is entirely real, and the historical argument is serious, and van der Wouden never lets either overwhelm the other. The revelation arrives not as a plot twist but as a moral weight that has been accumulating from the first sentence — the kind of ending that makes you want to go back and reread the beginning. Short enough to read in a weekend. Worth taking the whole weekend.

→ More on fiction about what is hidden in plain sight: my family secrets list

All Fours

Miranda July · 2024

A woman in her mid-forties sets out alone on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York. Two hours from home, she stops at a motel. She stays there. All Fours is Miranda July’s most formally ambitious and most personal novel: about perimenopause, about desire, about the life she has built and cannot quite inhabit, about the specific vertigo of a woman whose body is beginning to change on its own terms. July writes with an intimacy and strangeness that is unlike any other contemporary novelist, and the novel generated the most sustained literary conversation of 2025 — some readers found it revelatory, others found it alienating, almost nobody felt neutral about it.

All Fours belongs on this list because it does what the best literary fiction does: it creates discomfort that is the point, not an accident. July is writing about an experience — a woman at midlife, in a body that is changing, in a life that no longer fits — that is almost entirely absent from literary fiction at this level of seriousness. The motel is not a symbol. It is the only place in the novel where she can be herself. The discomfort the novel produces is the novel. If you read it and feel unsettled, you are reading it correctly.

Heart Lamp

Banu Mushtaq · translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi · 2025

Heart Lamp won the International Booker Prize 2025 — the first short story collection ever to win the prize. Twelve stories about the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India: marriages, desires, constraints, small rebellions, the management of what is visible and what must be kept hidden. Mushtaq has been writing in Kannada for decades and is celebrated in India; Deepa Bhasthi’s translation was praised by the judging panel as “so daring and textured and vitalic.” The prize’s decision to award a story collection, and to recognise Kannada literature on an international stage, marked a genuine expansion of what the prize is for.

Heart Lamp belongs on this list because it does what the best short fiction does: it insists on its own terms. These are not stories that make Muslim women’s lives legible to a Western literary sensibility — they are stories that operate inside their own world, with their own interior logic, and trust the reader to inhabit that world rather than observe it from a distance. The women in these stories are not representatives. They are people. That distinction is the most important thing a short story collection can achieve, and Mushtaq achieves it twelve times in a row.

We Do Not Part

Han Kang · translated by E. Yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris · 2025

Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024 — the first South Korean writer to do so. We Do Not Part is her novel about the Jeju April 3rd Incident of 1948, in which tens of thousands of Koreans were massacred and the event was suppressed from the historical record for decades. The novel follows a writer who travels to Jeju to care for an injured friend’s bird, and what she finds there — in the landscape, in the silence, in the dreams that come at night — is the past that the island still carries. It was published in English translation in 2025 and became one of her bestselling works globally.

If you came to Han Kang through The Vegetarian or Human Acts, We Do Not Part will feel immediately familiar: the same moral seriousness, the same refusal to aestheticise suffering, the same insistence on the specificity of individual bodies and individual lives caught inside historical catastrophe. It is also, in the context of the Nobel Prize, a reminder of what that prize is for: to direct international attention to writing that might otherwise remain inside its own country’s borders. One of the most important literary events of 2025.

→ Han Kang is on my complete Nobel Prize in Literature list

Feeding Ghosts

Tessa Hulls · 2024

Feeding Ghosts won the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir in 2025. It is a graphic memoir — told in images as much as in words — that traces three generations of a Chinese-American family: a grandmother who survived the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, a mother who carried that damage to the United States and raised a daughter inside it, and Hulls herself, trying to understand what she has inherited and why. The visual format is not decorative; it is essential. The images carry what the prose cannot, and the memoir’s central argument about what gets transmitted across generations — below the level of language, in the body, in the patterns of behaviour that repeat before they are understood — is made as much through its visual rhythm as through its sentences.

Feeding Ghosts belongs in the same territory as What Happened to You? and It Didn’t Start with You: books about how the past lives in the body, how trauma is transmitted across generations before it has been named, and what it looks like to finally try to understand it. Hulls uses the graphic form to show what conventional memoir cannot — the way memory fragments, the way the body carries what the mind has not yet processed, the way a daughter looks at a mother and sees both the person and the wound. If you do not ordinarily read graphic memoirs, this is the one that will change that.

→ More on inherited damage and what gets passed down: my family secrets list

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

Benjamin Nathans · 2024

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2025. It is a history of the Soviet dissident movement — the people who, from the 1960s onwards, systematically documented state repression, circulated underground literature, and built networks of resistance inside a system designed to make resistance impossible. Nathans traces individuals across decades: how they found each other, how they were surveilled and arrested and broken, how they kept going inside a structure that appeared impermeable from the outside. The title comes from a toast the dissidents gave to their own cause, fully aware it would probably fail.

This book belongs on the same shelf as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Captive Mind — books that take seriously what intellectual life looks like under conditions of political repression, and what it costs to refuse to pretend. Nathans writes with the precision of a historian and the pacing of a novelist, and the result is one of the most important nonfiction works of recent years. The dissidents he profiles were right, were ignored, kept records, and occasionally prevailed. In a moment when those questions feel closer than they should, this book is essential.