Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Fiction Books of 2025
2025 was the year literary fiction chose difficulty deliberately. The Booker went to David Szalay for a novel about a Hungarian man whose life is shaped entirely by desire and class — spare to the point of severity, written in prose the judges called like doomscrolling. The Women’s Prize went to Yael van der Wouden for a book set in 1960s Netherlands that uses two women and a house full of objects to do something devastating about wartime complicity. Ocean Vuong published his first novel: a nineteen-year-old on a bridge in Connecticut, an elderly woman with dementia, and a year that changes both of them. Ian McEwan set his new novel in 2119 and used the distance to ask what we can ever really know about the past. Han Kang, the Nobel laureate, brought her account of South Korean historical trauma into English. And Katie Kitamura wrote the most formally unsettling novel about marriage and performance of the year. Eight novels. None of them easy. All of them worth it.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 novels · Literary Fiction · Published 2025
Flesh
Istívan is a Hungarian boy from a working-class background. At fifteen he begins an affair with a married woman that sets the trajectory of his life: a man shaped by desire, by class aspiration, and by the gap between what he wants and what he is capable of becoming. Szalay follows him across decades, from Hungary to Britain, as he pursues and achieves and loses, in prose so spare it has been likened to doomscrolling — you move through it compulsively, even when the protagonist gives you almost nothing to hold onto. Flesh won the Booker Prize 2025 by unanimous decision, chosen by a panel chaired by Roddy Doyle, who said “we had never read anything quite like it.” The judges described it as “spare, disciplined, urgent, honest and heartbreaking.”
Flesh is on this list because it takes a formally austere approach to a subject — male desire, class, the gap between aspiration and reality — that most novels approach with more texture and sympathy than Szalay allows himself. The result is a novel that is simultaneously frustrating and compulsive, which is exactly the right response to its protagonist. Istívan is not likeable. He is not redeemable. And Szalay’s refusal to make him either is the book’s most rigorous and most important decision. This is a novel that thinks clearly about the things it would be comfortable to look away from, and the Booker jury was right to recognise it.
The Safekeep
Isabel lives alone in a house in the Netherlands in the 1960s. She is controlled, exacting, particular about her objects — the way they are arranged, the care she gives them. Her brother’s girlfriend Rebekkah comes to stay, and the two women circle each other in a growing, charged tension that is part attraction, part hostility, and entirely destabilising for Isabel. Gradually the history of the objects in the house begins to surface: where they came from, who owned them before the war, what was taken from Jewish families during the German occupation. Van der Wouden’s debut was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024 before winning the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2025. Judge Kit de Waal said she believed it would be a classic — that it is about “how history rises up unbidden and knocks your life aside.”
The Safekeep is on this list because it manages to be, simultaneously, a novel about two women and a novel about the Holocaust’s long aftermath — and it never announces the connection, never underlines it, never makes the reader feel instructed. Van der Wouden builds the historical argument through the physical world of the novel: through Isabel’s obsessive care for the objects, through the way Rebekkah disturbs that order. The novel’s resolution is bold and precise. It has earned every prize it has won.
→ More fiction where history and desire collide: my books about love list
The Emperor of Gladness
Nineteen-year-old Hai stands on a bridge in East Gladness, Connecticut, in the rain, ready to jump. An elderly widow named Grazina — succumbing to mid-stage dementia — calls across the river and talks him down. Bereft and out of options, he moves in with her and becomes her caretaker. The novel follows the year they spend together: the bond that forms between them, the blue-collar town ravaged by the opioid epidemic that surrounds them, and Hai’s slow, uncertain reckoning with his own addiction, his family, and his reasons for staying in the world. Ocean Vuong is already one of the most celebrated poets in America; The Emperor of Gladness is his first novel, and it reads with the precision and emotional exposure that his poetry has trained readers to expect.
The Emperor of Gladness is on this list because Vuong does something only a poet writing a novel can fully pull off: he makes every ordinary moment carry the weight of everything underneath it. Hai and Grazina are not a symbolic pair — they are two specific people with specific histories — but the novel is also about what it means to be kept alive by someone you did not expect, and what community looks like when the structures that were supposed to provide it have collapsed. One of the finest American debut novels of the decade.
→ More fiction about survival and loss: my books about grief list
Audition
An actress, her husband, and a young man in New York City. Kitamura’s fifth novel is about performance, identity, and the gap between the self that is presented and the self that exists underneath — if such a distinction holds. Every observation, every theatre visit, every exchange in their apartment is loaded with significance, though the exact nature of that significance resists explanation. The marriage’s past unspoils with a clarity that makes breakfast feel ominous. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 and named a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The New York Times called Kitamura “one of our most exacting novelists, with never a careless word”; Audition is the fullest expression of that precision.
Audition is on this list because it does something that almost no novel manages: it is about the construction of self without ever telling you which self is constructed. Kitamura writes about acting and marriage and surveillance with the same control — you are never sure whether the narrator knows more than she is saying, and that uncertainty is the novel’s subject as much as its technique. It is a short novel and a very complete one. Read it in a single sitting and sit with the discomfort afterwards, which will last considerably longer.
→ More fiction about fixation and the performing self: my books about obsession list
We Do Not Part
Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, and We Do Not Part — her first novel to be translated into English after the prize — centres on one of the darkest chapters in modern South Korean history: the Jeju April 3rd Incident of 1948–1949, in which tens of thousands of people were killed by government forces. The novel moves between a contemporary narrative and a reconstruction of the massacre and its aftermath, using both to ask how violence is transmitted across generations — how it lives in a place, in a family, in a body — and what it means to try to understand something that has been systematically silenced for decades. Han Kang’s prose, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, carries the same quality that distinguishes all her work: a refusal to look away from what is hardest to face.
We Do Not Part is on this list because Han Kang is one of the few living writers working at the intersection of historical atrocity and lyric prose who never allows the literary form to become a way of softening the material. She writes about violence as precisely as she writes about beauty, and in this novel the two are inseparable. The Jeju massacre has been largely absent from Western literary attention; this novel corrects that absence without making the correction feel instructional. It is a deeply serious book and a deeply necessary one.
What We Can Know
It is 2119. Britain has been partly submerged by rising seas after a long, difficult twenty-first century. Tom Metcalfe, a literature professor at the fictional University of the South Downs, has become obsessed with a poem that was read aloud at a dinner party in 2014 and then vanished — never published, never recovered, its existence known only through the testimonies of the people who were there. The novel is built around his investigation of that shadow poem, and around the question of what it means to reconstruct the past from fragments when the evidence is gone. McEwan has described it as “science fiction without the science”; Dwight Garner called it “the best thing McEwan has written in ages.”
What We Can Know is on this list because McEwan uses the distance of a century to ask a question that is actually about right now: what can we know about any moment in history, and what does the answer say about how we are experiencing our own? The post-climate-crisis setting is not the novel’s subject; it is its vantage point. From there, McEwan asks what the early twenty-first century looked like — what it felt like, what it meant — and the exercise reveals, with some precision, how much of what we believe we know about the present is already interpretation. One of the most formally ambitious novels he has written.
→ More fiction that earns its difficulty: my best fiction books of all time list
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss and then did not publish another novel for nineteen years. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is that return: shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, and received as the work of a writer who has taken the time to write exactly the book she wanted rather than one produced on a publisher’s schedule. Desai’s novel is about two women navigating identity, belonging, and the particular loneliness of existing between cultures — the accumulated weight of displacement, expectation, and the lives we build around the people we cannot tell everything to.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is on this list because a nineteen-year silence followed by a Booker shortlisting is itself a kind of statement. Desai writes about the interior lives of women who do not fit comfortably inside any single cultural framework with a precision that is entirely her own — the same quality that made The Inheritance of Loss so enduring, now applied to a new cast of characters in a different moment. The wait was long. The book is worth it.
Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li — one of the most quietly essential novelists writing in English today — explores grief, memory, and the specific texture of loss in a novel that carries the same spare, precise quality that has defined all her best work. Li writes about characters whose inner lives are not easily legible to the people around them — people who carry what they feel without performing it — and in doing so she produces fiction that demands a different kind of attention from the reader: slower, more patient, and considerably more rewarding. The novel appeared on multiple major year-end lists and confirmed Li’s position as one of the most important literary voices of her generation.
Things in Nature Merely Grow is on this list because Li writes about grief the way grief actually operates: as a thing that exists alongside everything else, not instead of it. There is no catharsis here, no resolution that earns the reader their release. What there is instead is a kind of company — the specific experience of being understood, quietly and without drama, by a writer who has thought very carefully about what it means to lose something and continue. That is rarer in literary fiction than it should be, and Li offers it with complete consistency.
→ More fiction that tells the truth about loss: my books about grief list
Where to begin with the best fiction of 2025
If you want the Booker Prize winner — spare, compulsive, formally severe
→ Flesh by David Szalay. A Hungarian man shaped by desire and class across decades. Never read anything quite like it, said the jury. They were right.
If you want the Women’s Prize winner — two women, a house, and a history that rises unbidden
→ The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden. 1960s Netherlands, wartime objects, and a novel that earns its devastating ending without ever announcing what it is building toward.
If you want Ocean Vuong’s debut — a poet writing a novel, and it shows in the best possible way
→ The Emperor of Gladness. A young man on a bridge, an elderly woman with dementia, a blue-collar town, and a year that changes both of them.
If you want the most formally unsettling novel about marriage and identity of the year
→ Audition by Katie Kitamura. An actress, a husband, a young man, and a narrative that never quite tells you what it knows. Read it in one sitting.
If you want the Nobel laureate’s account of a massacre history has tried to forget
→ We Do Not Part by Han Kang. The Jeju April 3rd Incident, translated from Korean, written with the precision and refusal to look away that defines all her work.
Frequently asked questions about the best fiction books of 2025
What were the best fiction books of 2025?
The Booker Prize 2025 went to Flesh by David Szalay — a spare, disciplined novel about a Hungarian man shaped by desire and class across decades. The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025 went to The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, set in 1960s Netherlands and dealing with wartime complicity. Ocean Vuong published his debut novel The Emperor of Gladness. Katie Kitamura’s Audition was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Pulitzer. Han Kang brought We Do Not Part into English. Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, set a century in the future, was among the most discussed literary novels of the year. Kiran Desai returned after nineteen years with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, shortlisted for the Booker. Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow confirmed her place among the most important literary voices of her generation.
Who won the Booker Prize in 2025?
David Szalay won the Booker Prize 2025 for Flesh — a novel about a Hungarian man whose life is shaped by desire, class, and aspiration across several decades. The judges, chaired by Roddy Doyle, chose it unanimously, saying they had “never read anything quite like it” and describing the prose as “spare, disciplined, urgent, honest and heartbreaking.” Szalay was previously shortlisted for the Booker in 2016 for All That Man Is. He lives in Vienna.
What is The Emperor of Gladness about?
The Emperor of Gladness is Ocean Vuong’s debut novel. Nineteen-year-old Hai stands on a bridge in East Gladness, Connecticut, in the rain, ready to jump. An elderly widow named Grazina, who has mid-stage dementia, talks him down. He moves in with her and becomes her caretaker. The novel follows the year they spend together in a blue-collar town hit hard by the opioid epidemic — their bond, Hai’s addiction and recovery, and his reckoning with his family and his reasons for staying alive. Vuong is already one of the most celebrated poets in America, and the novel carries the precision and emotional exposure his poetry has trained readers to expect.
What is The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden about?
The Safekeep is set in the Netherlands in the 1960s. Isabel lives alone in a house and is obsessively particular about her possessions. When her brother’s girlfriend Rebekkah comes to stay, the two women develop a charged, destabilising relationship. Gradually the history of the objects in the house surfaces — they were taken from Jewish families during the German occupation. The novel won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025 and was previously shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024. It is about how history rises up in objects, in bodies, in the domestic arrangements we make to contain what we cannot otherwise face.
What is What We Can Know by Ian McEwan about?
What We Can Know is set in 2119, in a Britain partly submerged by rising seas after a difficult twenty-first century. A literature professor named Tom Metcalfe is obsessed with a poem read aloud at a dinner party in 2014 that was never published and has effectively vanished — its existence known only through the testimonies of the people who heard it. The novel uses his investigation as a way of asking what we can ever really know about the past: how much of history is evidence and how much is interpretation. McEwan has described it as “science fiction without the science.” It was called “the best thing McEwan has written in ages” by the New York Times.
More from the shelf
From the bookshelf
“We had never read anything quite like it.” — Roddy Doyle, on Flesh by David Szalay
More hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — books from every year that stay with you long after the last page.
