Books of the Year

Or what I read in 2025.

Headbirths, Or The Germans Are Dying Out/Too Far Afield by Günter Grass

Two later, and critically less regarded, novels by my favourite German writer, with which I completed my reading of his works, a somewhat sad moment given I've been enjoying them since my late teens.

West by Carys Davies

A slightly surreal noir Western, with some echoes of True Grit, which I read straight through in an afternoon.

The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant

I was led to this after reading his earlier novel The Pawnbroker, which was filmed with Rod Steiger as the title character. Another story about Jewish-African American relations in New York, and human redemption, it has a quietly elegaic ending.

A Life's Music by Andrei Makine

This novella about a concert pianist fleeing Stalin's purges in the late thirties is both lyrical and of unusual literary origin, being by an exiled Russian writer who wrote it in French before it was translated into English.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

The winner of the 2024 Booker Prize. I know the subject matter, a crew from different countries orbiting Earth on the International Space Station, is unavoidably repetitive, but I still found this unnecessarily so, and was bored long before I finished it.

The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges

I read this surreal short story after I learnt that it begins in the Stoke town of Fenton, where I lived as a student in the early nineties.

Twelve Post-War Tales by Graham Swift

The first of these short stories, about a British National Servicemen attempting to discover the fate of his Jewish relatives in fifties West Germany, is by far the best. The others are all a bit contrived, and some derivative of his other works.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes 

One of the great unread novels, which despite its length is actually very readable (I finished it in about a week).

James by Percival Everett

A retelling of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the fleeing slave Jim which won this year's Pullitzer Prize.

The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee

Some unpublished short stories and pieces of non fiction from the early sixties by the writer of To Kill A Mockingbird. Most are very insubstantial, but the first, set in her native Alabama rather than New York where she then lived, offers an early glimpse of her later masterpiece.

The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

Another collection of short stories by the writer once described as India's Günter Grass. There's a sense of time running out and things coming full circle here, especially in the first two stories set in his home city of Bombay.

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky 

An ethereal short story about unrequited love set in the nighttime streets of St. Petersburg which I read after seeing in a newspaper that it had somehow become one of the year's bestselling books.