The Best Books of 2025

It's that time of year again where I go through my favourite reads of the year. Again, I do not have a GoodReads account mainly because I find 99% of people on there to be completely insufferable. Most of my book writing is stuff you will find around here. My New Years' Resolution in reading was to read more books by authors I perhaps had never heard of and so, let's have a look at whether I achieved my goal. Here we go, here are the best books I read in 2025. They will appear as when they were read in the year, not how good they are.

Note: Again, as I said in the other article - you might find that some of the books on this list have reviews that are yet to be released, so please wait patiently - I'm typing as fast as I can...

If you're new here, the key is listed below:

Key

• Fiction = F
• Nonfiction = NF
• Anthology = A
• Poetry = P
• Play/Theatre/Film Script = Sc

The Very Best of 2025 are:

• Fiction = Diavola by Jennifer Thorne
• Nonfiction = The Grammar of Angels by Edward Wilson-Lee & Fear by Robert Peckham
• Anthology = Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan & Reliable Essays by Clive James
• Poetry = Isaiahs in the Void by Kendall Defoe

The Best Books of 2025

1. Empire of Things by Frank Trentmann (NF)
2. Plainsong by Kent Haruf (F)
3. Eventide by Kent Haruf (F)
4. Poetry for the Feeble Minded by KG Miles (P/A)
5. The Light in the Dark by Horatio Clare (NF)
6. Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan (NF/A)
7. Love, Poverty and War by Christopher Hitchens (NF/A)
8. Eerie East Anglia by Edward Parnell (F/A)
9. Twopence Coloured by Patrick Hamilton (F)
10. He Died With His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond (F)
11. Monday Morning by Patrick Hamilton (F)
12. Diavola by Jennifer Thorne (F)
13. The Eyes are the Best Part by Monika Kim (F)
14. Fake History by Otto English (NF)
15. James and John by Chris Bryant (NF)
16. Fear by Robert Peckham (NF)
17. How We Break by Vincent Deary (NF)
18. I've Been Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett (NF)
19. The Penguin Book of Elegy (P/A)
20. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (NF)
21. How We Are by Vincent Deary (NF)
22. Entertaining Strangers by Jonathan Taylor (F)
23. Pure Evil by Geoffrey Wansell (NF)
24. The Last Witch of Scotland by Philip Paris (F)
25. Elektra by Jennifer Saint (F)
26. Home by Marilynne Robinson (F)
27. Murder as a Fine Art by Carol Carnac (F)
28. The Picador Book of Funeral Poems (P/A)
29. My Life as a Rat by Joyce Carol Oates (F)
30. The Great Passion by James Runcie (F)
31. Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates (F)
32. The Genius of Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate (NF)
33. Monumenta by Lara Haworth (F)
34. Mozart in Italy by Jane Glover (NF)
35. The Long Song by Andrea Levy (F)
36. Literature for the People by Sarah Harkness (NF)
37. The Hanging of Hettie Gale by Tess Burnett (F)
38. The Hotel by Daisy Johnson (F/A)
39. The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell by Robert Dugoni (F)
40. A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez (F/A)
41. The Sacrifice by Joyce Carol Oates (F)
42. Harrow Lake by Kat Ellis (F)
43. Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán (F)
44. Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang (F)
45. How the Classics Made Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate (NF)
46. Mad About Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate (NF)
47. Shakespearean by Robert McCrum (NF)
48. I Want to Go Home But I'm Already There by Róisín Lanigan (F)
49. 1000 Coils of Fear by Olivia Wenzel (F)
50. Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito (F)
51. Okay Then, That's Great by Susannah Wise (F)
52. Bat Eater by Kylie Lee Baker (F)
53. Hermit by Chris McQueer (F)
54. A Fool's Alphabet by Sebastian Faulks (F)
55. Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (F)
56. Liquidation by Imre Kertész (F)
57. Butcher by Joyce Carol Oates (F)
58. Here by Richard McGuire (F)
59. In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova (NF)
60. Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens (NF)
61. Reliable Essays by Clive James (NF/A)
62. Koba the Dread by Martin Amis (NF/A)
63. On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl (F)
64. Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey (F)
65. Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson (F)
66. Isaiahs in the Void by Kendall Defoe (P/A)
67. A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand (F)
68. Herzog by Saul Bellow (F)
69. A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir (NF)
70. Monkey Grip by Helen Garner (F)
71. Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall (NF)
72. The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk (F)
73. Gallows Court by Martin Edwards (F)
74. All Desire is a Desire for Being by René Girard (NF/A)
75. Dublin Palms by Hugo Hamilton (F)
76. The Moronic Inferno by Martin Amis (NF/A)
77. The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (F)
78. The Grammar of Angels by Edward Wilson-Lee (NF)
79. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens (NF)
80. Derek Jarman by Tony Peake (NF)
81. Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens (NF)
82. A Passion for Books ed. by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan (NF/F/A)
83. The Florentines by Paul Strathern (NF)
84. The White Ship by Charles Spencer (NF)
85. Happy by Derren Brown (NF)
86. Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (NF)
87. Mr Perrin and Mr Traill by Hugh Walpole (F)
88. Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood (F)
89. Home is Where the Bodies Are by Jeneva Rose (F)
90. The Magic of the Mountains by Tim Carmichael (NF)
91. A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess (F)
92. The Hanging Garden by Patrick White (F)
93. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (F)
94. Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo (F/A)
95. The Drinking Den by Emile Zola (F)
96. The Only Story by Julian Barnes (F)
97. Mephisto by Klaus Mann (F)
98. On the Calculation of Volume: 1 by Solvej Balle (F)
99. Who is the Liar by Laura Lee Bahr (F)
100. You Invited It In by Sarah Jules (F)
101. The Director by Daniel Kehlmann (NF/F)
102. American Rapture by CJ Leede (F)
103. Six Stories by Stefan Zweig (F)
104. Recollections of My Non-Existence by Rebecca Solnit (NF)
105. Visions of the Vampire edited by Sorcha Ni Fhlainn and Xavier Aldana Reyes (F/A)
106. It's Always the Husband by CL Taylor (F)
107. The Things We Keep by Sally Hepworth (F)
108. Found You by Sarah Jules (F)
109. The Truth About the Devlins by Lisa Scottoline (F)
110. The Fog by James Herbert (F)
111. Are You Mad at Me? by Meg Josephson (NF)
112. Siblings by Brigitte Reimann (F)
113. Death Spell by David Sodergren (F)
114. The First Witch of Boston by Andrea Catalano (F)
115. The Borgias by Paul Strathern (NF)
116. American Housewife by Anita Abriel (F)
117. The Bad Popes by E. R Chamberlin (NF)
118. Perspectives by Laurent Binet (NF/F)
119. Carrion Crow by Heather Parry (F)
120. Exterminator! by William S. Burroughs (F)
121. The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux (NF)
122. The Scent of Dried Roses by Tim Lott (NF)
123. The Collected Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker (F/A)
124. Reveries of the Solitary Walker by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (NF)
125. Behave by Robert Sapolsky (NF)
126. Baron Bagge by Alexander Lernet-Holenia (F)
127. Aftermath by Rachel Cusk (NF)
128. Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe (F)
129. Junky by William S. Burroughs (NF/F)
130. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim (F)
131. Imagist Poetry edited by Peter Jones (P/A)
132. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol by Andy Warhol (NF)
133. Night by Elie Wiesel (NF)
134. POPism by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett (NF)
135. Flight to Arras by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (NF)
136. Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark (F)
137. Amadeus by Peter Shaffer (Sc)
138. Southern Mail/Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (F)
139. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart (NF/F)
140. Vagabond by Tim Curry (NF)
141. The Boleyn Traitor by Philippa Gregory (NF/F)
142. Q by Luther Blissett (F)
143. The Graduate by Charles Webb (F)
144. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh (F)
145. Manituana by Wu Ming (NF/F)
146. Maldoror and Poems by Comte de Lautréamont (A)
147. New York Stories ed. by Diana Secker Tesdell (F/A)
148. Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels by Nancy Mitford (F/A)
149. Love, Sex and Frankenstein by Caroline Lea (NF/F)
150. From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough (NF)
151. Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account by Miklós Nyiszli (NF)
152. Ageless by Andrew Steele (NF)
153. The Knot of Vipers by François Mauriac (F)
154. More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow (F)
155. Scotland Yard: A Bloody History by Simon Read (NF)
156. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee (NF)
157. Nobody's Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre (NF)
158. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (F)
159. The Feast edited by Simon Winder (A)
160. Blueprint by Robert Plomin (NF)
161. Good Behaviour by Molly Keane (F)
162. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann (F)
163. Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich (NF)
164. A Book Forged in Hell by Steven Nadler (NF)
165. The Fran Lebowitz Reader by Fran Lebowitz (NF/A)
166. Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (NF)
167. Selfie by Will Storr (NF)
168. An Angel at My Table by Janet Frame (NF)
169. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman (NF)
170. The Good Samaritan by John Marrs (F)
171. You Weren't Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White (F)
172. Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney (F)
173. Ghosts by Dolly Alderton (F)
174. The Scapegoat by Daphne Du Maurier (F)
175. Human Monsters: A Horror Anthology by Various Authors (F/A)
176. Hotel World by Ali Smith (F)
177. Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey (F)
178. It's Probably Nothing by Naga Munchetty (NF)
179. Nightmare at 20'000 Feet: The Horror Stories by Richard Matheson (F/A)
180. City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert (F)
181. A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman by Margaret Drabble (F/A)
182. Escaping the Rabbit Hole by Mick West (NF)
183. Coffee by H.E Jacob (NF)
184. The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry (NF)
185. I Think You’ll Find It’s a Bit More Complicated Than That by Ben Goldacre (NF/A)