The best books of 2025 so far — our critics’ picks

My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud

In 1992 Esther Freud’s semi-autobiographical debut novel Hideous Kinky made her a name in the books world (and not just because she’s the daughter of the painter Lucian Freud). It was charming, fast-paced — and soon made into a film. So a sequel was a risk, but one which has paid off. Here, the novel jumps forward a decade to chart Lucy and her sister, Bea, emerging into adulthood in the 1970s. It captures everything from crushes to painful heels to heroin addiction, all in intense vignettes. “A highly impressive account,” John Self said.
Bloomsbury £18.99
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The Silence and the Rage by Pierre Lemaitre

This is the second in Lemaitre’s projected tetralogy about the Pellatier family in the 30 years after the Second World War in France. Already one of the children has been murdered, but the other three are now in Paris — Jean is running a haberdashery, while François and Hélène are working for a newspaper. The result is an intricate examination of mid-20th-century French life, with its economic growth, its post-occupation guilt and, of course, some very French bed-hopping. Our reviewer David Mills described it as “monumentally ambitious stuff and remarkably enjoyable”.
Tinder £25
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Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt

Management consultancy and tidal energy start-ups are not typical subjects for contemporary fiction, but this extraordinary state-of-the-nation novel brings them to glittering life. It follows James Drayton and Roland MacKenzie as they graduate from Oxford, work for McKinsey and go on to form their own start-up, all while navigating the 2008 credit crunch, Brexit, Trump and tech bros. Just as important, though, is their unlikely friendship, weathered rather than battered by the storms they experience. It is unexpectedly moving — a triumph.
Swift £16.99
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Seascraper by Benjamin Wood

Twenty-year-old cart shanker Thomas Flett is the protagonist of Benjamin Wood’s fifth novel. Full of dreams (he is a frustrated musician with a secret love for Joan, who works in the post office), Thomas spends his days scraping for shrimp on the beach. But despite the quiet premise, this 1960s tale is full of intrigue, from a missing father to a Hollywood director, and the true joy is Wood’s sentences: “There’s now a cool, soft, effervescent feeling in his blood, a sense of possibility that’s spreading from his heart down to his ingrown toenails.” Johanna Thomas-Corr called Wood “one of the finest British novelists of his generation”.
Viking £14.99
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The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine

You think you know the Belfast novel — it’s all peace walls, sectarian divides, centuries-old divisions. But Wendy Erskine’s The Benefactors looks at something quite different: how money divides us. It tells the story of Misty, from a poor background, who is sexually assaulted by three posh boys, and how the system is balanced against her when she tries to seek justice. Erskine’s style is fragmentary and experimental, but the morals behind it are pleasingly old-fashioned — our enamoured reviewer compared her to both Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens.
Sceptre £18.99
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Dream State by Eric Puchner

Sometimes a novel is a little bit too long, but the bagginess is part of the charm. That’s the case with Eric Puchner’s novel Dream State, a family saga turned climate change epic. It starts in 2004, as Cece prepares for her wedding at the Montana home of the parents of her husband, Charlie. But when Charlie’s friend Garrett begins to keep her company, they develop some extremely inconvenient feelings. What will they decide to do? Following the trio over 50 years, Puchner uses their dangerous, magnetic pull to each other as the basis for a novel that does so much more. And the writing is terrific.
Sceptre £18.99
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The Names by Florence Knapp

Does your name decide your destiny? This much-hyped debut begins as Cora takes her baby son to be registered. Her abusive husband, Gordon, wants the baby to be named after him. Their daughter, Maia, would like to call him Bear. Cora loves the sound of Julian. The narrative then splits in three, following the little boy as he becomes a man, showing the drastic differences caused by his various names. “I read The Names in a single afternoon, glued to the pages, occasionally wiping away a tear,” Laura Hackett wrote in her review.
Orion £16.99
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The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce

After the phenomenal success of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce has become known as an author of quiet, often older, lives. In The Homemade God she changes tack — and it works. It follows the family holiday of Vic Kemp, an ageing artist, and his children: Goose, Susan, Iris and Netta. But as the sun beats down on them, the holiday threatens to turn dark — particularly when Vic introduces his young new wife, Bella-Mae. Our reviewer wrote: “There’s a new heft and grandeur, not only in the sophisticated characters and the fancy Italian real estate, but in the hidden darkness that can exist in a family.”
Doubleday £20
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Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It’s been more than a decade since Adichie’s previous novel, the bestselling, highly acclaimed Americanah. But Dream Count is worth the wait. It follows four African women: dreamy, wealthy travel writer Chiamaka, neurotic lawyer Zikora, bold banker Omelogor and a stoic housekeeper, Kadiatou. Their lives intersect and interweave to form an epic portrait of 21st-century life on both sides of the Atlantic. And while Adichie is unsparing on the particularities of female oppression (from cruel men to FGM), this is also a joyful and truly funny story.
4th Estate £20
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Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis

Fundamentally may be the novel with the most original premise in years. Thirtysomething Nadia is an academic on sabbatical, who is heading up a UN programme to deradicalise Isis brides in Iraq. That all sounds pretty harrowing, but the book turns out to be a riotous satire, with a Bridget Jones-like hapless protagonist (when she ventures into a sandstorm, Nadia wonders: “Does this count as microdermabrasion?”) and a sweary east London Isis bride (who jokes that the best way to improve Stratford’s Westfield shopping centre would be to “drop a bomb on it”) as the main narrative drivers. Hilarious and thought-provoking.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99
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Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

It won’t surprise her fans, but Anne Tyler’s new novel is a low-key domestic drama about an unremarkable family from Baltimore. The main character, Gail, pops to life on the page — awkward, unsentimental, a touch of Olive Kitteridge to her. She’s just lost her job as an assistant head at a private school, her daughter is getting married to a man she’s uncertain about, while her ex-husband, impulsive and probably quite annoying, has turned up unannounced to stay with her for the nuptials, rescue cat in tow. Warm-hearted and well executed.
Chatton & Windus £14.99
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The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor

In this second novel in his projected trilogy, after the acclaimed My Father’s House, Joseph O’Connor returns to occupied Rome. The Ghosts of Rome, which features an airman with a faulty parachute falling into the city, keeps the tensions just as high. Our reviewer, Peter Kemp, said: “The ugly stratum of Nazi oppression O’Connor’s novel graphically resurrects is packed with sensuously evoked reminders of Rome’s rich past in this haunted and haunting novel.”
Harvill Secker £20
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Non-fiction

How to End a Story: Collected Diaries by Helen Garner

You might think that reading someone else’s diary would be boring — “Had Weetabix for breakfast. Bit soggy” etc — but those of the Australian writer Helen Garner, known best for her 1984 novel The Children’s Bach, are endlessly fascinating. How to End a Story, divided into three parts and spanning 1978 to 1998, reveals the lonely reality of a writer dogged by doubt. In the opening pages Garner (now 82) is 36 and feeling lost in Paris, her first marriage over and her second just beginning. In undated entries — some a sentence, some only a page — she returns to Melbourne, tends to her home and daughter, writes, works, dreams, cleans, reads Proust. Her new marriage falters. Her daughter grows up. Life goes on. In 2023 Garner’s backlist was acquired by US and UK publishers in fiercely contested auctions — but this is her masterpiece.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20
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Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China’s Stolen Children and a Story of Separated Twins by Barbara Demick

A pair of twins, separated at birth. It’s the stuff of fiction. But for Esther and Shuangjie, two Chinese sisters who grew up on opposite sides of the world with no idea that the other existed, that’s exactly how their lives began. This fantastic piece of reportage by the veteran journalist Barbara Demick tells their story, as an example of how for decades corrupt officials stole children and sold them through orphanages to unsuspecting Americans, under the guise of enforcing China’s one-child policy. “Despite the author’s limited Chinese, she captures the essence of rural Chinese society in a way few western observers have done,” Yuan Yi Zhu wrote in his review.
Granta £20
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To the Sea by Train: The Golden Age of Railway Travel by Andrew Martin

From Butlins trips to rainsoaked promenades through “Hampstead-on-Sea” (Southwold in Suffolk), this nostalgic history of the golden age of rail travel covers all tastes. The novelist and self-confessed railway nut Andrew Martin discusses the long history of the British travelling to the seaside on the railways, which was for a century an overwhelmingly working-class and lower-middle-class delight, unless you were Queen Victoria and had your own train. He is especially good on the melancholy that suffuses children returning from summer holidays. Max Hastings, in his review, called it a “whimsical little book, a feast of anecdotage”.
Profile £18.99
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The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich by Evan Osnos

Fun/disturbing fact: there are 800 billionaires in the US. And what’s a must-have for the super-rich? A super-yacht, ideally one with a helipad and a Renoir in the master bedroom. In the Covid-battered year of 2021, a record 887 superyachts were sold. The New Yorker writer Evan Osnos offers a field guide to the world of the ultra-rich, touching on everything from “luxified troglodytism” (the penchant for building vast three-storey basements) to apocalypse insurance. The book is full of colourful reportage, intriguing nuggets and intelligent observation — but by the end it’s likely to have you raging like Bernie Sanders about this awful, oligarchic elite.
Simon & Schuster £22
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Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe by Adam Weymouth

In December 2011 a young male wolf left his territory in Slovenia and began an arduous journey of several thousand miles across the Alps. He was wearing a GPS collar, so we know which rivers he swam, motorways he crossed and Alpine passes he loped along, on his travels across Austria and down into Italy. The nature writer Adam Weymouth follows in his pawprints, describing what he sees, as well as musing on our changing attitudes to the wolf, which are growing in number again in continental Europe.
Hutchinson Heinemann £18.99
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Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World by Justin Marozzi

A lot of ink — quite understandably — has been expended on the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the American South, but slavery in the Arab world has had much less attention. So Justin Marozzi’s impressive, fascinating and evenhanded history fills a gap, following the history of slavery from the era of Muhammad to now. The chapters on harems, concubines and eunuchs are particularly interesting. Marozzi also reminds readers that this horrible institution lingered for a long time. It was only abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962, Oman in 1970 and Mauritania in 1981, although it still persists.
Allen Lane £35
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Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson

Known for her stylistic talent and glorious wit, Muriel Spark had a life almost as extraordinary as her novels. At 19 she married Sydney Oswald Spark, ominously known by his initials, SOS, and lived with him in southern Rhodesia. Within two years she’d run off to London to be general secretary of the Poetry Society — a job that provided her with much inspiration for her fiction. Frances Wilson brings together “a wealth of down-to-earth detail assiduously amassed” in a new biography that “admirers of Muriel Spark will relish”, said our reviewer, Peter Kemp.
Bloomsbury £25
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Homework by Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer’s writing is wonderfully eclectic. He has covered war memorials, DH Lawrence, South America and now, his own life. Homework is his memoir of growing up in 1960s and 1970s Cheltenham in a very ordinary lower-middle-class family. But the details are terrifically evocative, from Eagle and Beezer comics to The Generation Game and Stringray on television, and even the “slop” of school dinners. Dyer also writes movingly about his parents, and how his life became “incommunicable” to them after he passed the 11-plus and then left home for Oxford. “If you’ve read Dyer before then you’ll need no persuasion to read this book. If you haven’t, it’s the perfect place to start,” our reviewer said.
Canongate £20
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• Geoff Dyer: my 60s childhood of Airfix, verrucas and schoolboy larks

Sword: D-Day — Trial by Battle by Max Hastings

Max Hastings first wrote about the Allied invasion of Normandy in his massive tome Overlord in 1984. This new book is about individual soldiers, in particular the British who attacked Sword Beach. Hastings takes the time to trace many of the 29,000 men’s individual personalities — often by describing the things they carried. Lieutenant Alan Jefferson, for instance, took a tuning fork and a copy of Hamlet. Signaller Finlay Campbell carried a fountain pen — a gift for his 21st birthday. Major John Howard brought a child’s tiny red shoe. It amounts to a wise and moving triumph.
William Collins £25
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Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever by Lamorna Ash

When the writer Lamorna Ash heard that two of her university peers had transitioned from stand-up comedy to the Anglican priesthood, it prompted a countrywide search for the ways young people are turning (and returning) to Christianity. In this lyrical, moving book, she signs up for a Bible course, visits a missionary training centre and goes on a silent retreat. As a lapsed Anglican, Ash’s own slow awakening to spirituality is perhaps the most touching element of this remarkable story. “It is not only a fascinating sociological study and religious memoir, but a profound look at the power of ritual and communion with others,” Laura Hackett said in her review.
Bloomsbury Circus £22
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Allies at War by Tim Bouverie

Tim Bouverie’s first book, Appeasing Hitler (2019), was a compelling study of the disastrous British diplomacy of the 1930s that failed to prevent war. This ambitious follow-up dissects the “improbable and incongruous Alliance” that defeated Hitler and differs from previous studies by including not only the British-Soviet-American bloc, but also Britain’s relationship with France (before and after its defeat in 1940), nationalist China, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece. Saul David called the book “a fine reassessment of Allied politics and diplomacy during the Second World War: impeccably researched, elegantly written and compellingly argued.”
Bodley Head £25
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Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress and Dr Crippen by Hallie Rubenhold

The eerie tale of how, in the early 20th century, Dr Hawley Crippen fell in love with his typist, murdered his second wife and then fled across the Atlantic, triggering one of the most celebrated pursuits in modern history, is well known. But the historian Hallie Rubenhold thinks we have been telling it all wrong. Too often, she argues in this gripping and thoughtful book, writers have placed Crippen at the heart of the story, ignoring or caricaturing the women whose lives he touched. She bucks this trend, putting the victims centre stage. “Even though we know where the story is leading,” Dominic Sandbrook wrote in his review, “Rubenhold makes it tremendously exciting.”
Doubleday £25
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John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie

This heartfelt history — which investigates pop’s greatest bromance, John Lennon and Paul McCartney — is a wonderful contribution to the ever-growing library of Beatles books. The story starts in 1957 with 16-year-old Lennon inviting McCartney, a year and a half his junior, to join his skiffle group after a performance at a suburban fête. The journey from there to global domination is familiar, but there’s a freshness to this telling, with a thread of wonder at the sheer implausibility and novelty of it all sewn in. Leslie is particularly good on some of the key songs and records, analysing them with insight and gratifyingly non-technical language.
Faber £25
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The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O’Sullivan

“We are becoming the victims of too much medicine,” the neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan warns in her well-researched new book. Over the past couple of decades, older diagnoses, such as ADHD and autism, have acquired expansive new criteria, meaning more people qualify for them, and new diagnoses, such as long Covid and chronic Lyme disease, have emerged, driven not by medical research but by the sufferers’ self-identification. But there are ethical implications to this kind of overdiagnosis, including that defining people as sick is unlikely to heal them. Despite her scepticism, O’Sullivan is unfailingly compassionate.
Hodder & Stoughton £22
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The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal by Jon Stock

Between 1963 and 1974 the psychiatrist William Sargant was in charge of Ward 5, the in-patient psychiatric unit in St Thomas’s Hospital, London. But it was better known as “The Sleep Room”, because Sargant drugged his female patients unconscious for up to 20 hours a day, waking them up only to administer the electroconvulsive therapy about which he was evangelical. The patients were less enthusiastic. In this shocking investigation, Jon Stock speaks to the women who were admitted to the Sleep Room, among them the model Linda Keith and the actress Celia Imrie, to uncover the truth about Sargant’s abuse of power — and the damage he inflicted on them.
Bridge Street £25
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The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King by Christopher de Bellaigue

This is the second in Christopher de Bellaigue’s three-part chronicle of the Ottoman emperor Suleyman the Magnificent. Compared with the rollicking volume one, there is less fighting and more intriguing in these pages. Having turned 50 in 1544, Suleyman had put his party-animal days behind him and traded in his gaudy wardrobe — kaftans dripping with sapphires — for humble cotton robes. But don’t be fooled, his ego had gone nowhere. “I am he who makes ships to go to the Frankish Sea, the Western Sea and the Indian Sea. I am the Shah of Baghdad and Iraq, the Emperor of Greece, the Sultan of Egypt” runs one inscription in Moldova. It is an enormously entertaining account of Suleyman’s middle year, Pratinav Anil wrote in his review.
Bodley Head £22
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The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker

By all accounts, Eric Tucker’s life amounted to very little. He left school at 14 and spent his life drifting between jobs as a labourer, a sign painter, even a grave digger. But when he died, his nephew Joe discovered a treasure trove of paintings completed across the course of Eric’s life. In this loving memoir, Joe recounts the life of his uncle, who became known as “the secret Lowry”, and his posthumous success. Thoughtful, funny — and never sentimental.
Canongate £18.99
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What’s your favourite book of the year so far? Let us know in the comments