Welcome to the first instalment of your go-to reading list for 2025 – where we bring you all the very best new book releases of the year. So, if you’re looking for a new book, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve got you covered with our edit of this year’s must-reads.
Our picks are a proper treat – a monstrous game of tit-for-tat played out on the edge of the Nile, a couple of sharped-eyed looks at millennial ennui that showcase two very different sides of Berlin and a devastating reflection on one of the darkest incidents in South Korea’s history are just for starters.
We also roam the globe trying to trap an ancient evil soul, bunk off school for the day during a long, hot 1980s English summer, follow a young neurodivergent girl as she navigates the tricky path into young adulthood and lots, lots, more.
Anna and Tom are young digital creatives living the dream in those heady years when all the promises of the new millennium looked set to pass. They rent an enviable apartment in an enviable neighbourhood in Berlin – complete with mid-century furniture, a large, leafy plant collection and carefully curated selection of vinyl. The couple have swapped, they believe, the nine-to-five yoke of their parents’ generation for a bold, individual lifestyle – they go to gallery openings, experiment with sex and drugs, tip in cash and boycott Uber. Just like every single one of their peers...
Latronico’s portrait, as he charts the couple’s surfacely shiny, social media-friendly lives, is wryly – at times wince-inducingly – funny (we are all, after all, a Tom or an Anna to some degree). But he does more than take simple pot-shots at their ‘identical struggle for a different life’. Underneath its coolly teasing assessment, Perfection offers a deeper look at a generation who grew up after ‘the collective upheaval of the 20th century was over’ only to discover that their dreams of ‘liberation’ were just yet another invitation to exit by way of the gift shop. And who are now left wondering where to go next.
A slow and absorbing piece of literary fiction, Chadwick’s polyphonic, 1980s-set debut is set across a single English summer’s day. It follows the students and teachers of an elite high school at the end of term as news of the death of a much-loved teacher, Mr Ardenne, becomes known. Like a modern-day Songs of Innocence and Experience, she captures the fierce intensity of these not-quite adults who are eager for a life beyond the close world of family, friends and school they’ve known, and passes it back through the prism of their teachers’ lives as they reflect on their knowledge of all that the years which separate them can bring. Chadwick’s prose is delicate, precise and not without a little humour. It stays on the right side of sentimentality throughout, reaching its peak with subtle, almost transcendent, grace in the novel’s coda, as the truth about Mr Ardenne’s final moments is revealed. Just lovely.
The Little Alien of the title, is a young neurodivergent girl growing up outside London in the 1990s and her struggles with school and her general place in the world. That is until she discovers the power of written language – and one mysterious ancient book in particular, which some believe to have been delivered to Earth by an alien life force – upon which, she slowly, steadily comes into her own. Tender, playful and funny, the novel’s singular narrative voice reveals the world as its unnamed narrator sees it (complete with footnotes), while simultaneously shining a light on the lives and all-too-human failings of those around her. It might still be too soon in the year to call it, but this looks set to be one of the most affecting and original reads of the year.
The International Booker winner and Nobel laureate returns with a slippery tale that is part ghost story, part brutal historical record. Kyungha, a writer living in Seoul, is contacted by a former colleague and friend, Inseon, who is in hospital after a near-fatal injury in her carpentry workshop. She begs Kyungha to go to her home on Jeju Island to save her pet bird, which has been left caged and abandoned without food or water. After battling a snowstorm to reach the remote house where Inseon grew up, Kyungha wakes the following morning to find herself in a half-world, unsure of what – or who – is real. Over the course of the day that follows, the island’s dark past (Jeju was the site of a real-life massacre that saw tens of thousands killed shortly before the Korean War) is gradually revealed.
The narration veers from plain-speaking accounts of these horrors and poetic discourses that range from the paradoxes of snowflakes and candle flames to the fragile strength of a bird’s skeleton. It is altogether an elliptical, uneasy read. Then again, how else to hold a mirror to the horrors of what lies hidden in our collective histories when they all too often do so in plain sight?
Another visit to Berlin. This time, our dip into the grimy depths of its drug-swirling, noughties techno party scene is navigated by Nila, 18-year-old daughter of Afghan refugees who fled their prosperous lives in Kabul for the grim realities of immigrant life and, in the wake of 9/11, rampant anti-Arab racism. (Should anyone ask her, Nila ‘identifies’ as Greek). Returning to the city from boarding school after her mother’s sudden death, Nila is ‘ravaged by the desire to ruin my life’. A key part of that involves willingly sacrificing her dreams of studying photography for the dubious (in every sense of the word) affections of thirtysomething Marlowe – a once feted American writer whose star is quite clearly on the wane. As befits all good coming-of-age stories there are lessons aplenty to be learnt here and Nila’s are as touching as they are hard won.
What would you do to live forever? Barker’s edge-of-your-seat literary horror is a page-turningly gripping read about a centuries-old woman who willingly and continuously sacrifices everything to do just that. We get to know her over the course of two feverish days in the wilds of the New Mexico desert in 2022 as she sets out to take down her next victim. This present-day action is interspersed with deftly told testimonies that track the paths and fates of her previous victims as recorded by Londoner Jake who, after a chance meeting in Osaka airport brings her nefarious dealings into the light, is determined to avenge the friend he lost to the woman by putting a stop to her quest once and for all. Can he succeed where all before him have failed?
What’s that line about never going back? Our unnamed narrator battles through a storm to visit the boy he first fell in love with after returning to the town he grew up in to settle his late mother’s affairs. The complications and confusion of their shared past resurface over the course of the night they spend together – and continue to echo alongside those of his troubled childhood the next day. ‘We thought we were big and strong and all sorts of other things that we later learnt we weren’t and what’s more, never would be,’ he recalls of a day the two boys spent together as kids. Screenwriter Tijssens (Closer, Girl) has form when it comes to queer coming-of-age narratives and in this, his debut novel, he explores that duality – the push-me-pull-me hesitancy between child and adult, between who we wish to be seen as and what we are desperate to hide – beautifully.
Bollen’s gloriously waspish thriller is an out-and-out romp. After several years’ hotel-hopping her way through Europe, widowed American Maggie has been holed up at a faded grand hotel in Luxor, Egypt, where she has settled into a routine of morning stretches, lunchtimes by the pool and sunset watches with her fellow guests. She has a gift, she tells us, for spotting unhappy relationships and, in the past, had taken it upon herself to ‘free’ her fellow guests from such shackles by fair means or foul. Yet, after a meddle too far, Maggie is determinedly on hiatus. They don’t call it a ‘calling’ for nothing, however. Compelled into action one more time, Maggie is spotted planting (false) evidence of an affair by eight-year-old Otto, a new arrival to the hotel who immediately sets out to blackmail her and an increasingly monstrous game of tit for tat ensues. As one bad act begets another and another, Bollen leans into said monstrousness with glee and things quickly escalate to hilarious and horrific effect. Brilliantly fun.
The Elizabeth is Missing author returns with a striking novel about coercive control and bodily autonomy. Cassie is working as a personal trainer when her controlling ex-boyfriend books a PT session in her gym. The twist? Thanks to a benign tumour pressing on his optic nerve, Liam is now blind. While yes, the sensible option would be for Cassie to swiftly exit stage left, she can’t resist getting up close and personal with her former tormentor. With a spray of Armarni Code and a change to her accent, ‘Steph’ sets to training, testing – and exacting some revenge – on the ex who put a lock of the fridge, confiscated her house keys and fed her an emetic when she dared to fancy a little cake. It’s a credit to the quality of Healy’s writing that despite the implausibility of the set-up she largely keeps the reader on the right side of suspending their disbelief. By leaning into it, she reveals how the patterns of such a toxic, coercive relationship, once established, aren’t so easy to shake off.
When the story opens in a shabby corner of London’s Camden in 1996, Eily and Stephen (from McBride’s 2016 novel The Young Bohemians) have been together for two years. She is a 20-year-old drama student, he an actor-turned-filmmaker, twice her age at 40, and their relationship is on dangerously rocky ground. If that sounds like just another novel furrowing that well-trodden narrative path signposted: Relationship In Crisis, think again. McBride, who turned the coming-of-age novel on its head with her searing, prizewinning debut A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing and who is rightly championed for her experimentation with language and form, would never opt for anything so straightforward. And so it is here. Told in dual timelines, McBride carefully peels back the layers of Eily and Stephen’s personal histories and that of their relationship to reveal all that brought them to the flashpoint of their current crisis. As ever with McBride, it is visceral and brutal. Child abuse, drugs, self-harm and more are all picked up, turned around and revealed in new and startling ways by her command of form and language. Read it and weep.
The Romantic Comedy author returns with a funny and astute collection of (deceptively simple) tales of American lives. Her subjects are largely well-to-do-ish middle-aged midwestern women, caught somewhere in the gulf between who they were and where they are now – quite literally in the case of ‘Lost But Not Forgotten’, which features Lee Fiora, protagonist of Sittenfeld’s debut novel, Prep, returning to school for her 30-year reunion. Alongside its dissections of friendship and marriage (and the strengths and failings thereof), Sittenfeld’s customary sharp-eyed takes on privilege, class, fame, creative freedom and more abound. A delight.
The son and mother of the title are Peter – an immigration lawyer living and working in NYC – and Ann, who runs a spiritual retreat with her lover, Clare, in rural Vermont. Their relationship is complicated to the point of estranged, and Haslett takes his time peeling back the layers on why and how this has come to be: the easy answer, that Ann left Peter’s father for years before, is only the start of it. For Peter, the trigger into a proper reflection into his past comes from the case he takes on of a young, gay Albanian asylum-seeker who is petitioning on the grounds of homophobic persecution in his home country. As mother and son both begin to face their pasts, their stories come together to reveal subtle truths about the ties that tear us apart as much as bind.
Dinan follows up her acclaimed debut, Bellies, with a fresh take on tangled relationships and millennial ennui in the tale of Max, a would-be poet who works as a lawyer for a tech start-up where she poses as ‘Owl’, the company’s AI. Throwing herself back into the dating scene after a messy breakup, she meets City boy Vincent, who appears to be too good to be true. Told in dual narratives, there is indeed more to Vincent’s backstory than first appears and Dinan unpicks the complications of both their pasts with delicacy and care.
Steed’s elegantly confident debut is an explosive portrait of the artist as monster. Edouard Tartuffe (Tata) has spent years shuttered away in Provence with only his art and niece Ettie for company. The arrival of aspiring young journalist Jacob in the summer of 1920 disrupts the household’s careful balance, unleashing secrets and giving fire to Ettie who, after so long living in Tata’s shadow, is beginning to understand ‘there is something inside her reaching towards the light’. She begins to follow it – but at what cost and to whom?
Wary of commitment despite being happy living with the man she loves, our hero – the Hero of the title – is given seven days by said love in which she must to decide whether or not to accept his offer of marriage. As the days tick down, Hero explores myth, folklore and fable as she wrestles with the sacrifices and challenges she believes to be inherent within the marriage contract. Can she (re)write her own happy ending or is she forever doomed to rinse and repeat?
