Best novels to read in 2025

Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett

"Adam Haslett is one of those incandescently smart and elegant authors that the US seems to produce almost accidentally," said Alex Preston in The Observer. His "brilliant debut novel", Union Atlantic, examined the 2007/08 financial crisis. "His second, Imagine Me Gone, was a meditation on fatherhood and depression." Now, with his third, he has produced a "complex portrait" of the fraught relationship between a mother and son. It's a work of quiet beauty, which feels "as deep and real as life itself".

At its centre is Peter Fischer, a "gay, 40-year-old asylum lawyer living in New York", said John Self in the Financial Times. He is busy, but his life feels "temporary" – and his thoughts constantly circle back to a traumatic event in his childhood. Alternating with his story is that of his mother, Ann, who "left Peter's father for a woman", with whom she now runs a women's retreat in Vermont. Peter and Ann have been long estranged, but Haslett brings their stories "closer and closer", until they finally meet. He is a writer who "wears his novelist's skills lightly", and this is a "symphonic and satisfying" tale.

Three Days In June by Anne Tyler

"Famously", Anne Tyler's "scope isn't wide", said James Walton in The Times. For 60 years, she has written about family life in Baltimore in the same "clear-eyed but kindly" tone. And so it won't surprise readers that, in her 25th novel, she serves up more of the same. Gail, the narrator, is 61. The novel opens on the day of her daughter's wedding rehearsal, which "gets off to a bad start" when Gail is "let go" from her administrative job at a school. Then Max, her somewhat unruly ex-husband, "shows up, asking to stay for a couple of nights". What should have been a happy occasion is suddenly beset by anxiety and tension.

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As Gail and Max make their way through the wedding weekend, the story of their divorce "gradually unspools", said Rohan Maitzen in The TLS. And we discover there was more to it than Gail likes to pretend. The stage is set for one of the "modest epiphanies of reconciliation" that have long defined this author's work. "Because we're reading Anne Tyler, there is little suspense about what will happen, but there's a great deal of satisfaction in seeing it through."

Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse (trans. by Damion Searls)

"Few writers working today capture the liminality of life as viscerally as the Norwegian 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse," said Yagnishsing Dawoor in The Observer. The latest of his works to be published in Britain (in an elegant translation by Damion Searls) is this haunting two-part novella, which appeared in Norway in 2000. In part one, a child is born in a remote fishing community. The story is told from the perspective of its father, as he "waits anxiously in the kitchen". The much longer second part takes place decades later: the baby born that day, Johannes, is now an old man, living alone, and going about his morning routine. But as he makes coffee, and sets off on a walk, he is gripped by an overpowering sense that "everything" is "different".

"Eventually the penny drops," said Houman Barekat in the Financial Times. Johannes died that morning; he has become a ghost. Morning and Evening is a novel about the "first and last days" of a man's life. Written in "Fosse's distinctive prose style – a spare minimalism with almost no full stops – this is a "work of graceful, spine-tingling beauty".

Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante (trans. Jenny McPhee)

Elsa Morante was the first woman to win Italy's equivalent of the Booker (for her 1957 novel Arturo's Island), and has been cited by Elena Ferrante as a "major influence", said Catherine Taylor in The Telegraph. Yet in Britain, her work has never had much recognition. Now her 1948 debut Lies and Sorcery – a "magnificent three-generation family saga" – is set to "receive its due", with this "artful" translation by Jenny McPhee. It is narrated by Elisa, a "singularly eccentric" young woman who tells us, across its 800 pages, the "staggering and absorbing" history of her grandmother, Cesira, her mother, Anna, and of her own, pain-filled childhood in the household of a Sicilian courtesan.

Featuring "mismatched marriages, lives constructed on false pretences", and plenty of broken hearts, the story Elisa tells is sometimes bewildering, said Francesa Peacock in The Spectator. Yet it's "nothing short of a triumph". It succeeds because the writing is "wonderful", said Vivian Gornick in The New York Times. "Deep, dense and psychologically penetrating", this is a "door-stopper of an Italian soap opera".

Hum by Helen Phillips

Helen Phillips's "unnerving" third novel is set in a "near-future dystopia" where humanoid robots – "hums" – have taken over most jobs, said Olivia Ho in Literary Review. May Webb has just been made redundant from her job in AI. With two young children to support, and a poorly paid "gig worker" husband, she decides to become a guinea pig for a company that's developing a procedure to reconstruct people's faces so they can "elude facial-recognition software". With some of the money she earns, Webb takes her family on an "expensive getaway to the Botanical Garden, a green refuge in the barren city". She makes everyone leave their AI devices at home – a decision she'll "later regret".

"In spite of its clever science fiction elements, "Hum" reads like a work of beautifully observed contemporary realism," said Karen Thompson Walker in The New York Times. While raising "unsettling questions", it tells a simple story about a "mother's day-to-day struggles to keep her children safe". The result is "propulsive" – and confirms "Phillips's position as one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction".

Killing Time by Alan Bennett

Spreading to little more than 100 pages only thanks to "large print and generous spacing", Alan Bennett's new book – his first in five years – is essentially a "short story", said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. Yet it "contains multitudes". One by one, we are introduced to the residents of a care home: Mrs McBryde, the prideful manager; Mr Woodruff, an inveterate flasher; Gloria, a long-haired "suburban sphinx", and so on. Getting to know them is so much fun that you barely wonder "where, if anywhere, it's all heading". But the year is 2020 and, sure enough, a mystery virus soon appears, bringing anarchy to the home. Bennett, now 90, has written a "late-period mini-masterpiece" that packs a punch.

Bennett is brilliant on the "queasy details", said Max Liu in the Financial Times. There's a lunch plate on which the "dregs of the turkey mince had congealed into what remained of the Angel Delight"; for a carer in the home, work means "another long and phlegm-flecked afternoon". Yet as fiction, Killing Time doesn't quite succeed: there are "too many characters" for a novella, and the chronology feels a bit muddled.

I disagree, said Oliver Soden in The Spectator. Bennett's "ear for the tiny idiosyncrasies of language" remains as sharp as ever. A "geriatric Lord of the Flies", this book is a triumph.

Fathers and Fugitives by S.J. Naudé

This "strange and beautiful" – if nihilistic – novel tells the story of Daniel, a gay South African writer, said Daniel Clarke in the TLS. Translated from Afrikaans by Michiel Haynes, it "unfolds over a series of fragmented episodes, often set years apart". The first takes place in London, and describes a sexual encounter Daniel has with two Serbian men he befriends at an art gallery. Months later, he visits them in Germany, and they go on a "surreal, Pinteresque camping trip". Soon after this, Daniel returns to South Africa, to care for his dying, incapacitated father – a bully whom Daniel now taunts with tales of his sexual escapades. In the event-filled final third, he spends a month living on his cousin's farm.

Part of the wonder of this novel is the "magical way it wrong-foots you", said Robert Collins in The Times. From being a portrait of a "drifting cosmopolitan", it turns into a study of "post-Apartheid race relations" – and finally a "heart-swelling" story about "how we raise boys". It may be less than 200 pages, but it "packs an enormous punch". It's the "perfect antidote" for our age of fragile masculinity.

Gliff by Ali Smith

Ali Smith's masterful "Seasonal Quartet" – four novels about Brexit Britain – was "as close to livestreamed literature as the technology would allow", said Alex Preston in The Observer. Now, Smith has taken "the logical next step" with a novel set in a dystopian near-future Britain. It's a society where certain people are classed as "unverifiables", and have red lines painted around their homes – as a prelude to these being bulldozed. This is what happens to the family of Bri, the novel's non-binary, word-loving narrator, who finds themselves on the run with their sister "from a force that is both faceless, terrifying and banal in its relentless bureaucracy".

As usual, Smith's language is "rich and dazzling", said John Self in The Times. Few writers are better at reminding us that "novels are constructed, brick by brick, from individual words". So it's a shame that the story is so one-dimensional: Smith's villains are "cookie- cutter authoritarians"; Bri, by contrast, is a virtuous "innocent". "Gliff" is a novel that "Smith admirers" will welcome, while leaving "agnostics unpersuaded".

Juice by Tim Winton

In a recent essay, the Australian novelist Tim Winton urged writers "to look the climate crisis in the eye", said James Bradley in The Spectator. That's something Winton does in his 13th novel, a gripping futuristic thriller set "in a world transformed by rising temperatures". Having grown up in a place so hot that summers had to be spent underground, the unnamed narrator describes being recruited, in his late teens, by a shadowy organisation known as "the Service". Its mission is to fight "the descendants of the billionaires and corporate executives whose profiteering cooked the planet". Still living off the proceeds of their forebears' actions, they now live in fortified bunkers, or platforms in the sea.

Juice is a novel that offers "dual pleasures", said Luke Kennard in The Daily Telegraph: on the one hand, it's a Mad Max-style "high-octane" thriller; on the other, it's a detailed account of survival that recalls Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Winton's prose is "clean and unaffected", and the "twists are plausible and devastating". It makes for a "furious hymn to resilience, unsentimental and hard-won".

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

In certain quarters, a "Sally Rooney backlash" has been building, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. The Irish writer's novels – most famously, "Normal People" – are, some say, "too white" and "a bit corny". No doubt her staggering commercial success also "rankles". Yet her new novel should silence the doubters: "wise, resonant and witty", "Intermezzo" is a book I admired "almost without reservation". It tells the story of two brothers: Peter, a successful Dublin barrister in his early 30s, and "shyer, geekier" Ivan, ten years younger, who "wears ceramic braces and plays competitive chess". Both are in mourning for their father, who recently died from cancer. As ever, love is the "primary subject". Peter is "caught between two women" – serious Sylvia, his long-time girlfriend, and the "more feral" Naomi, who is 23. Ivan is falling for an older arts-centre worker named Margaret. Inevitably, there is lots of (superbly described) sex, along with "fluid and exact" writing about chess and exquisitely well-perceived emotion. I spent a couple of days with the book, and it "made my burdens feel lighter".

This is Rooney's "richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements", said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. Gone is the self-consciousness that bedevilled her last novel, "Beautiful World, Where Are You". Here, she "leans fully into her gifts". There is something "electrically compelling" about the way that defining events in the brothers' shared past – notably their parents' divorce – play out in the present. "The reader always feels different layers of grief at play – buried pain exhumed by fresh hurt – in a way that feels stingingly true to life."

We Do Not Part by Han Kang

Han Kang's first novel since winning the Nobel Prize is narrated by Kyungha, an author obsessed with a terrible episode in South Korea's history, said Houman Barekat in The Sunday Times. In 1948, government forces brutally suppressed an uprising on the island of Jeju, killing some 30,000 people. Kyungha's friend, Inseon, comes from the island, and when she's suddenly hospitalised she begs Kyungha to brave a snowstorm and travel to her house to feed her pet bird. There, confronted by ghosts, Kyungha discovers how the massacre devastated Inseon's family. The eerie detail is a little overcooked, but Han's book is "sensitive" and "suspenseful".

The second half shifts into magical realism, said Megan Walsh in The New Statesman, opening the possibility that Kyungha is herself a ghost. But the details of the massacre are all too real. Han doesn't flinch from describing human cruelty, but balances this with "delicate, miraculous moments" of hope. Seeking out people who have died needlessly, she "gently awakens them in her readers' imagination – ensuring that we cannot look away either".

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Despite being an acclaimed novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is probably best known for her 2012 TEDx talk" We Should All Be Feminists", said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. A viral hit that was sampled by Beyoncé, it turned the Nigerian-American into a "global icon". Despite having written little since it appeared (her last novel was 2013's "Americanah"), Adichie has now returned with a new book, "a scintillating account of the trials of four African women living on both sides of the Atlantic". Featuring all manner of female hardship – "agonising menstruation, genital mutilation, lonely childbirth and sexual assault" – "Dream Count" reads in some ways like a "novelised version" of Adichie's talk. Yet it's "no grim misandrist slog", but a "big, noisy novel" that adroitly anatomises contemporary culture and is often "extremely funny".

The novel is divided into four sections, each focused on a different character, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Three are "well-off women seeking love": there's Chia, a travel writer, her best friend Zikora, a lawyer, and Chia's cousin Omelogor, a "high-finance genius". But Adichie's fourth character is different: a Guinean hotel maid named Kadiatou, she is modelled on Nafissatou Diallo, who in 2011 accused the French economist Dominique Strauss-Kahn of raping her in his hotel room. While a novel "built as a quartet of stories" is risky, such is Adichie's ability to plumb the "desires… hopes and anxieties" of her characters that we care equally about each one. She recently told an interviewer she feared she "wouldn't write again". How lucky we are that she is back.

Perspectives by Laurent Binet

Laurent Binet has a talent for making history "fun", said George Cochrane in The Daily Telegraph. "HHhH" (2010) turned a Nazi assassination into a "charming meditation" on how we construct the past; "The 7th Function of Language" (2015) spun the death of Roland Barthes into a "madcap murder mystery". The French author's latest is another thriller, this time set in the Renaissance. It centres on Jacopo da Pontormo, a real-life Florentine painter who died in 1556/57, leaving behind an unfinished cycle of "controversially graphic frescoes". In Binet's (fictionalised) telling, Pontormo's death looks suspicious, and so the "great art historian Giorgio Vasari" is sent to investigate. With twists galore and a "satisfying denouement", this is a "very well done" detective story.

Unfolding as a series of letters, "Perspectives" features many "leading figures" of the age, including Michelangelo, Bronzino and Cosimo de' Medici, said Edward Wilson-Lee in The Times. Binet is both knowledgeable and playful – and the reader gets an education in the Renaissance while enjoying a "racy" whodunnit.

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Taffy Brodesser-Akner's new novel – the follow-up to her bestselling 2019 debut "Fleishman Is in Trouble" – may be largely about "inherited trauma", but it's still a "heck of a lot of fun", said Marianne Levy in The Independent. It opens in 1980, with the kidnapping of factory owner Carl Fletcher – one of the richest men in the Long Island suburb of Middle Rock. Fletcher survives, but never recovers; and the novel explores how his ordeal impacts his three children: Nathan, who's "so afraid of the world that he has insurance for everything"; Beamer, a screenwriter who churns out scripts about kidnapping; and "brainy and brilliant" Jenny, who rebels by becoming a union organiser.

This is a novel with "maximalist swagger", in the tradition of David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times. But while there's much to admire, I didn't quite fall in love with it. The narrative voice, while charming, is "oddly impersonal" – and the result is that Brodesser-Akner never really makes us care about the travails of this "majestically monstrous" family.

Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin

This entertaining debut novel by the critic Lauren Elkin is a "brainy sex comedy"s et in pre-Covid Paris, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. Its narrator, Anna, is a Franco- American psychoanalyst whose lawyer husband is away for the summer, on a job in London, "leaving her to oversee the long-planned knocking through of a wall in their Belleville apartment". Anna feels lonely and adrift, until she meets Clementine, an art history postgraduate who has just moved into the same building. Clementine challenges many of Anna's assumptions – about property ownership, psychoanalysis, marriage – and also "widens" her "sexual horizons", drawing her into a ménage à trois with her boyfriend. Elkin's prose can be clumsy, and at times this novel feels overly introspective, said Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The i Paper. But as it develops, it becomes a "truly fascinating" study of the messiness of the human condition. In non-fiction books such as Art Monsters and Flâneuse, Elkin has shown herself to be an "astute" thinker; here, she proves equally "inventive" as a novelist.

Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler

Halle Butler made her name writing novels about the precarious lives of millennials, said Caleb Klaces in The Guardian. Her latest book follows a similar pattern. It's about a thirty-something woman called Moddie, who, following a break-up, leaves her "potentially fulfilling" job at an arts charity in Chicago and moves back to the "university town where she grew up". There, she reconnects with old friends, gets awkwardly drunk at social gatherings, and dwells on her failed relationship and her feeling of having achieved little in life.

Yes, this is the latest "sad girl" novel, said Robbie Millen in The Times. Popularised by the likes of Ottessa Moshfegh and Naoise Dolan, it's a genre that by now feels somewhat clichéd. While Butler's example contains all the usual ingredients – right down to the obligatory "masturbation scenes" – this is a sad girl novel that's "actually funny". From the absurdity of a student art installation to the "self-deceptions of therapy-talk", Butler excels at skewering the "delusions and flaws of America's creative class". Banal Nightmare is "bang on the money".

Wife by Charlotte Mendelson

Charlotte Mendelson creates great villains, said Alex Clark in The Guardian, and has outdone herself in her sixth novel with the character of Penny, an expat Australian academic who is "glamorous, worldly, beautiful" – and grotesquely narcissistic. A "compelling" study of coercive control, the novel is told from the point of view of Penny's timid younger wife, Zoe, who has been bullied for years but has decided at last to escape their marriage with their children. Zoe's plan must be executed in a day, creating a thriller-like tension intensified by the fact that their co-parents – the children's biological father and his sister – are manipulative monsters too.

The novel is "fast and furious" but beautifully observed, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Sunday Times, and full of "tiny comic images of everyday human absurdity". But despite Mendelson's consummate craftsmanship and her frequent use of flashbacks, I found it a little too relentlessly dark. Penny is "pretty much charmless from the get-go" (it's hard to imagine how Zoe could have fallen for her), and "moments of respite" are few and far between.