Every year brings its share of standout novels, but this one felt unusually rich. Big returns sat alongside bold debuts, and familiar themes like family, love and power were pushed into fresh territory by writers willing to take real risks. From sweeping historical epics to intimate coming-of-age stories, 2025 has been a dream for lovers of great fiction.
What follows is a look back at the 14 books that stayed with us the longest. Some dazzled with scope, others with precision, and a few simply hit with the force of something completely unexpected…
Flashlight by Susan Choi
Choi’s knotty, time-hopping mystery opens with 10-year-old Louisa found half-drowned on a Japanese beach and her father vanished, then follows multiple threads through his Korean-Japanese past and her American future. It is a gripping inquiry into memory, migration and political history.
Jonathan Cape, £20
Flesh by David Szalay
This year’s Booker Prize winner was a terrific choice. Following István from small-town Hungary to the rarefied world of London wealth, Szalay uses almost nothing on the page to suggest everything, distilling sex, class and moral slippage into unnervingly simple sentences written with chilling restraint.
Jonathan Cape, £18.99
Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal
Johal’s dazzling debut centres on Satnam as he arrives in a Punjabi village for his grandmother’s funeral and is surprised to see water in the well that has been dry for centuries. In tracing the ripple effects of the revived river which supplies it, this author proves himself a major new storyteller.
Serpent’s Tail, £16.99
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie’s first novel in over a decade may not quite live up to the likes of Americanah, but still stands head and shoulders over the majority of fiction published this year. Her interlocking portraits of four women at a crossroads confirm again her rare knack for marrying big ideas with propulsive storytelling.
Fourth Estate, £20
The Fathers by John Niven
Through the stories of Dan and Jada, two very different Glasgow dads bound by catastrophe, Niven dissects masculinity, grief and parental fear, producing a novel that is as heart-stoppingly uncomfortable as it is compulsively readable.
Canongate, £18.99
The Pretender by Jo Harkin
Even saddled with an audacious “Wolf Hall meets Demon Copperhead” billing, Harkin’s novel more than holds its own. Her tale of a 15th century everyman, fashioned into a would-be king, becomes a gripping study of power steeped in both atmosphere and playful wit.
Bloomsbury, £18.99
Heart the Lover by Lily King
In senior year at elite New England college, an aspiring writer falls for friends Sam and Yash and drifts into a charged, secretive triangle. Years later, the past resurfaces, and this cool, precise novel about longing, regret and artistic ambition becomes one of the year’s best heartbreakers.
Canongate, £18.99
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
Latronico’s novella-length autopsy of a millennial ennui is brutally precise. In detached, exacting prose, translated by Sophie Hughes, he traces the lives of an expat couple drifting through Berlin and captures the curated lifestyles and aimless politics which make their world feel empty.
Fitzcararraldo, £12.99
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood
Set in the early 1960s in a shrinking town on England’s north-west coast, Wood’s 170-page novel is a timeless portrait of class, yearning and thwarted potential. It tells the story of Thomas, the shrimp shanker with a secret dream to be a folk singer, who is seduced by the glamour of a visiting American.
Viking, £14.99
The Names by Florence Knapp
Knapp’s high-concept premise – three different versions of one boy’s life play out, depending on the name his mother chooses for him – is daring and clever. The big-hearted storytelling, meanwhile, has won over legions of readers this year, for good reason.
Phoenix, £16.99
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
In this lucid and philosophically charged novel, McEwan looks to a water-submerged 22nd century Britain where academic Tom Metcalfe, marooned on an island campus, becomes obsessed with the traces of a lost poem from 2014.
Jonathan Cape, £22
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
This story of a British-Asian academic in Iraq, tasked with de-radicalising Isis brides, is caustically funny yet morally serious; folding in bureaucracy, identity and trauma. In pulling off such a wild tonal high-wire act, it is easily the most audacious debut this year.
W&N, £16,99
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Desai’s long-awaited, 680-page return asks for patience – and rewards it richly. It’s a slow-burn love story of Sonia and Sunny, told across continents and decades, but also an epic novel about family, class, art and destiny.
Your next read
Hamish Hamilton, £25
Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh
Set over one Irish island summer, filled with parties, crushes and football match tensions, John’s fumbling attempts to decide what kind of man he will be brings rare clarity to teenage boy confusion. This debut marks the arrival of a serious talent.
Fourth Estate, £16.99
