(Disclaimer! I’m not including work books, by which I mean books I’ve worked on in any capacity, which might mean books I’ve acquired and edited but might also mean books I’ve had a hand in in a less obvious way. They are still brilliant. I am including at least one or two books which my clever colleagues brought to life, and which I read in my own time for sheer pleasure.)
Outside of work, I’ve read exactly 45 books since January 1st. I know this because I track my reading meticulously and slightly obsessively. I keep a handwritten list in the back of my diary, and I also log everything on an app called StoryGraph, both habits which I almost resent but can’t quite bring myself to cut. Forty-five sounds like both a little and a lot: a few years ago, before I was an editor with submissions to read, I’d have been closer to eighty in six months. I don’t care (or at least: I try not to care) about the number of books I read – but I am also aware that I have less time for completely work-free reading than I used to, and so I’m even more bothered about finding things I love.
This year, I resolved to approach my reading with more freedom and more joy. I read things I think I’ll like, whether they’re big and buzzy or niche and unheard of. I move between genres and languages, from proofs to hardbacks to audiobooks. I put things down once I’ve stopped enjoying them, even if I’m thirty pages from the end. The result has been a gloriously eclectic mixture of fiction and non-fiction, in English and in translation, ranging from the commercial to the literary with all things in between. What can I say? I just like a really good story.
And so – in alphabetical order, not by order of preference – here’s the top ten from my 2025 reading so far (plus links to some of my favourite independent bookshops).
On The Calculation of Volume, I & II
Solvej Balle (so good she’s on here twice)
These two books are the first two instalments of Danish author Solvej Balle’s fantastic septology – and if the rest had already been translated into English, they’d probably be taking up seven spots on this list. They are mesmerising and alarming and brilliant and like nothing else I’ve ever read. A woman awakes, over and over again, to the same eighteenth of November. Nobody else around her has any inkling that anything is wrong: for them yesterday was the seventeenth and tomorrow will be the nineteenth. But she is trapped in time, time no longer works for her, and she must learn to find her way through. Some days she is scared; others she is furious, confused, resigned, liberated, hopeful. It’s as strange to her as it is to the reader, and as you follow her through the endless repeating days, you start to think a lot about the meaning of things - like routines, and shared experiences, and the future - and what happens when you can no longer take them for granted. I finished the first instalment wondering how Balle could possibly extend it into a second book and beyond – but of course she can, and the second book is even more surprising and enchanting than the first.
Buy a copy of volume I and volume II from Ink84
Scaffolding
Lauren Elkin
I loved Lauren Elkin’s narrative non-fiction book, Flâneuse, when I read it a few years ago, and this novel felt a little like its fictional cousin: it’s set in Paris, where, in different ways, the characters find inspiration and solace and purpose in strolling through the arondissements and thinking about philosophy. That makes it sound offputtingly erudite and worthy though, and it’s not at all: it’s the story of two couples, one in the 2010s and one in the 1970s, both inhabiting the same apartment, and both coming up against some of the same questions about marriage and fidelity, family and future, desire and contentment. I enjoyed it for its plot but I also loved it for its gorgeous writing, and the many, many single lines or paragraphs that managed to distil something so profound and so clever into such lucid prose. It also made me headily nostalgic for my own fever dream of living in Paris, where I lived in flat in the Marais for three months, bought bread and pastries at the local bakery every morning, and truly did not appreciate how lucky I was!
The Correspondent
Virginia Evans
Oh, I loved this. Warm and sad and incredibly surprising, this is about the power of connection and the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. It’s an epistolary novel, and I realised it’s a long time since I’ve read one – presumably because nobody really writes letters anymore? And indeed, her penchant for letter writing is one of the many things which marks Sybil, the protagonist, out as quirky and set in her ways. But her life of letter writing has also afforded her a sense of control over her interactions; an ability to hold people at arm’s length; a meticulous record of all that’s passed. As you read her correspondence - with siblings, with her children, with love interests, but also with people she collects from the fringes of her life - you build a vivid picture of this stubborn, searingly clever, well-meaning old woman, and the worries, obsessions and regrets that have haunted her throughout her life. The effect is utterly exquisite. I never cry at books but I couldn’t make it through the ending without blurry eyes and a lump in my throat.
Atmosphere
Taylor Jenkins Reid
This is so good: not simply in an obvious way, but also because why shouldn’t the queen of the modern love story write a novel set at NASA and in outer space? The two protagonists of this novel, Joan and Vanessa, are members of the first cohort of female trainee astronauts and are so aware of the weight resting on their shoulders: they don’t just have to prove that they can do it, but that women can do it – for all the women who will come after them, and for all the young girls who are looking up to them. But this is America in the eighties, when homosexuality was expected to remain out of sight and out of mind. When Joan and Vanessa fall in love, they have to keep their relationship under wraps, even when there’s nothing they want to do more than proclaim their love, loudly and publicly. There is high drama in this novel (does it get any more dramatic than a literal space shuttle mission into the actual universe?!) but there’s also lovely tenderness and warmth – not least in the form of Joan’s darling niece, Frances, and the powerful bond between her and her aunt. I really admire Taylor Jenkins Reid for writing this: it feels brazen and all the more satisfying for it. She even explained how gravity works in a way I understood - something my GCSE physics teachers never quite managed!
The North Pole
Erling Kagge
I was utterly captivated by this beautiful, transportive, fascinating narrative non-fiction book about the North Pole, and why this elusive destination has captured imaginations and fuelled obsessions (not least mine!) for centuries. The author, Norwegian adventurer Erling Kagge, was the first person to reach the trio of the North Pole, the South Pole and the top of Everest, and his account of his own life-changing expedition to the North Pole in 1990 is interwoven throughout the book. But there are also shocking accounts of history’s earlier failed expeditions; thought-provoking meditations on the morality of these missions (cannibalism, anyone? how about shooting and eating a polar bear?); reflections on the different national psyches that shape their explorers’ decisions (I particularly liked his observation that, while British and Swedish societies recognise a ‘heroic failure’, Norwegians would simply see a ‘fiasco’); and examinations of the North Pole’s role in the writings and imaginations of societies long before any documented expeditions there (Herodotus, for one!). I learned a lot about the geography of it all too: about how there’s no monument or landmark at the pole, because it’s all floating ice so there can’t be; about how you might pitch a tent for the night and wake up to find the ice has drifted fifty kilometres south and undone several days’ trekking; about what you need to pack and eat to have any hope of sustaining yourself over several gruelling months at -40°; about how it feels to finally get there. I found it utterly alluring and revelatory. I’m not sure I’m keen to venture beyond northern Norway any time soon but I do love the idea that there’s this whole extra, relatively untouched world up there, starting just as the human landscape tails off.
Perfection
Vincenzo Latronico
I absolutely LOVED this incredibly clever and astute (but also very readable) interrogation of millennial life, aspirations and searching for meaning. It entices you in with irresistible descriptions of high-ceilinged Berlin Altbau apartments and stainless steel coffee machines and houseplants and morning sun; introduces you to digital nomads and graphic designers and earnest social justice campaigners – and then tears into it all to reveal its empty core. And yet. And yet! I couldn’t stop feeling jealous of these characters and their European passports and freedom of movement; couldn’t help thinking I’d be the exception to the rule and would actually make something meaningful of it if only I could give it a go. Which, of course is what the characters think, and what we all think – and we see ourselves in them while also feeling a smug and subtle satisfaction that we’ve got the upper hand. It totally got me.
Ripeness
Sarah Moss
Sarah Moss is, I think, one of the very best writers at work today, and every new book I read by her makes me even more sure of it. One of the things I love most about her writing is how you can trace her fascination with certain themes as they appear over and over again throughout her books, and although Ripeness was notably lacking in barren northern landscapes, it’s full of the ideas that continue to fascinate her: emotionally distant mothers; small groups of young people stranded far away from home; migration and Europe and Brexit (Moss moved from England to Ireland a few years ago, like the protagonist of this novel). And all of this in a novel which is so different from her others: set partly decades ago, in Italy, and written across a dual timeline. It did take me slightly longer to get into this one than some of her other novels but I think it was partly to do with the spacing (sorry Picador!) - the letters and words are oddly loosely spaced on the page and I found it hard to focus at first. But once I was hooked I was utterly hooked and I didn’t want to stop - which is why I finished it on a cold London park bench as it started to rain. I hope this is the year Sarah Moss finally gets the major prize recognition she deserves: she is operating in a whole different dimension.
Show Don’t Tell
Curtis Sittenfeld
I credit this as being the book that made me realise I might like short stories, which is huge for someone who has tried and failed with short story collections so many times before. I usually find them somewhere between frustratingly brief and intimidatingly clever, but these were more like working through a box of really good chocolates. They’re really character studies more than stories – glimpses into a person at a point in time – but Sittenfeld is so brilliant at writing characters that you don’t want any more than that. They’re about long-lasting friendships and fading marriages; stilted ambition and life in the Midwest; people doubting things and people realising things. They feel clever and sparky and incredibly relevant. So here you go: short stories for people who don’t like short stories. You’re welcome.
Rejection
Tony Tulathimutte
I rarely buy books on a whim, but I bought this after a brilliant bookseller at Bookbar raved so passionately about it that I couldn’t leave empty handed. It was in the Spring, when everyone was watching Adolescence and talking ferverently about boys and masculinity and toxicity. It’s engrossing, fascinating and confronting, and was so worth taking a punt on. The novel is made up of interconnected short stories, all exploring the theme of rejection from different points of view, with some characters and incidents popping up in each others’ stories. There are moments which are so excruciating, so agonising, so completely wincingly awful, that you almost want to stop reading - and on that, it’s brilliant. It’s also a book which is incredibly ‘online’: sometimes my yardstick for thinking about contemporary fiction is ‘would my granny understand this’ but for some sections of this book, I’m not even sure some of my less online millennial friends would follow! There are so many issues under the microscope here, and as the perspectives shift throughout the stories, nobody is spared from the author’s piercing insight. That said, there were some stories I found a little more intense than others - although the final section goes some way to explaining that. Piercing, harrowing, and damningly indicting.
Erling’s book is incredible! Did you happen to go to his talk/signing back in March?
The Correspondent is new to me and sounds like something I’d love!! Adding to the tbr thank you :) I’m also eager to finally get around to scaffolding, which has been on my shelf for too long… & thrilled you enjoyed Atmosphere, honestly can’t wait to pick it up, feels like such a blockbuster of the summer