BOOKS OF THE YEAR Part 1 - chosen by our contributors

 

This is the first of three round-ups by our reviewers. Each has chosen their own best read of the year (or one of them) which did not necessarily have to be published during 2025. It's also our chance to thank our wonderful contributors for supporting us throughout the year - we couldn't possibly do this without you. Thank you all!

Susan Elkin chooses Orbital by Samantha Harvey: Nothing I’ve read this year quite surpasses this 2023 novel. The setting is the International Space Station which orbits Earth sixteen times a day. That means a continuously unfolding display of Earthly sunrises and sunsets, 250 miles below. Two Russians, one American, one Brit, one Japanese and one Italian maintain the vehicle internally and externally, servicing lab mice and plants, obeying a strict exercise routine to prevent muscle loss. Each is instructed by ground crew and there’s email contact with home. “Swimming” round the capsule, they hook themselves into hanging sleeping bags at night like bats.

Meanwhile the profound beauty and wonder rotates beneath them. Orbital is a heartfelt hymn of praise to the glory and wonder of our richly coloured planet and a timely reminder that national boundaries and all the hostility they cause are irrelevant. Succinct, poetic, philosophical and breath-taking, Orbital is a veritable Everest (visible from the ISS, apparently) of imaginative writing.

Susan Elkin's latest publication is a short story collection, Unheard Voices: Tales from the Margins of Literature

Lizzie Enfield chooses Purge by Sofi Oksanen: As a travel writer and novelist, I always seek out fiction set in the places I visit. Novels reveal the emotional texture of a landscape and the hidden histories of those who live there in a way guidebooks cannot. When I travelled to Estonia for the first time this year, Sofi Oksanen’s Purge offered a powerful introduction to a country with a scarred yet optimistic spirit. The novel intertwines the lives of two women - Aliide, an elderly survivor of Soviet oppression, and Zara, a young victim of modern trafficking - whose fates converge amid a legacy of fear, shame and endurance. Oksanen’s taut, lyrical prose captures both the brutality of history and the fragile strength of those who endure it. Reading Purge while exploring Tallinn and its countryside lent every ruined farmhouse and quiet forest a deeper resonance. It’s a haunting, unforgettable story of survival, memory and the resilience of the human spirit - both painful and positive. 

Lizzie Enfield is the author of Living With It. She has also written these BBC articles about Estonia.

Sheena Wilkinson's choice is By Any Other Name, by Jodi Picoult: We’ve all heard the theories that William Shakespeare may not have written all the plays attributed to him. I never wanted to believe this: the myth of the Bard’s humble beginnings and preternatural understanding of human experience at its deepest and widest was so romantic. But I have been entirely convinced by the thesis underpinning Jodi Picoult’s novel By Any Other Name. Building on compelling evidence that some of the plays could have been written by Emilia Bassano, an educated Italian Jew who, at thirteen, was given to the Lord Chamberlain as his mistress, Picoult fictionalises Emilia’s eventful life, setting it in counterpoint to that of a modern-day woman playwright: times have changed, but women still struggle to have their voices heard as loudly as men’s.

Bold, readable, wearing its considerable research lightly, By Any Other Name turned what I thought I knew on its head.

Sheena Wilkinson's latest publication is Miss McVey Takes Charge.  

From Lesley Glaister: I adore eccentric characters and the eponymous narrator of Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, is exactly that. Monstrously selfish, devasted by her twin sister’s chance of happiness in marriage, which she tries to sabotage, she’s melodramatic, pedantic, impatient, witty, really a terrible person, and one of the most engaging and enraging narrators I’ve read for a long time. This claustrophobic novel is darkly funny and shocking in parts. I loved it! Much gentler is an audiobook that kept me spellbound: The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. This family saga set in Sri Lanka, spans the first 77 years of the twentieth century. I found it deeply moving, almost unbearably sad, and with an intriguing theme of medical discovery. A quick round-up of other favourite reads this year: The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller; Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy and Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley.

Lesley Glaister's latest publication is A Particular Man.

Cindy Jefferies' choice is The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn: This novel embraced me, as if I were another child living in that gently crumbling house. I eavesdropped on the adults, listened to stories and was part of the close knit group of children, whose lives were a mystery to their parents. There is a melancholy in being ignored one moment and admonished the next. But childhood is not where this novel ends. Once the dead whale is found, its bones eventually turned into an outdoor theatre, Cristabel, who found it, also finds purpose for herself and the others.

Time moves on while plays are written, costumes made and props obtained. Adults attend, years pass and war comes.

I wouldn’t have missed reading this book for anything. If the hallmark of a good book is that the characters live on after the last page is turned…then this is certainly it!

Cindy Jefferies' latest publication is The Honourable Life of Thomas Cheyne.   

Laura Parker chooses Clear by Carys Davies: If you can read a book in one evening, it’s either very short, or very good. Clear is both. It feels timeless, even though it is set in a specific era and in a very particular place. Its historic backdrop is the Scottish Clearances and the formation of the Free Church of Scotland, but, much more urgently, it is about two men on an island: Ivan, who lives in isolation, and John, who is sent to evict him. From the moment Ivar finds John unconscious on the beach, the story moves at a fine pace, yet still manages to be a slow drama of two people getting to know each other and revealing our basic human needs: survival, trust, and love. It deals with several moral dilemmas, and right up to the end, it is impossible to predict what is going to happen. Profound, and deeply satisfying.

Laura Parker's current project has the working title Drystone Country.

Sue Purkiss recommends The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese: a richly textured family saga set in what is now Kerala. It begins with a young girl who is sent to marry a much older man, a widower. Surprisingly, the two gradually come to love each other, and they are at the heart of their small village, Parambil, as it grows and thrives.

Meanwhile, a parallel story tells of a talented young Scottish surgeon, who comes to India to work. His promising career is blighted by a tragic accident. It’s not evident for some time how these stories will link, but eventually they do.

It’s a long book, full of drama and with its fair share of tragedy. And yet it’s also full of warmth and humour – and hope. I found it to be a riveting read – the sort of book you really don’t want to end.

Sue Purkiss runs two blogs: A Fool on a Hill, her book reviews, and Let's Write! with ideas for creative writing.

Catherine Butler chooses 100 Tales from the Tokyo Ghost Café by Julian Sedgwick and Chie Kutsuwada: In 2021, Julian Sedgwick and Chie Kutsuwada published Tsunami Girl, a novel about a quarter-Japanese English girl, Yuki surviving the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and coming to terms with its aftermath. Tsunami Girl, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, was formally audacious, switching between a conventional novel (written by Sedgwick) and a manga (authored by Kutsuwada). Its hybrid telling, reflecting Yuki’s own cultural hybridity, worked unexpectedly well.

Two years later, the same pair produced 100 Tales from the Tokyo Ghost Café. This book plays even more radically with form. Sedgwick and Kutsuwada are not only authors but characters in the story, shepherding a stray child (who may or may not be a ghost) from a yokai-haunted café in Tokyo to his home in Aomori Prefecture, and encountering many creatures and stories (some traditional, some brand new) in the process – including a brief encounter with Yuki from Tsunami Girl. If you enjoy Lafcadio Hearn’s tales of Japan’s spirit world, or a cleverly told story of any sort, I highly recommend this one.

Catherine Butler is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University. Her latest publication is British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture.

Chosen by Yvonne Coppard: Kent Haruf's The Tie that Binds. Haruf never sets out to shock or mystify: his writing is so beautiful there is no need for tricks of the trade. Instead, the reader is folded into his story-telling arms and gently immersed in the sleepy rural town of Holt, Colorado, where the intertwining tale of ordinary folk in extraordinary situations gradually unfolds. It is April, 1977. Edith Goodnough, 80 years old, lies in a hospital bed under police guard. She has lived an apparently drab, quiet life on a farm on the outskirts of town. But Edith is about to face trial on a charge of murder. Her life, and her family’s, will be laid bare.

If you like this, move on to Haruf’s trilogy: Plainsong, Eventide and Benediction. They are all perfect reads to turn to after a run of spooks, spies, thrillers and impenetrable award winners.

Yvonne Coppard has retired from a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship and is now working towards becoming a Lady who Lunches.

Chosen by Miriam Halahmy: The Painter's Daughters by Emily Howe. A 2025 debut novel about the daughters of the 18th century painter, Thomas Gainsborough, this book won the Mslexia prize for unpublished novels. It is always difficult to bring alive great art in fiction. Not every author can achieve it. But Emily Howe has given us a deep and satisfying window into this great artist, as well detailed descriptions of everyday life at the time. It’s a smorgasbord of colour, smell, light, people and landscape.

But this is not the main focus of the story. Peggy, Gainsborough's youngest daughter, lives in fear that sister Molly’s mental health affliction with be discovered. It blights their lives from childhood. When the family moves to Bath and the girls enter society, things get worse. This is a family coping in silence with a stricken child, while the artist struggles to keep his patrons on side. A story of family life in all its complexities, deep sisterly love and severe illness without medical support. I thoroughly recommend it.

Miriam Halahmy's latest title is Pomegranates for Peace, published in November.

And finally for this first batch, Celia Rees picks Vianne, by Joanne Harris, the prequel to Chocolat. Vianne is a young woman, barely out of her teens. She is pregnant and alone, after recently losing her mother. She finds herself in Marseille, a city she doesn’t know. She is broke and finds work in a bistrot, even though she can’t cook. The people she meets and recipes they share teach her more than cookery. Vianne learns to love food and through the Provençal dishes she prepares in the bistrot and the chocolates she learns to make, she discovers how to love people because food is made to share. Food is on nearly every page and is described so vividly one longs to share it, whether the salty pungency of pissaladière, or the delicacy of a rose fondant. There is also a sprinkle of magic, as there is in Chocolat, as tantalising and mysterious as my favourite ingredient: xocolatl spice.

Celia Rees's latest novel is Miss Graham's War, first published as Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook.

What's your Book of the Year? Please tell us in the comments, and come back next week for more great recommendations in Part Two!