BOOKS OF THE YEAR part 2 - chosen by our contributors

Here's our second batch of lovely recommendations. Thank you to our reviewers, all authors and booksellers, for your support - we couldn't do this without you - and also to all our followers. Come back next week for the final selection of great suggestions to kick off your reading for 2026!

Jaffé and Neale Bookshop: Patrick Neale's Book of the Year is The Winter Warriors by Olivier Norek: A literary gem describing Russia's invasion of Finland in 1939. It's a thriller about the world's greatest sniper, capturing a forgotten piece of history that resonates strongly today. Rachel White's choice is Ian McEwan's What we can Know: McEwan is back on form with this time-spanning quest that expertly threads a literary mystery of a lost poem through a post-catastrophe future. Can hope be rescued from looming gloom? It's his best work since Atonement and Enduring Love. 

Jaffé and Neale is an independent bookshop in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.

Lissa Evans: I loved Ghosts of the Farm, by Nicola Chester.  This is a non-fiction book, but it has as much heart and plot as any good novel, interweaving the fascinating diaries of a simply splendid woman farmer in World War 2, with the author’s own passionate relationship with the land, as she attempts to advocate for a nature-depleted countryside.  Within it, there’s a marvellous account of Chester’s teenage years when she worked in stables at the weekends and early mornings, her reward being the opportunity to learn to ride;  I was always envious of those tough, responsible little girls that I glimpsed on the rare occasions I bumped into that world, but I'm not aware that they’ve ever been written about in non-fiction before.  It’s all part of the rich and riveting texture of a book that I’m already looking forward to reading again. 

Lissa Evans' latest novel is Small Bomb at Dimperley, reviewed on the blog by Penny Dolan.

Judith Allnatt recommends The Book of Fire by Christi Lefteri. In Greece, a family is left physically and emotionally scarred by a fire that destroys their home and a vast tract of beautiful forest. They are Irini, a bazouka player, Tasso, an artist, and Chara, a sweet child. The story switches between the present with the family struggling to recover and the past – their terrifying jump from a cliff into the sea to escape and the fire’s aftermath.

Alongside the family’s journey from despair to hope there are questions to answer about who is responsible for the disaster. Is it Mr Monk, the man who illegally started to clear land for his hotel development, the emergency services that were slow to respond, the government, or is climate change and therefore all of us? To what extent are each to blame?

This is a moving book and, as with Lefteri’s other novels The Beekeeper of Aleppo and Songbirds, it brought me near to tears. The author has a clear-sighted view of human destructiveness but also has great compassion.

Judith Allnatt's latest publication is The Poet's Wife

Mary Hoffman: My Book of the Year is Helen Castor’s magnificent The Eagle and the Hart, an imaginative historical comparison of the two first cousins Richard II and Henry IV. Richard, with his effeminacy, love of luxury, preference for male “favourites” and refusal to name an heir, was unsuited to kingship in every way but he was the legitimate next in line to the throne, the remaining son of Edward (later known as the Black Prince). His grandfather, Edward III, and his older brother, another Edward, predeceased him, so Richard became king at the age of ten. 

Henry, on the other hand, had every quality needed in a king. He was intelligent, brave, a champion jouster, happily wedded to his childhood sweetheart and the father of four lusty sons and two daughters before tragedy struck and his wife Mary died in her last childbed. But Henry was not the heir. The two men were born within months of each other, married close together and lost their wives only weeks apart. 

Henry’s father was the great magnate John of Gaunt, the richest man in England after the king, Edward III’s third son. They were both mistrusted and overlooked by King Richard. Things came to a head when Richard sent Henry, who had not been tried or convicted for any crime, into exile in France. Gaunt died months later and Richard stole Henry’s great inheritance – all titles and lands. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

Historical storytelling at its best.

Mary Hoffman's latest publication is David: the Unauthorised Autobiography.

From Cathy Cassidy: This is Happiness by Niall Williams had me hooked from the first sentence. Fiction disguised as memoir, it's light on plot but brimful of heart, humanity, grief and love, a kind of time machine taking you back to 1950s rural Ireland. Both place and character are drawn perfectly, and the prose is clean, clever and beautiful in its simplicity. The novel charts the unlikely friendship between seventeen year old Noe, fresh from the seminary, and sixty-something Christy, who has been tasked with siting the poles that will connect the village of Faha to the National Grid. The novel unfolds slowly, but along with the details of village life come shards of pure beauty and insights into love, life and loss. I've read a LOT of books this year, but none have moved me as much as this one. I absolutely loved it.

Cathy Cassidy is the author of  the Chocolate Box Girls series and other children’s books.

Pippa Goodhart chooses The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: this novel is a breath of fresh air. Far from perfect, but full of energy, ideas and beautiful writing, it’s rich and original, and I’ll certainly read it again.

Kaliane Bradley is a Penguin book editor who found herself shut-in alone and bored during Covid lockdowns. She watched a television programme about the HMS Erebus polar expedition, and semi fell in love with naval officer Graham Gore (look online for his photo!) who died, but it isn’t known quite how. She found other enthusiasts online, and began writing a bit of time travel fantasy for their entertainment. To her surprise, that then grew into this, her first novel, The Ministry of Time.

It's written in the first person by disaffected female civil servant, brought into The Ministry of Time to become a ‘handler’ for an ‘expat’ brought from the past to be studied. Thus, gorgeous but of his time Graham Gore comes to live in her flat, bemused by washing machines, Spotify, doing your own cooking, feminism, computers, but gallantly trying to assimilate. Also brought from the past at moments when they died alone, and therefore history won’t be disturbed by their removal from it, come characters from 1645, 1665, 1793, and 1916, from whores to soldiers. Friendships and tensions arise, sometimes very funny, often poignant.

What to do with this situation she has created? The story becomes a tangle of sci-fi, rom-com, study of race and empire, and it doesn’t all convincingly resolve. But, no matter. The ride has been thought-provoking and fun!

Pippa Goodhart's latest publication is You Choose Bedtime, illustrated by Nick Sharratt.

Linda Newbery chooses Etta Lemon - the Woman who Saved the Birds by Tessa Boase, and will post a full review soon. Its wide sweep covers not only Etta Lemon's outrage at the mass killing of birds - almost driving some species to extinction - to provide feathers for fashionable hats, but also the suffragettes/suffragists, whose campaign began shortly after Etta Lemon's and who were of course far more prominent. There's much about social history, conditions of workers and the rise of feminism alongside the origins of the RSPB - now one of the UK's largest conservation organisations. Yet until now, and the publication of this book, Etta Lemon and her colleagues were barely acknowledged. There's much to learn and enjoy in this fascinating account.

Linda Newbery's latest publication is The One True Thing.

Sarah LeFanu chooses Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories by Edith Pearlman: My friend Hannah sent me this wonderful short story collection for my birthday in the summer. I had never heard of Edith Pearlman, although she has been writing short stories for 40 years and has won numerous awards in the USA. She’s nowhere near as famous as the writers to whom she is most often compared, Alice Munro and John Updike. Each of Pearlman’s sentences provides pleasure. She has a broader scope than Munro, and is more subtle and compassionate than Updike. The stories range widely in place (New England, old Russia, Central America, the remote mountains of Hungary), in character and voice, and in subject-matter. They are utterly serious, shot through with humour, and quietly surprising. Now I am slowly re-reading them, savouring their rich complexity. When I looked her up, I found she had died in early 2023. I shall track down her earlier collections.

Sarah LeFanu's latest publication is Talking to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer

Nick Hodges: My book of the year? Sean Dooley's The Big Twitch: One Man, One Continent, A Race Against Time - a True Story about Birdwatching, wherein the writer spends his inheritance attempting to see and tick off 700 species of Australian birds. Dooley gives himself a year and when the book starts - dead on midnight - so does he: positioned with spotlight in a dark forest. A nocturnal sooty owl is the first target. And it's raining.

He could of course be partying; celebrating the arrival of the new year; doing what ordinary people do. But no: he's a twitcher. And so we follow Dooley's adventures as he travels and ticks his way through the country: its swamps and sewage works (yes, you read that right); its heat and dust. Seasickness plays its part as well as flat tyres in the desert. A book written by a man aware of his own eccentricities. And no girlfriend. 

Nick Hodges is a wildlife journalist living in Sydney.

Sam Barnes of Books & Ink Bookshop recommends Craftland by James Fox: This is the most beautifully written book documenting the lives and careers of master craftspeople whose trades are critically endangered. James Fox demonstrates a vast breadth of research and a true, authentic passion for his subject, giving voice to craft trades spanning the length and breadth of the British Isles, incorporating not just rural crafts but those found in our towns and cities too. The author explores trades from the Scottish Islands in the north down to the Scilly Isles in the south. From watchmakers, coopers and bell founders, to bodgers, rush cutters and letter cutters. This isn’t a travelogue, though the author visits all these places and people; it is a love letter to crafts and trades, a living history and a reminder to us all to look around at all the crafted objects we use every day and consider their story. Britain is a nature of crafters and hopefully this book will also inspire a new generation to take up some of these threatened trades. A delight to read but also a delight to listen to as James Fox narrates his own audiobook, interjecting his passion for the trades he talks about into his audio delivery (available on Librofm and presumably on other audio platforms too).

Books & Ink is in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire. Proprietor Sam Barnes, back in the days when her shop was in Banbury, was our very first independent bookshop contributor.

Graeme Fife chooses Facing Down the Furies by Edith Hall. I’ve known five men who committed suicide, two of them close to me, and nurse my own feelings as to their loss. In this remarkable book, Hall, with great candour, insight and courage explores her own emotional reaction to the suicide of past members of her family and the ‘miasma of corruption’ as she puts it, which clung to the survivors and lingers, yet, near irresistibly, in her. Into this investigation of her own emotional responses she weaves the result of deep study of many Greek tragedies which delve undaunted into the unkindly matter of self-destruction.

The Greek idea of three Furies, known, euphemistically, as Eumenides ‘kindly ones’ (an interesting paradox in itself) underpins this vital study of a dark corner of the human psyche. Greek myth emerged from an extraordinarily acute sensibility which, in its turn gave birth to the tragedies of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, the work that forms the very foundation of our own drama. Full review coming in 2026.

Graeme Fife's latest novel is Memory's Ransom.

From Caroline Pitcher: As Christmas hurtles near, I’m re-reading eight of Claire Keegan’s short stories in the collection Walk the Blue Fields.

The title story begins: the women came with flowers, each one a different shade of red. Later, the priest stares at the line of her scalp where the shining red hair is parted.

At the wedding feast there is humour, and threat. After the best man urinates, he turns before his cock is put away. It is a huge cock and he has difficulty getting it back into the rented trousers.

Walk the Blue Fields is the bittersweet story of a man whose love got away. The spare writing is full of sadness, yet after the visit to the mysterious Chinaman, the priest thinks after all that, The spring has come, dry and promising.

In Claire Keegan’s writing, there is so much more than meets the eye. Ireland struggles with its dark past. (Here I want to mention So Late in the Day, a shattering novella about Cathal’s inherited misogyny, which destroys his own happiness.

Hilary Mantel said that Keegan writes with a certain stony-eyed realism about human experience. Yes. And she doesn’t write enough stories for me.

Caroline Pitcher's latest book is Mariana and the Merchild, illustrated by Jackie Morris.

And finally: Julia Jarman's choice is The Glory Cloak by Patricia O’Brien. The glory cloak of the title fixes this novel in my memory, sparking others of people, places and actions, some of which I’d rather forget. The novel is an alternative biography of Louisa M Alcott, written from the point of view of a fictitious character, Susan Gray, who gets closer to her than even her sisters did, joining her in the Union Hospital in Washington DC where, during the American Civil War, Louisa nursed soldiers and fell in love. It’s a story of passionate love and passionate self-denial – and it rings true, because of the writer’s skill and meticulous historical research.

The glory cloak itself was real. Luxurious, made of red and green silk, it was confined to the dressing-up box in the Quakerish Alcott household. But Louisa’s mother once placed it round her shoulders to inspire her ‘to do great things’.

Julia Jarman's latest novel is Widows Waive the Rules.

What are your own best reads of the year? Please tell us in the comments, and do come back next week for our final selection.