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: Ivar, 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!

Q&A: Jane Rogers interviews Lesley Glaister about her new novel, A PARTICULAR MAN

"I always like to be utterly certain of each character’s motivation at any one time – even if they aren’t sure of it themselves ..."

Lesley Glaister has written numerous novels, as well as short stories, drama and poetry. Alongside her writing she has worked as a tutor and mentor in Creative Writing in settings ranging from Crete to The University of St Andrews. Her most recent novel, A Particular Man, is set in the 1940s, and looks at love, marriage and sexuality in the post-war period. Find out more on her website.

Jane Rogers: Congratulations on your 14^th (??) novel, Lesley! It’s a completely engrossing read, and your characters continue to haunt me, especially Starling and Aida, that unlikely couple who almost certainly will not live happily ever after.

My first question is probably foolish, but I found myself puzzling over whether the ‘particular man’ of the title was Starling, or the absent Edgar?

Lesley Glaister: Thank you, Jane. It’s my 16^th or 17^th novel, depending on whether you count my YA novel, Aphra’s Child. The title: A Particular Man, came late. I had several other working titles including A Hole in the Corner Affair – but no-one else seemed to like that!  A Particular Man jumped into my mind while I was washing up one evening and it immediately felt right. It has both the meanings that you suggest. Starling is a particular man, of course, and he’s the particular man Aida falls in love with. But in a larger sense, the particular man who drives the whole dynamic of the novel is the absent Edgar.

JR: Speaking of Edgar - one of the things I love in the book is that everyone has their own story and secrets; Clem’s affair with famous artist Corin; Starling’s forbidden homosexual love for Edgar; Aida’s attraction to Starling which she tries to blot out by getting engaged to Neville. But the link between all the characters is Edgar, as son, as brother, as beloved comrade. And he is dead, and remains a total mystery. We have no idea if he returned Starling’s love, and even Starling doesn’t know. What made you decide to keep such a key character blank?

LG: Ha, good question! It wasn’t a decision. When I set out to write this novel, which has connections with Blasted Things, set twenty-five years earlier, I intended that Edgar, who was an infant in that novel, should be a central character. I kept trying to write scenes for him but he remained stubbornly inanimate. I couldn’t breathe life into him, or see him or hear him, and eventually I realised he was dead. For me writing is full of discoveries like this, rather than decisions. But I did decide to leave ambiguous the question of whether Starling’s love might have been requited if Edgar had lived. I think it would or might have been, but Edgar died so, like Starling, we will never know. 

JR: Your writing is wonderfully vivid, transporting the reader instantly into the scenes and characters’ feelings you describe. Here’s an example taken at random:

Aida hurries out of the hammering rain into the puddled shelter of St Pancras. As arranged, he’s waiting outside W H Smith, and her heart jerks like a bad dog on a lead.

How much revision does it take to achieve this kind of economy and joyous precision?

LG: Thank you! That is a huge compliment coming from a writer of your calibre. The honest answer is that those kind of similes and metaphors just seem to come naturally. Like many writers (and, of course, many people who aren’t writers) I tend to think in metaphor most of the time. Sometimes I drive myself mad with my habit of always thinking things are like this or that other thing. I have to work much harder at revising other elements of the narrative though: scenes where people have to move and act, dialogue, shifts through time etc. I always cut huge swathes in the editing process, and hone and sharpen scenes to try and rid them of any flab. I always like to be utterly certain of each character’s motivation at any one time – even if they aren’t sure of it themselves. 

JR: The novel is set in 1946 and also refers back to the war years and to the experiences of prisoners of war in Singapore. You don’t acknowledge any sources, but I’m guessing you did a huge amount of research, because the post-war world you conjure feels totally authentic. The menus are a particular delight (lobster mayonnaise and chocolate meringue!) and there are lots of details which are new to me, e.g. the choice of demob suits offered to ex-servicemen.  Can you tell us a bit about researching the background?

LG: One of my main sources was a box of family memorabilia. This includes photographs, letters, and artefacts relating to my father and his family. My dad was a Far East Prisoner of War in World War 2, a fact that was never spoken about in our family while he was alive. It was only after his death that I became fascinated both by his experience and the silence that surrounded it. In 1994 I wrote a novel called Easy Peasy, which is about that silence within a family.  At the time I did a fair amount of research, met a friend of my father from his time in Burma, read letters and newsletters written at the time. The tobacco tin of sketches in A Particular Man, was a real thing, though in real life it was a secret diary written on minute scraps of paper, also wrecked by a trapped ant. I find this idea very resonant. A letter from Edgar that Aida reads out loud to her mother is, in part, a letter that my father sent his mother when he was on his voyage to Singapore. There were also letters from my dad’s sister Kitty, who was killed during the Blitz and I was keeping her in mind for the character of Aida – though of course I never knew her.

As well as this family research, I also read reams of fiction set (and preferably written) during or shortly after the war as well as social histories. I watched films and TV documentaries and visited the Imperial War Museum. From all of these sources, I magpied away details of everyday life, such as those you mentioned, and the vocabulary of the times too. And of course I spent a lot of time Googling!

JR: I very much enjoyed the unsent letters from Aida to Starling. It’s a clever way of letting the reader into her thoughts. You also have Starling’s diary entries to reveal his inner feelings. But the larger part of the novel is written in the third person, from the restricted points of view of Aida, Starling and Clementine. How did you arrive at that writerly choice?

LG: Point of View is one of my obsessions and that close third person viewpoint is my favourite position from which to write. It means there is as little of the narrator showing as possible and all the narrative is filtered through the consciousness of the character in question. Sometimes, because of this restriction, it can be frustrating. For instance, I might think up just the right word, or image, but know that it wouldn’t be in the character’s vocabulary, or experience. With each novel I write I tend to wait for the first inklings of a voice to arrive. If it arrives in first person, I’ll go with that. The novel I’m writing at the moment, which spins off in an unusual direction from this one, is in the first person. One point of view I haven’t attempted yet is an omniscient third person – it simply looks too hard to control. I enjoyed using the first person for the letters and diaries and found it gave me extra insight into the characters of Starling and Aida. It was also a way of getting through a great deal of story in a reasonably economical way. 

 JR: How difficult was it to write using the point of view of a gay man in 1946?

LG: Oddly, I didn’t find it hard at all. I did a fair amount of reading including from a book called Curing Queers: Mental Nurses and Their Patients 1935-74 by Tommy Dickinson, which was excellent. I also did a lot of Googling and I was careful to run it past a gay male reader to ensure I hadn’t made any real howlers. 

 JR: And, leading on from that question, where do you stand on the whole vexed issue of appropriation? Do you think it’s OK for writers to write about people from different cultural/racial/social backgrounds to their own?

LG: Yes I do!  Of course, if a writer pretends to be something they’re not in order to write from a particular viewpoint, that’s wrong. If a writer writes cruelly or inaccurately or causes any hurt from their writing, that’s wrong too. But I can’t see why any human being can’t sensitively and intuitively try to enter into the experience of any other. Surely that’s part of what creative writing is about?

JR: I know this novel was originally slated to be published by Sandstone, and that Sandstone then went into receivership. Can you tell us about the bumpy road to publication?

LG: A miserable tale!  It’s so hard to get a novel published these days unless one is already a best-seller or a new writer on the brink of being discovered. For those of us that have published several (or many) novels, none of which have won a major prize, or been turned into a major movie (or maybe even if they have) publishers just aren’t interested. We are quite simply, out of fashion. This is true in my experience of the major traditional publishers, at least. Fortunately, there are smaller independent publishers – Sandstone was one – which work on a similar model but have more regard for quality rather than simply profitability. Sandstone published Blasted Things and I’d signed a contract with them for A Particular Man before they went into liquidation. I was left rather in the wilderness until Bloodhound came to my rescue. They differ from traditional publishers in being more focused on selling digital and audio copies than hard copies of books, though they do produce these too. I am very grateful that they have not only published A Particular Man but will also be reissuing Blasted Things later this year.

 JR: Finally – the limericks! They are great fun. Are they all your own work? I knew you were a poet, but I didn’t know you had a talent for limericks!

LG: They were fun to do. I sometimes think of limericks when I’m out walking my dog – it seems to suit the rhythm of my walking. Sometimes that rhythm drives me nuts. Most of the ones in the novel are my own, though one is adapted from someone else’s and the one that Peter quotes to Starling towards the end is, as he says, ‘an old chestnut’.

Thanks for these lovely questions. You have really made me think!

JR: Thank you for your generous answers, and for a fascinating novel! I think I like it even more now I know how closely it is based on your own family’s experiences. 

A Particular Man is published by Bloodhound Books.

Jane Rogers' review choices for Writers Review:

How the One Armed Sister Sweeps her House by Cherie Jones

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

On dramatising No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe

Jane's dramatisation of Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai, about one family's troubles during the partition of India in 1946, is currently on Radio 4. Listen here to the first of two parts.