A Year in Reading

We invited friends and contributors to reflect on what they read in 2025.

HARRIET ARMSTRONG

A standout book for me this year is Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace. The cover struck me as a bit cloying at first: it’s the edition with the blonde woman’s face on it, clearly an adult woman, I felt, and neither Siss nor Unn, the eleven-year-old main characters. But once I’d read a page or two, I couldn’t help finding the cover extremely beautiful, because of the overpowering beauty and mystery of the book. Very different, but with common themes (the end of childhood?) was Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards, which enthralled me for the whole of June. A deeply fun but also very sad and frightening book. I’ve been saying it makes me want to read ‘more thrillers’ but I think really I just want to reread The Shards already. The biggest literary ‘event’ of my year is undeniably Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series – I’m currently reading the latest one, The School of Night, and have spent large chunks of the year texting with friends about our progress through the series. I can’t imagine any other books ever making me feel simultaneously totally absorbed in the characters’ day-to-day lives and as if I’m coming close to understanding something huge and unnamable about the world – the world of the morning star and also the real world! Also, Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s The Sisters moved me to tears many times.

AMIE BARRODALE

I read Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters for the first time, and what I loved about it wasn’t so much the bile as the exalted recognition of love for the people in his past, and for the tenderness and fulness of his portrait of Joana and the others in his life. The slow recognition, seeming to surprise even himself, of Auersberger’s genius, and Joana’s perhaps lesser but so much more moving and particular artistic qualities. I really think it would have destroyed me had I read it when I was young. I also had a funny experience, where I woke up from a dream about Sean Thor Conroe, that he’d called me on the phone, on the day I had to go on a long drive. I was about an hour in when I realized I could buy his audiobook, and so I did, and he sort of hijacked my brain for a while, in a way my husband can’t really understand. (Dinnertime conversation. Me, ‘I like the word “bro”. Bro. Bro.’ Him, confused. Me, ‘No?’) I was also wanting to bow down at the altar of Susan Minot’s Don’t Be a Stranger. The craft, the intelligence, and the fearlessness, the fierceness of her telling. I truly do not think I have ever seen in any artistic work before the state of mind late in an uneven love affair, when a person can learn through friends that their situationship partner looked at an apartment with a woman, spend ten days thinking, ‘Don’t ask him about the apartment. Don’t ask him about the apartment.’ Then see him, sleep with him, ask him about the apartment, get chastised, and apologize. Genius. But I don’t know if I read anything new. I read Christine Smallwood’s Life of the Mind, and loved the way it opened (on the toilet) and what that came to be about, and the way she slowly slowly opened herself to communicating what it was about for her . . . I’m also reading Flesh by David Szalay. A lot to say about it, like Raymond Carver writing Layer Cake or something, but mostly it has this interesting vibe. Like so much under the surface, and then these sexual relationships sort of wash in, wash out. Very unique.

TOM CREWE

I started the year with back-to-back Russian bangers: Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov and The Golovlyov Family by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Daisy Chain has stuck in my mind: it was bracing to encounter a book so strictured by a sometimes shockingly strange Christian ethic, but which at the same time manages to be a vivid and often moving study of a widower and his many children over time. Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education crept up on me with its brilliance (though of course I’d been warned). My odyssey through Trollope – I’m over thirty novels now – continues to reveal him as almost unparallelled in the variety and delicacy of his gifts. He deserves to be counted as one of his century’s greats by virtue of The American Senator, Is He Popenjoy?, John Caldigate, Cousin Henry and Mr Scarborough’s Family, and yet I expect many people haven’t even heard of these books, never mind read them. That’s how good he is. (Arabella Trefoil, in the American Senator, is more than a match for Becky Sharp.) This year I read most of Robert Louis Stevenson: lovely to be reminded of the perfection of Treasure Island and Kidnapped, but even better to read for the first time The Master of Ballantrae, The Ebb-Tide and the ‘Beach of Falesá’ (and fascinating to encounter him as the co-author of a book as odd as The Wrecker). Whenever I read Gissing, I am reminded what a distinctive and clarifying flavour he is: The Nether World is deeply impressive in its wringing of drama from a ragged bit of Clerkenwell. I loved revisiting Our Mutual Friend; loved the first part especially of The Idiot; and can see exact in my mind Mrs Poyser’s kitchen parlour from Adam Bede. But the greatest book I read this year was undoubtedly Hugo’s Les Misérables, in the brilliant translation by Christine Donougher. It is stupendous. I can only compare it to War and Peace or Anna Karenina, and need say no more than that.

GEOFF DYER

From time to time I’m asked what kind of books I like, to which I always reply, ‘Great ones.’ But that’s not really true because I have trouble reading a lot of purportedly great books, Ulysses, for example, which seems pretty much to suck ass, if you ask me. If the question is ‘What do you like books about?’ my instinctive response is ‘Anything’, but that’s not true either because there are tons of non-fiction books I’m not interested in (books about American sports, so-called biblio-memoirs, anything with the word ‘How’ in the sub-title) which means – I like the idea of reading philosophy – that there must be some things I am especially interested in. With the mind concentrated in this way I realize that if I had to choose two subjects they would be the Second World War and aviation, so, logically, what I most like must be books about Second World War aircraft, and I have reads lots of these. But logic only gets you so far because this year the book I re-read with most enthusiasm was Ernest K. Gann’s 1961 classic Fate is the Hunter, a memoir focusing primarily on his experiences during the perilous early days of commercial aviation. It combines the sidereal lyricism of Saint-Exupéry with endlessly engrossing technical detail about engines, fuel, instruments, ailerons – all the stuff that keeps planes from falling out of the sky. That was just a warm-up though for a book I read for the first time: Beryl Markham’s extraordinary West with the Night (1942), a memoir of her life flying solo, first in Africa and later – famously – across the Atlantic from east to west in 1936. It’s wonderful – as none other than Hemingway proclaimed. I’m also about to embark on what I hope will be a thorough reading of the Complete Poetry and Complete Posthumous Poetry of César Vallejo, in two separate editions, both translated by Clayton Eshleman and both published by University of California Press. A friend told me Vallejo is great, that he was sure I’d like him. Does this mean – philosophy again! – Vallejo wrote poems about flying?

FERNANDA EBERSTADT

Lots of people called Benjamín Labatut’s The Maniac the best book of 2023. I may be alone in declaring it the best book of 2025. Okay, I admit I was slow in cottoning onto it; I’d been lukewarm about his previous novel. But The Maniac is not only darkly funny, pleasurable, it proves that fiction remains the truest vehicle for explaining the world-as-it-is. (It’s also the Chilean-born Labatut’s first book to be written in English.) Labatut links three real-life stories in an allegory about new technologies. In 1933, the Austrian Jewish physicist Paul Ehrenfast kills himself and his handicapped son. Why? Because he sees a connection between Nazism and quantum mechanics – this ‘profoundly inhuman form of intelligence’ that is ‘enrapturing the cleverest men and women with whispered promises of superhuman power and godlike control’. The ‘cleverest’ of those tempted by technology’s godlike promises is Labatut’s central protagonist – the Hungarian-born John von Neumann, co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb and the computer, who dreams of colonizing outer space with self-replicating automata. Von Neumann’s hubris is recounted in vivid polyphony by his family, former teachers, colleagues, suggesting how the hunger for immortality paradoxically might tempt a person into world-destruction. The Maniac’s finale takes us to 2016, when DeepMind succeeds in developing a computer capable of beating a human grandmaster at the game Go. Labatut’s conclusion? AI can only equal and surpass us by embracing what’s irrational in humans – not just the intuitive but the counter-intuitive, the chaotic, the seemingly self-destructive or outright insane, ‘the wild guess’.

MERVE EMRE

For the eleventh time, I read Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and thought, ‘I will never get tired of this.’ Like James, Glenway Wescott was a gay man fixated on the melodrama of straight marriages. In both The Pilgrim Hawk and Apartment in Athens, an ordinary husband and wife are undone by the arrival of an extraordinary creature –a hawk, a Nazi general, respectively. Halldór Laxness’s Independent People, about a proud, lousy sheep farmer and the women, children, and animals who suffer at his hands, is among the bleakest and funniest books I’ve ever read. Like the best modern epics, it summons archaic art forms – Norse fairytales, Icelandic sagas – to enchant national history. I loved it as much as I loved the two novels I read on its heels: The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s society portrait of the sensuous and degenerate Sicilian aristocracy, and Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina, a swirl of rumors, fables, tall tales, songs, and poems about Bosnian life under Ottoman, then Austro-Hungarian rule.

I mostly avoided contemporary fiction. The American exceptions were Makenna Goodman’s hallucinatory closet drama, Helen of Nowhere, and Joanna Howard’s Porthole, whose narrator, a ruthlessly seductive female auteur, a genius and a tyrant, thrilled me. From across the Atlantic: the Welsh librettist Paul Griffith’s two tales of Ophelia, let me tell you and let me go on, and Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, in which a pair of class-conscious marriages are thrown into crisis by the Big Freeze of 1963. These are perfectly composed novels; not a word is out of place. From farther away: Krisztina Tóth’s psychoanalytic thriller, Eye of the Monkey, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, made me feel, on every page, the horror of erotic and political hopelessness. Few things bore me more than bellyaching about AI. Thank goodness for Kyle Booten’s Gyms, nine poems composed in dialogue with nine ‘gyms’, computer programs that exercise the brain. Reading it reminded me that we are not done toning the expressive powers of human language.

SUJATHA GIDLA

This year I read two recent books that I liked very much. Megha Majumdar’s A Burning is a tragic, fast-paced, stylishly written thriller inspired by the prevailing political atmosphere in India. And Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me is a shocking memoir of the well-known author’s mother. Her clear prose and direct approach let one see how much ugliness and tragedy may be hidden behind the glossy facade of high social status and prosperity.

I also caught up with three classics this year. I am a fan of true crime, and Truman Capote is justly considered the genre’s founder. His passion for research while writing his ‘non-fiction novel’ In Cold Blood reminded me what fun it was to write my own book of the same genre. Before I read Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps, I couldn’t have imagined that a year in the life of a middle-aged secondhand bookshop owner with a slight limp and an extreme passion for thrift could make for a gripping novel. And Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica is the hilarious story of the unlikely coming of age of the children of English settlers in colonial Jamaica. The turn of events in the novel’s second half was a delightful surprise.

ROBERT GLÜCK

I read (and wrote an afterword for) The Orchid Stories by Kenward Elmslie, a bonkers masterpiece of astounding and steadfast invention, reissued in 2025 by the intrepid Pilot Press. Elmslie was a member of the New York School; his novel inhabits a small category that might be called limit cases, like Pierre Guyotat’s Eden Eden Eden, and William Burroughs’ The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. Speaking of Guyotat, I read Idiocy, about his hero’s maturation inside the ravages of colonialism in Algeria. In Guyotat’s mighty prose, the blinders have been removed and the senses rubbed raw. Speaking of rubbed raw there’s Claire Star Finch’s FUCK ME JUDITH, a heedless and depraved fan fiction about Wendy and Judith that is also a site of discovery. Finch sets desire on its head and in every other position. I want to add Lilacs by Rainer Diana Hamilton, a poem/disquisition on the senses and on love that is richly conversant, philosophical, and eighteenth century in its perfection of conversation and wit. Hamilton is the greatest company, a friend who invites you to refract your life through their Refining Lense. Finally, Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter. This is the tenderest of AIDS fictions. It proposes the always radical notion that play is more important than work. At the same time, it’s a manifesto proclaiming the value of queer experience and soul.

SOPHIE KEMP

I thought, going into 2025, that my year would be about the release of my first novel. As it turned out, it ended up being about the strange and sad process of being transformed by love only for it to spectacularly and brutally fall apart. When I look back at my reading this year, I can chart the entirety of the relationship. There I was in a Parisian housing project, reading Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil, while my boyfriend slept in the other room. I read Sarah Kane’s Complete Plays in April, on a couch in Bushwick while my boyfriend worked on his own writing. In May, I went to Yaddo, where I read the Anne Carson translation of Euripides’ Grief Plays and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I finished the first draft of my second book. My boyfriend called me in the evenings, while I looked out the window, out onto the great lawn.

Come summer proper, I was exquisitely miserable. I read Candide and Huck Finn, for the first time, like some kind of fourteen-year-old boy. My boyfriend went away to Europe for six weeks and did not take me with him. I sat in my apartment, completely naked, and picked at scabbed over mosquito bites. I went to a friend’s summer home in Litchfield County, and alternated between bleakly looking out at the pool, drinking champagne, and reading Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy. A few weeks later, in Truro, on psychedelics and reading Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer, I had realized things were going to end. I was right. He came back and broke up with me. I filled up my filthy, pink bathtub and sat there reading, God knows why, Emily Ratajkowski’s My Body. It got easier, quickly. A moment on the bus to Cambridge, reading Nell Dunn’s Talking to Woman, where I felt it all click into place. It became deeper into fall in New York. I took out my sweaters from the back of my closet. Someone new kissed me on my couch. I kept reading.

CHRIS KRAUS

I discovered Helen Garner’s writing this year, beginning with How to End a Story which is as suspenseful as 800+ pages of edited diary writing could possibly be. And then moved onto Monkey Grip – unrepentant and brilliant, and The Children’s Bach after that. What I love most about Garner’s writing is the way recollections of daily routines and internal debate are cut through with descriptions of the natural world. Semiotexte published On Virginia Woolf: Sylvère Lotringer’s Interviews with Members of the Bloomsbury Group, 1961 – a pamphlet of interviews transcribed, translated and edited by the writer Jeanne Graff. Twenty-two years old at the time and speaking hesitant English, Lotringer was quietly relentless in pushing his subjects beyond familiar anecdotes towards an illumination of Woolf’s writing as a new form of philosophy. Though it took a decade to get around to it, I finally read Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, which was audacious, hilarious and as outrageous as the racial history of LA and America. Is he really saying this?, I kept wondering. And then I reread Lost Illusions by Balzac which was less about Lucien’s ambitions than I remembered and more about paper manufacturing and the escalation of nineteenth-century capitalism during the Restoration, which was surprisingly even more entertaining.

CATHERINE LACEY

Overall I read much less this year because I am continuing to slowly attempt to acquire some degree of fluency in Spanish, but also because I started writing a new novel. The Spanish learning burns a lot of reading time and the novel writing makes me insanely picky and hesitant. I ended up doing a lot of re-reading and I tried to get to classics I’ve had on the TBR for too long. In February, I finally read Middlemarch and it was way more of a soap opera than I expected. I couldn’t help but yell things like, ‘Are you kidding me!?’ or ‘Oh boy, someone is definitely about to write a strongly worded letter that will humiliate its recipient.’ In March I read one book, a short one, in Spanish, but it probably took me a month to get through. It was by the Chilean writer Gonzalo Maier and it was called Cuando Cumplí Cuarenta (When I Turned Forty). A series of short, humorous essays about turning forty, I figured it would be full of vocabulary I should know since I also achieved forty years of uninterrupted life this year. Another classic was The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch. I got really enthusiastic about it on Substack, which surprisingly led at least a few other people to read it as well. I’m trying not to be so drunk on book influencing as to ruin my own life. Then there were a lot of re-reads this year – Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, Tonight I’m Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson, The Lover by Marguerite Duras. In August, like it was the medicine I needed, I re-read Cain Named the Animal by Shane McCrae. Those poems are so good sometimes I had to put the book down and do a lap around the room. On a plane in November I read Gente Sin Paz (People Without Peace) a three-way correspondence about addiction and dependency between Sofia Balbuena, Daniel Saldaña París, and Sabina Urraca. I must confess I am married to one of the authors, but I loved the form of this book which is part of a series from the Spanish publisher Almadia in which they chose three authors to write a series of letters to each other loosely around a single topic. Can we start an English language version of this series somewhere?

NANCY LEMANN
This book was dear to me in 2025: Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi, an Italian author who was an expert on Pessoa and was thereby drawn to Lisbon, where this novel takes place. It is all about the soul, written in a sprightly and entrancing style. Despite or because of these attributes I felt it would appeal to about one percent of the population, which was ‘validating’ for me. So it’s OK to just be in your lane and barely in anyone else’s. There is a certain simplicity about it that I adored. The entrancing weather, the entrancing old city (Lisbon), the hero’s fidelity to his dead wife. He’s a bit of a hapless Graham Greene style hero – hapless in a good way, inspiring immediate sympathy. He’s fat, he has heart trouble, his wife is dead. He has regrets. But somehow his very hopelessness is hopeful. In the opening he feels a vague need for repentance but does not know what he has to repent. This also was entrancing. It turns out in the end that what he has to repent his lack of political activism. Till then he has stayed in his ken. He prefers to be a lone wolf. That was another resonance. I never followed politics before, but with a Shakespearean villain at the helm of the USA, this can no longer be the case. But what I loved about it most was its artistry, a stylistic gambit derived from the title.

GUADALUPE NETTEL

Mars, Fritz Zorn’s only book, was one of the first I read this year – an autobiographical essay that connects cancer with suppressed anger. Intimacies by Katie Kitamura was a great way to discover her work, I liked it so much that I read Audition as soon as it came out. Then, the collection Good and Evil by Samanta Schweblin, one of my favorite short story writers. I read in Italian Andrea Bajani’s The Anniversary, a delicate novel about domestic violence and toxicity in families, that will be published next year in the UK. I also enjoyed The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş – another great discovery – a novel of extraordinary beauty. La nuit ravagée by Jean-Baptiste del Amo in French, was next. I love haunted houses stories – and this is a very good one. After many years of waiting I finally read On Women by Susan Sontag and then immediately read the excellent biography that Benjamin Moser wrote about her. I finished the year with two gems: Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov, on his father’s last days, and Exit Paradise, the new manuscript by Lila Azam Zanganeh, an addictive story of obsessed love, exile, and family heritage.

ANDREW O’HAGAN

As readers, we are often addicted to reassurance. We view the rehearsal of what we already believe as evidence of clear-thinking. And this should raise the importance of writing which renovates how we think and tackles what we ‘know’. Donald Antrim is an American stylist with a surreal sense of concrete reality and plain sentences. This year, I’ve read everything he has written, including, in manuscript, what I believe will be his next masterpiece, My Eliot. Politicians, to speak of a different breed of believer, may be especially reliable when it comes to amplifying one’s prejudices. I’d been hoping for a breakthrough, and it came with Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir, Frankly, a book which is truthful about self-doubts, errors, hopes and fears – as well as about achievements and arguments – in a way that one seldom ever sees from a male leader showing you his medals. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, a beautifully written novel about snobbery and double-standards, was for me an obsessive read. Wharton, in one or two respects, has an edge on her friend Henry James: she can go inside a women’s hat factory, for instance, and her accounts of female humiliation (at the hands of men and women) is more experienced and less theoretical. The lives of writers increasingly interest me nowadays – they all feel like splinters from a shattered mirror – and I found myself enjoying Richard Holmes’s The Boundless Deep (his new book about Tennyson), as well as Zachary Leader’s Ellman’s Joyce, his examination of the famous biography of Ireland’s greatest novelist. Continuing along those lines, I also dug out The Brass Check by Upton Sinclair, and found myself really enjoying Nathan Waddell’s new, calm, very grounded account of the domestic and everyday wonders of George Orwell in his book A Bright Cold Day. The book summons one of the biggest questions we face nowadays, the relationship between fiction and reality. The life of the spirit, in relation to reality and other great mysteries, is there in another terrific biography, the three-volume one written by Norman Sherry about Graham Greene, and I’ve dwelt with that too this year. The spirit-level theme will continue with what is already guaranteed to be a book of the year for me, The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis. A volume of sunlight and shadow, history and memory, it is a book of treasures that provides by itself enough sparkling matter not just for this year but for many years to come.

LEOPOLD O’SHEA

My daughter was born in June, and before time ran out and I still had hands to hold books and a full night’s sleep to remember the beginning of a sentence, I was reading Middlemarch. And history, a lot of history. Braudel’s Civilisation Matérielle et Capitalisme, Sennet’s The Fall of Public Man, and Mair’s Ruling the Void. Now it’s audiobooks. MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Taylor’s A Secular Age and Postman’s Bowling Alone follow me into rooms where I forget what I was doing there like a sentence I couldn’t follow to the end. Much of what I’m reading seems to be about trying to remember how we got to this dead end of ours, to locate the moment when the social and political impetus of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seemingly wandered into a cul-de-sac, leaving their children where we stand today, endlessly rehearsing a shrill and pointless moral theatre. When I get to hold a book I read to her, mostly poetry and in French – Baudelaire, Verlaine, Éluard – because it’s short and because it practises the mother tongue I want her to keep alive. Pieces of La Vie Devant Soi, a board book entitled Regarde Dans La Nuit. I make one exception for Jack Handey’s What I’d Say to the Martians, but which I read in a French accent. Already you roll the disgruntled Rs of your countrymen so joyously you scare away the bluetits. Someday maybe we’ll get out of this cul-de-sac and you’ll sing us Le Temps Des Cerises.

SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT

For most of the year I read programmatically, trying to catch up with history. I had taken it upon myself to help organize writers and culture workers, an effort helped by a lot of Lenin and Kanafani and Grace Lee Boggs. I read Jean Guéhenno’s Diary of the Dark Years, partly because it was what Gary (Indiana) was reading when he died. I read every issue of The New York War Crimes. And I read Mohammed el-Kurd’s Perfect Victims, which is remarkable for how it both demonstrates and casts doubt on the role of cultural production in the struggle for liberation.

I couldn’t read any new novels. Fiction, the whole enterprise, started seeming quixotic and irresponsible, but also the idea of being ‘introduced’ to a ‘character’ made me feel like an agoraphobe. Possibly this is because I was already spending so much time talking to new people, which I guess is what organizing is. When I wanted to read, I would open to a random page in one of five books: Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson, Airless Spaces by Shulamith Firestone, White Rat by Gayle Jones, The Blue Light by Husayn Jamil Barghuthi, I can’t remember the fifth. All the same genre, as you can see. Dépaysé. Until this year, I didn’t know that the Firestone book – like the Jones book – is constructed on a perfect loop, the last page leading you to the first. I had skipped the last section, because it was about the death of her brother, and I was superstitious. Of course, that was before.

One day I went to Bergdorfs to be alone. I pretended I was going to buy a button-down shirt for the office, and the saleswoman put me in a private fitting room that had an armchair and a vase of white flowers and a number of black-spined Penguin paperbacks, including The Consolation of Philosophy. I had never in my life thought about Boethius, but that morning on the subway I found him described as a Christian martyr, as well as a theorist of music, in Ian Penman’s book on Satie. So I felt that The Consolation wanted to be with me, even though normally I avoid anything that could, like so much moral philosophy, be classified as self-help.

‘You should not wear yourself out by setting your heart on living according to a law of your own in a world that is shared by everyone’, Boethius says in Philosophy’s voice. It’s good advice. I think, however, that the book I loved most in 2025 is by a woman who exhausted herself in precisely that way: Arwa Salih, and the book is called The Stillborn. Every Marxist should read it.

KATE RILEY

Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat, published this year, is so good it makes me angry. It has four main characters: two young Canadian men, a truck, and a gun. I found myself telling people it felt like a movie, but I hate movies and loved The Passenger Seat. So I amend: it felt like the kind of movie I like, which is the movie Dog Day Afternoon. Though there is enough action in The Passenger Seat to penetrate even the vulcanized mind of a studio executive, it’s the language that made me swoon and screenshot:

‘He had learned to hold the nippled remote with one hand covering the end so he could fondle the buttons without changing anything. He was already old enough to find secret pleasure in the contrast of rigid plastic and soft rubber, and the odd distribution of weight, much heavier at one end, that meant it could balance on his palm in a way that seemed impossible.’

My other best book was published in 2016 and its relative obscurity is bittersweet consolation to anyone dismayed by Literary Fiction lists dominated by cowards like [redacted] and [redacted]. Dodge Rose deserves display beside Pale Fire and Wolf Hall; the mind of its author, Jack Cox, seems so capacious as to contain multiple geniuses, his book populated with characters whose brilliance is evident, not advertised. Dodge Rose is an unqualified masterpiece, and since reading it I have waged a constant if largely astral campaign (of which this recommendation is part) to convey my awe at and gratitude to Jack Cox for conducting it.

DECLAN RYAN

The book I’ve read the most, gone back to endlessly, is Karen Solie’s Wellwater, her latest and possibly best collection of poems, in an absurdly strong body of work. She’s no longer a poet’s poet’s poet or whatever the phrase is now, but it’s poetry so I suspect her privacy is still relatively undisturbed. I also loved Anna Whitwham’s Soft Tissue Damage, a lyrical book about her learning to box after her mother’s death as a means of gaining some control, and shape, in every sense, to her life. Her descriptions of the relationship between fighter and trainer, and their parallels with the maternal, are especially well-rendered.

EDWARD SALEM

I’m always returning to the immense genius of Anishinabe poet and novelist Gordon Henry Jr.’s book The Light People, which is on my all-time top ten list. I can’t recommend him enough. His follow up, The Failure of Certain Charms, is also brilliant, and I’m excited to read his new book, Spirit Matters.

Amie Barrodale’s Trip is off-the-wall bizarre and unpredictable. More of this, please! Just when you think it can’t get any crazier, it goes for broke. Trip also pairs nicely with a gem I just got to this year, Michael Robbins’s poetry collection Alien vs. Predator.

I heard Torrey Peters say she got out of her TV deal for Detransition, Baby in large part because the TV people wanted to show a trans woman holding a baby, and how that would subvert what she intended with the ending. And I mean, respect. Not sure I’d have the integrity to turn down that payday and exposure. But having just seen the film adaptation of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, which I found cloying, maybe Peters’s follow up, Stag Dance, will make it to the silver screen. It takes place in the same world of early 1900s lumberjacks, but reads like something John Waters might adapt. A delight and a hoot. Here’s hoping!

Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection and Anna Poletti’s hello, world?, both from last year, are radical, inventive, and kinky, even if they’re total opposites in some ways, like their characters Kant and Seasonal (those names!). Rejection’s Ryan Trecartin-like hyperactive intensity is soothed by hello, world?’s refreshing earnestness and depth.

Ashraf Fayadh is a little like the Tony Tulathimutte of Palestinian poets, kinda sorta. His book, Instructions Within, is playful and cutting, profane and hilarious, surreal and singular.

ANNE SERRE

I started the year with Patricia Highsmith’s People Who Knock on the Door. What always strikes me about her is her use of description. Every moment is so meticulously described that after each paragraph you expect the revelation of some dramatic event, which, in fact, is always postponed. It’s her brilliant way of creating constant suspense. I read Louise Glück’s Marigold and Rose and Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook one after the other: both are about twin children. Glück has the wonderful audacity to expose the inner lives and thoughts of infants; Kristof, those of implacable children. I reread Jean Rhys’s Quartet and realized that nowhere had I read such a true evocation of psychological suffering. My friend and English translator Mark Hutchinson had me read Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, which begins like a Gothic novel, continues like Lewis Carroll, and then like Swift. In June, I read Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers, and I thought I wished I had written that book. Among the year’s treasures, I’d also like to mention Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice, Murakami’s First Person Singular, and ten others. But that would take ten pages!

VIVEK SHANBHAG

However random they may seem together, choosing a handful of books from a year’s reading reveals something about us, something we sense inwardly though we may never be able to say aloud what.

It was a comment on the narrative style of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft that made me reach for the novel. His character-building is astonishing in its restraint; he brings the reader to the brink of a crest and lets the depth speak for itself.

Blending real people, family photographs, and identifiable places into a work of fiction demands a special, almost reckless, boldness. Jeet Thayil brings this off with striking assurance in his novel Elsewhereans.

Reading Zahid Rafiq’s collection of stories, The World with its Mouth Open, made me feel the force of the unsaid, particularly in its quiet reckoning with violence.

And then there was a newly collected volume of Roberto Bolaño’s work, where writers, poets, and failed geniuses drift through the pages like restless spirits, and the ordinary is always on the brink of slipping into menace.

In Railsong, written with evocative clarity, Rahul Bhattacharya follows Charu, one among the many women whose quiet grit and ambition continue to remake India.

When the normalisation of extremes begins to trouble me, I retreat into my favourite books. This year I returned, often, to Singer’s stories and to Jorge Amado’s The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray.

YURI SLEZKINE

I have, quite by chance, read two terrific books about friendship: Dennis C. Rasmussen’s The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought (recommended by a colleague named Prudence), and Ian Leslie’s John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs (suggested by an algorithm). Friendship is love by other means. Hume and Smith called theirs ‘affection’, John and Paul needed only love but hid theirs away (and never sang openly about friendship). One celebrated reason and communicated in writing, the other sang about feelings, ‘feelings deep inside’. One helped design the moral foundations of our institutions and the wealth of (some) nations, the other retuned our temperaments and still sounds like the spring before our fall.

Hume was stout, gregarious, prolific, and, by all accounts, irresistibly charming, with a Scottish burr he acknowledged to be ‘totally desperate and irreclaimable’ and an ‘innocent mirth and agreeable raillery’ Alexander Carlyle found unmatched in his lifetime. Smith was mild-mannered, absent-minded, and reticent to the point of timidity. Both believed that ‘friendship is the chief joy of human life’ (as Hume put it) and wrote for each other as much as they did for the public and posterity. The last words Hume ever wrote were ‘Adieu My dearest Friend.’ Smith, in his only act of open defiance, published an open letter describing the late Infidel ‘as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit’.

The soundtrack to the 1960s issued from John and Paul’s tender and tempestuous ‘quasi-marriage.’ They dueled and harmonized, sang in unison and in counterpoint, from the breathlessness of one boy telling the other: ‘You think you lost your love? Well, I saw her yesterday,’ to the softly intersecting lines of ‘If I Fell,’ to the uncertain certainty of ‘We Can Work It Out,’ to the memories of Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields on the opposite sides of the same doublе-A single, to the two apparently unrelated accounts of ‘A Day In the Life’ brought together by the final piano chord. ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko,’ which seemed to spell the end, is the only Beatles song performed solely by Lennon and McCartney. ‘The lyrics are about John and Yoko,’ writes Leslie, ‘but the music is all John and Paul.’

NATASHA STAGG

When finishing Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament, I was told that no, I must read her other books, too, and also her sister’s response novel, Free Will to get the full picture. Of course, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume is a seven-book series and I’ve only read Book I so far. And this year, I read most of Annie Ernaux’s books – well, those translated into English – which all feel interconnected and therefore incomplete without each other. Slowly continuing to read Proust has been fun, but it feels I am missing a lot if I don’t also read and see every artwork and text referenced, and so the project further slows. Reading some pages of Ulysses aloud at a Bloomsday event got me thinking: I should reread Ulysses, while I’m at it. But then, what about the rest (Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce’s correspondences)? And then there are the books and articles and newsletters my friends have published, the reading of which importantly constellates our relationships. Which made the book I’d really been waiting for, Helen DeWitt’s Your Name Here (a ‘honeycomb of books within books’, written with the journalist Ilya Gridneff) feel, ironically, of one piece. Maybe that’s because the media it names is mostly the stuff I read/watched in college, and its messiness accurately illustrates the frustrations of reading itself – the attempt to freeze time – especially as time progresses.

JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

I’ve enjoyed the mnemonic triggering of thinking back over the books that I read this year. I did a search on the phrase ‘I’ve been reading,’ in my texts, and it fished and fetched up so many lost nights. You know those knotted ropes that the Inca used, to send messages and store information – quipus? It was like moving my fingers along one of those. Every title had forgotten sentences and clusters of sense-memories in it. What a strange, dark year. I read a ton of Twain and Twain-adjacent texts, by way of research for a long essay-review in Harper’s. Of that stuff, Roughing It has stuck with me best. Sometimes Twain stops joking long enough to really describe something, such as a coyote’s smile, and he’s so good. I read Maupassant’s introduction to his novel Pierre et Jean, supposedly as close as he came to a manifesto or Ars poetica. It contains this superb formulation, in re a certain kind of literary critic: ‘me paraît doué d’une perspicacité qui ressemble fort à de l’incompétence.’ That led me to read, for the first time, a different Maupassant novel, Bel-Ami, which starts like a cannonball but goes dead halfway through. (It’s hard to make a reader care about the fate of a morally vacant climber for 250 pages, whereas in a short story a drop of pity suffices! The women were more interesting, but Maupassant seemed uninterested in them, after a certain point that came too soon.) I read Bulgakov’s Notes of a Country Doctor (the fierce, pure manners of the beautiful one-legged peasant girl at the end of the first story!) and Pushkin’s great unfinished historical novel, The Moor of Peter the Great (the pain of that premature ending, or lack of one . . . a chasm opens, in the universal imagination, that can never close . . . what was he thinking leaving off like that?). I read a bunch of other stuff, of course, but I’ve gone on too long. Well, a few quick things: Nancy Lemann’s The Ritz of the Bayou (re-issued by Hub City Press), Jean Strouse’s Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers (a master class in using art as a lens on shifting society). Oh, and Joy Williams. I finally get it about Joy Williams. I’d always resisted her. But it turns out I just wasn’t ready.

JEREMY TIANG

I’ve been making my way through Yan Lianke’s back catalogue in preparation for translating his more recent work. He has a knack for plunging into the heart of a painful subject and twisting the knife. Dream of Ding Village (translated by Cindy Carter), which is narrated by the ghost of a dead child, is based on the true story of a blood merchant infecting his entire village with HIV.

Otherwise, I gravitated towards books that played with form and language. Nick Drnaso’s Acting Class was a fantastically creepy graphic novel that really got under my skin with its slippery approach to reality. Kate Beaton’s memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, also in graphic format, had all the sly humour of her comic strips along with something much more poignant. I’m still thinking about the intelligence and grace of Canisia Lubrin’s Code Noir, a righteous defilement of Louis XIV’s edicts on slavery. And I was blown away by Isabella Hammad’s Enter, Ghost, which I read immediately after her Recognising the Stranger.

I also went through a spate of only reading detective fiction because I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I recommend this as a palate cleanser; it’s very soothing to watch one misanthropic curmudgeon after another go around dismantling falsehoods and setting the world to rights.

WILLIAM T. VOLLMAN

In hopes of taking a long but (I promise) still jaundiced view of my country’s let’s say ‘rebranding’ as a right-wing thuggish kleptocracy, I have been rereading and extracting aphorisms from such dead Americans as George Washington, whose slaveholdings and chicaneries against the Indians were accompanied by bravery, endurance, modesty and a delightfully insistence that the only legitimate source of government is ‘the people’. The fact that the Founders interpreted this term as including white males only (some went farther and proposed that the men must be Christian property owners) indicates that we all partake of the same human rottenness. All the more do I admire the Constitution they built, with its checks and balances, its ‘government of laws, not men’. The fiery ex-slave Frederick Douglass (whose speech on the Fourth of July is a bitter masterpiece), John Quincy Adams, who matured into a brave and delightfully sarcastic foe of slavery and war with Mexico (the abuse and threats he endured are almost Trumpian), the Supreme Court’s chief justice John Marshall, who strengthened the judiciary branch, and Jefferson, Franklin, Margaret Fuller, Lincoln of course are some of my other dead friends. I love the noble idea of America, which is of course a work in progress, admire our Constitution despite its blemishes, and therefore am preparing a set of extracts about law, separation of powers and how to smell out despotism.

NICO WALKER

I’ll start with books I reread this year: McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh and The Long Take by Robin Robertson, two real good ones, for sure. Then for some oldies but goodies (but that were new to me): Gone Tomorrow by Gary Indiana and The Misfits by Arthur Miller, both perfect. If you’re looking for a newer release, I can recommend Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange and Sucker by Daniel Hornsby. Or if you’re more in the mood for short stories, there’s Temple Folk, by Aaliyah Bilal. Presently I’m reading Post Capitalist Desire by Mark Fisher, a posthumous release drawn from his final lectures. The book I just read before it was the best (albeit only) counterrevolutionary lit I read this year, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog (Stalin also liked Bulgakov, liked him so much it saved MB from the gulag or worse, such were Mikhail’s chops, so don’t clutch your pearls, imaginary leftist). Then, last but by no means least, the book I recommend if you only read one from this list is If I Must Die: Poems and Prose, a collection of some of Refaat Alareer’s writing, published a year after he was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Northern Gaza. Let it live as a reminder of what is possible when a writer writes.

STEPHANIE WAMBUGU

I read a number of very short novels this year partly due to the devastating consequences of promoting my own book on my attention span. I’m sure I’ll get it back, or am already beginning to, but in the meantime, I am enjoying seeing just what writers can accomplish in under two hundred pages. The best novella I read this year was Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait. This slim book is written in sentences that dart away from one another in stark turns, moving from one recollection or self-description to the next, disparate one with little in the way of transition. The result is an account of a man’s life that feels as though it were written with the urgency and the candor of a prison diary. Levé’s telegraphic declarations about himself and the world read like the last words of a dying man, which is fitting because he took his own life only two years after this work of autofiction was published. His book, thankfully, is absent of euphemisms like ‘he took his own life’. Lines such as, ‘I have often gone to bed with one woman while thinking of another’ or ‘The quest for prestige makes me feel pity’ or ‘I have not signed a manifesto’, devastated me in the same way that Joe Brainard’s I Remember did, as both books are an accumulation of impressions and facts stripped of the consoling and often dishonest cope, context and self-delusion we often pad narratives of our lives with to make them tolerable and coherent. The story of anyone’s life told this severely in only one hundred and seventeen pages (the length of Autoportrait) would probably be a very sobering assemblage.

MOLLY YOUNG
The arc of digital communication bends so annoyingly toward the ‘chatty’ that I kept seeking out books-on-paper with a countervailing quality: taciturn or obstreperous books, grammatically elaborate books, books with characters or arguments that defied synopsis. Under that rude umbrella in the fiction category: Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose, Kate Riley’s Ruth, Stacey Levine’s Mice 1961 and Lauren Rothery’s Television. In nonfiction, Dagmar Herzog’s small book The New Fascist Body and Annie Ernaux’s romantic tragedy The Use of Photography. Actually there was one exception to the anti-chattiness rule. I reread Studs Terkel’s Working and was glad to remember that everyone hates her job and always has. (Except stonemasons. Stonemasons are happy.)