The Best Books of 2025
The idea of being overwhelmed by all the world’s available information is not unique to the digital age. Back in the late eighteenth century, readers were already lamenting a Bücherflut – a flood of books that outpaced any hope of total mastery. At the Leipzig book fair of 1799, printers and scholars complained that universal erudition had finally slipped out of human reach: it was now impossible to read literally everything ever published.
Every ‘books of the year’ list is reflective of that context. It is also, inevitably, an exercise in partiality. Even the most committed readers might manage only tens of new titles in a year, rarely hundreds. Literature demands time in a way music, film or other art forms do not: the labour of reading is slow, and the labour of writing is slower still. Which is why you can argue that book lists matter for more than just publisher publicity or cliquey gestures of allegiance. They map the boundaries of a landscape no single reader can now cross alone. To readers they offer books they may not have known existed, let alone considered.
We hope our list is productive evidence of that. We have books that fall within every category; from reissued classics, theory and art criticism to poetry, fiction, biography and even a sort of memetic fiction born out of a niche internet subculture.
Obviously, this is not the whole story, not even close, but it is a set of places in which you might begin. Here are The London Magazine’s Best Books of 2025.
– Jamie Cameron, Managing Editor
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On Painting
by Gilles Deleuze, tr. Charles J, Stivale, ed. David Lapoujade (University of Minnesota Press)
NON-FICTION
The thing about these 1981 seminars, now translated into English for the first time, is that they’re extremely fun. Seriously. Starting from the ‘pre-pictorial space’ (an ‘infinite world of bullshit and stupidity’), Deleuze maps painting’s process through a theory of catastrophe, code and colour modulation. On his way he calls abstract painters ‘whorish… dolphins’ (as a compliment), argues entertainingly with interlocutors, gets grumpy and excited by turns. He’s on great form in this dialogic, spoken mode, meaning this is now English readers’ best introduction to his thoughts about Francis Bacon, Cézanne, visual art, how we relate to the violent catastrophe behind all things. ‘Whew!’ says Deleuze, wrapping up one session in a whirlwind – and we feel his energy, happy to have sat in on this, knowing we’ll revisit – ‘Until next time!’
Ghost Driver
by Nell Osborne (Moist Books)
FICTION
Malory is an administrative worker whose mystifying health concerns are matched in nightmarish scale only by the gruelling Institution that employs her. We join her as she descends into a world of magical diagnosis, appalling men and an unopenable envelope. This book has all of my favourite things: weird menace, faceless bureaucratic horror, bodily dread and internalised minerals, all balanced with a flawless emotional register, and exquisite observations on the terrors of life. On rereading I find that I stop being a reader and become a student of the language itself. Nell Osborne is a poet also, which probably explains a lot of this. Moving, propulsive and with an absolutely breathless ending.
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Groundwater
by Thomas McMullan (Bloomsbury)
FICTION
Funny Games but with fewer laughs. There you go, Bloomsbury, you can have that for free. For the follow up to his chilling folk-horror debut The Last Good Man, Thomas McMullan pulled focus with this claustrophobic examination of a couple – John and Liz – whose move to a remote lakeside house adds torturous strain to their troubled relationship. ‘Already they were altered by their new surroundings,’ acknowledges John shortly after arrival – and how. An adroitly designed mise-en-scène facilitates a shrewd remodeling of home invasion norms. Observed with almost cruel precision, Groundwater more than makes good on McMullan’s early promise.
– Gary Kaill
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Silk Work
by Imogen Cassels (Prototype Publishing)
POETRY
One of the hardest and most impressive things for a poem is to arrive with lines that seem always to have existed. Imogen Cassels’ Silk Work is full of those kinds of lines, except they are also strange, unsettling. Little glitching classics. ‘I am glazed with holding myself upright’, ‘thronged off your shoulders with pearls’, ‘spirit is a bone’. Every shock of recognition also disturbs in a way that is not unpleasant. I think this book is one people will return to.
– Hugh Foley
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I Remember
by Joe Brainard (Daunt Books Publishing)
NON-FICTION
In 1970, Joe Brainard published I Remember, a long and paratactic list of everything Brainard happened to recall at a given moment: ‘I remember the pale green tint of Coca-Cola bottles’; ‘I remember 21 inch television screens!’; ‘I remember sexual fantasies of making it with a stranger in the woods.’ This year, it was re-issued by Daunt Books. It’s still startling how often I remember what Brainard does, and moving when he recalls what lies beyond my ken. In these intimate then alien turns, we find a syntax of experience, a collage in search of lost time and a vital archive of queerness in mid-century America. At a time when memory seems a thing of the past, I Remember shows us that attentive remembrance can be a present joy.
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The Empire of Forgetting
by John Burnside (Jonathan Cape)
POETRY
There are few poets who can truly claim the cliché that all their work forms one single poem, but Burnside might be one of them. This posthumous collection returns to all his signature obsessions: the everafter, the creaturely, the felt presence of something not-quite-there. It is poetry attuned to what ‘slithers’ past us, to the moments of ‘light and shadow’ so tiny they might be missed yet as deeply felt as anything we can experience. Burnside’s poems always leave me stunned, in touch again with what it is really like to be alive. His final collection is no different – and though a style so recognisably his own does at times suffer a little from self-impersonation – this is still poetry that makes its quiet effects very loudly indeed.
– Jamie Cameron
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Doctor Criminale
by Malcolm Bradbury (Picador)
FICTION
When Malcolm Bradbury died in November 2000, it was front page news. Now, a quarter of a century later, you’d struggle to find a Bradbury novel in a bookshop or reading list. What a pleasure, then, to see his fifth comic novel Doctor Criminale, originally published in 1992, reissued by Picador alongside his more famous work The History Man (1975) and the Booker-shortlisted Rates of Exchange (1983). Doctor Criminale is an energetic satire of literary journalism and literary theory in the post-postmodern nineties. In 2025 it is a period piece, a relic of a time when we respected intelligence enough to satirise it.
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The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton)
FICTION
It couldn’t be anything but The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny this year. Yes, the sheer length of it infuriated me sometimes. Yes, I often expressed the fear, lugging the tattered blue brick around on holiday, that I may never finish it. But I can’t think of a reading experience more immersive and affecting than this love story which wrenches you between Goa, Vermont, Mexico and New York. I saw Kiran Desai speak at the Southbank in September and was so impressed by her dedication: she’d been writing the thing for twenty years, and missed it. ‘I didn’t even notice the years go by!’ The Booker Prize should have been hers.
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We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
by Colwill Brown (Chatto & Windus)
FICTION
I’d not encountered this book until the Goldsmith Prize readings in November, where I had the pleasure of hearing it read beautifully by the author. I was hooked from the first line, the evocation of a Northern childhood where you don’t yet know you’re ‘Northern’ and where your hometown is simply ‘town’, not measured against anywhere else. Exactly this. And then the language, so overflowing with energy, so driven and driving, all the rhythms and cadences of Northern speech landing and taking off at once on the page. Like many great first novels, it’s oozing life and dripping with the chaos that birthed it.
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Scene: A Memoir
by Abel Ferrara (Simon & Schuster)
NON-FICTION
For decades, Abel Ferrara has directed some of modern cinema’s most revelatory and provocative independent films – Bad Lieutenant, Pasolini, Welcome to New York and Driller Killer, to name a few. His memoir, Scene, is no less exciting. Addiction, sex, religion, organised crime: the story of how Ferrara made his films is thematically of a piece with the films themselves. Scene recounts a wildly intoxicated life – its author claims to have gotten high every single day from age fifteen to sixty-two – from a perspective of committed, Buddha-minded sobriety.
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The City and the House
by Natalia Ginzburg, tr. Dick Davis (Daunt Books Publishing)
FICTION
The latest title in Daunt Books’ handsome paperback series of the author’s work, The City and the House is Ginzburg at her tender, tragic-comic best, affectionately skewering and intimate and real. Unfolding in a sequence of hilarious, heartbreaking letters, the novel charts the lives of a group of friends (and friends of friends) and family, gradually fracturing, drifting apart, noting their minor tragedies and petty grudges, celebrations and disasters. From crumbling meatloaf and cold-blooded murder to dodgy real estate developments and unexpected, doomed affairs, Ginzburg shows us that life is equally made up of everything and nothing much. First published in 1984, The City and the House is human observation at a level matched by very few. The more Ginzburg one reads, the more essential she appears.
– Rowland Bagnall
The Passenger Seat
by Vijay Khurana (Peninsula Press)
FICTION
The most riveting book I read this year was The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana. It follows two teenagers on a road trip across the dense, insect-biting Canadian wilderness, as they murder three people along the way. Loosely based on real-life events (the Northern British Columbia killings in 2019 by Kam McLeod and Bryer Schmegelsky), the book doesn’t give any easy answers about toxic masculinity or violence. Instead, Khurana’s glass-cut, rhythmic sentences plunge you into a world of obsessive friendship and insecurity, a game of one-upmanship that feels eerie in its innocence.
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The Alienation Effect
by Owen Hatherley (Allen Lane)
NON-FICTION
In a survey of artists published in The London Magazine in 1961, Merlyn Evans pronounced that ‘[I]mportant developments abroad in sculpture and painting were usually “discovered” in Britain thirty years later’. The subject of The Alienation Effect is the transformation of this backwardness in British culture through contact with Central European émigrés who introduced us to ‘a more proudly urban, modernist and serious culture’. From the design of Penguin mass paperbacks to a vast number of murals in Anglican churches, it was Central European, often Jewish, refugees fleeing political violence and later fascism who created a visual vernacular that we now recognise to be quintessentially British. In reconsidering Britishness, The Alienation Effect defamiliarises many objects and spaces we take for granted thus allowing us to recognise how ‘the aliens made us all a little alien too’.
– Sruti Basak
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There Is No Antimemetics Division
by qntm (Del Rey)
FICTION
I have a guilty secret: twice a year, I’ll disappear down an internet rabbit-hole, staying up all night eating pizza and exploring the SCP Foundation, an ever-growing collection of sci-fi/horror fiction about a Men in Black-like secret agency. Mostly short stories masquerading as internal reports in dry bureaucratese, often written collaboratively, published anonymously and peer-reviewed by geeks whose pedantry would put Wikipedia’s editors to shame, it’s a rich, strange, wholly original universe. Much of the writing there is dreadful, but the best is superb. That website is where I first read this daft, gripping, ludicrously high-concept pulp novel about a contagious ‘antimeme’ – a hazardous idea that makes people instantly forget it exists – by ‘qntm’. The awful pen-name makes him sound like a failed Ibiza DJ, but don’t let that put you off. Now repackaged in dead-tree format for the normies, and lightly edited to remove any mention of the Foundation (and, alas, the bit where a scientist turns himself into a kind of giant squid), it has been hailed by newspaper critics as one of the year’s most inventive sci-fi novels, but it’s more than that: it’s a window into a vast, addictive, never-ending online story.
Ceilings
by Zuzana Brabcová, tr. Tereza Novická (Twisted Spoon Press)
FICTION
The most interesting, and unusual, book I read this year was Brabcová’s surrealist novel, Ceilings. Flitting between first, second and third person, dreams, memories and reality, we are given a portrait of Ema, a recently-admitted patient at an addiction treatment centre in Prague. With a novel like this, it’s difficult to tell what is a dream, what is reality, what is hallucination or memory, and yet there’s a perverse pleasure in surrendering to this obscurity. Ema is a character who has never quite managed to make her internal and external realities align, and the novel is ultimately concerned with that endeavour: how do we stitch the suture between ourselves and others? What is required of us to make it hold?
– Zadie Loft
Ruth
by Kate Riley (Doubleday)
FICTION
Ruth by Kate Riley follows its titular character through childhood, motherhood and middle age, in a loosely fictional Anabaptist community called the Brotherhood. It was a joy to read about a world as different to mine and as wholly rendered as this one – Riley, who spent time in a similar community, is tenderly anthropological in her approach. Then there is Riley’s sentence-level bravura, often delivering approximately ten truths with one statement. Every once in a while this does get tiring – good! But the real feat of the novel is how it depicts the lifelong tension between belonging and oddity, and the fruitless task of overriding the self.
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Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing
by John Berger (Verso)
NON-FICTION
John Berger’s 1960 debut, Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing, has been republished for the first time. Written throughout his twenties, the book traces a young Berger confronting the decadence of the modern art world. Anticipating his seminal work, Ways of Seeing, Berger embarks upon a democratic form of art criticism that foregrounds the political potential of the aesthetic: ‘The question I ask is: Does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights?’
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