Books of the Year 2025 / Part One
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd choose the books they have most enjoyed this year. Part Two follows next week.
I was on an extended trip to Australia this year so my reading concentrated on Antipodean writers.
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan is a non-fiction foray into territory already covered in his fiction i.e. the death of his father. But that is just a springboard for a philosophical reflection on the original question 7 posed by Chekhov – who loves longer, men or women? A blend of history, autofiction and memory, Flanagan considers the big questions of love, time and what will survive of us. Absolutely compelling.
Murray Bail’s most famous novel is Eucalyptus, winner of the Miles Franklyn Award and Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1999, but I started with The Voyage, a distinctly non-linear novella that reads like it’s set in Henry James’s world but is actually contemporary.
It’s the story of an eccentric Australian entrepreneur Frank Delage who has invented a new kind of piano and comes to a distinctly old world Europe to try to flog the prototype. The voyage in question is his defeated return to Australia on a container ship but with the enigmatic comfort of a new wife. Bail moves back and forward in the action of the novel – on board ship, then Vienna, then Frank’s childhood – with no authorial flagging so it’s a very slippery read time-wise.
That timelessness also applies to Bail’s memoir He. (note the full stop in the title – he’s declared this is his last book.) Written in the third person, it reads like an extended poem, a compendium of images, memories and aphorisms very loosely bound together. Like The Voyage, it’s non-linear, slipping from one era of his life to another without warning, but after a while you surrender to the sheer beauty of the prose and go with this slim diaristic memoir which mimics the wayward pathways of memory and asks why do we remember what we do?
Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional was shortlisted for the Booker last year. It’s a confronting depiction of a religious community of women that asks the question – what does it mean to be good. Wood’s novels vary hugely – for something much more upbeat, try The Weekend and you won’t believe they were authored by the same person. And to prove her versatility, her volume on writing, The Luminous Solution, is also a joy. Woods can write about anything. Her voice is forthright, her prose arresting.
And lastly an Irish novel, Youth, by Kevin Curran set in Balbriggan a small town north of Dublin, about four teenagers, two black, two white trying to make their way in the world. It’s written in a wonderful patois, a mix of Hiberno-English, rap talk, and East End slang. Effervescent, energetic and strangely hopeful despite the dispiriting circumstances of its characters, Curran’s novel is a gem.
First; a confession, I can’t read Laura Cumming’s work without a sense of awe bordering on jealousy. The first I read was On Chapel Sands: My Mother and other Missing Persons. I had bought the book for all the wrong reasons but loved it and its author for all the right ones. Laura Cumming is an art critic for the Observer. The daughter of two artists, Cumming breathes in images like oxygen – or perhaps like one of the noble gases; neon or xenon, and breathes out the most exquisite writing. Here she is describing a painting by Brueghel:
For no matter how strange those shoes, with their clodhopping toes; no matter how odd the pleats of the ploughman’s tunic or the plump knickerbockers of the shepherd staring gormlessly up at the heavens, this is a world we know (at least as far as the stately galleons); a northern landscape through which you or I might clamber even now.
Perhaps precisely because she includes ‘us’ in that paragraph it alerts the reader to oddness, ugliness as much as beauty. But hold on, isn’t this book a memoir? Did she forget? No, of course not, the story she tells, is of the five-day disappearance of her mother from an afternoon at a Lincolnshire beach in 1929. It would ruin the book if I told you more than that.
In a similar fashion Cumming’s The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez is not a simple tale about the great Spanish painter, though it is evidently that, but rather about the fate of a rather humble bookseller from Reading who somehow (how very dare he!) managed, in 1845, to buy a forgotten Velázquez from a country house auction. The painting in question was a portrait of Charles the First. Dimmed by years of fire smoke and swallowed by years of revarnishing, after cleaning it and doing some extensive research John Snare was convinced that what he possessed was a long-lost picture produced in Madrid while the young prince was visiting the Spanish court. Cumming unfolds both stories; that of Charles as a young man journeying in Europe and of Diego Velázquez’ life and work. As Cumming writes in regard to a self-portrait by the artist, he is ’the tall, dark figure behind the canvas, his brush held high like the wand with which he has magically summoned everything and everybody in Las Meninas.’
Cumming’s A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits is more properly an ‘art book’ being large format, filled with reproductions of self-portrait paintings of artists from cover star Albrecht Durer through Frida Kahlo and Rembrandt to naked Lucien Freud. Here Cumming is interested in the why as much as the how or indeed the end product. She takes a psychological approach to her artists, bringing a sort of familiarity to the work,
Caravaggio had been left for dead in a dark Neapolitan alley, wounded almost beyond recognition. Perhaps the memory of what he saw in the mirror is there in that damaged face; Caravaggio taking an old tradition … and giving it a violent reality, with the added admission of his own guilt.
Cumming draws her readers in, she invites us to look, then look again, she navigates and interrogates and explains pictures. My last pick illustrates perfectly Cumming’s embrace of art tinged with tragedy, Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death where she brings to life several painters of the Dutch golden age, notably Carel Fabritius, whose painting is the star of Donna Tartt’s novel ‘The Goldfinch’ and whose life, career and possibly many of his works, were destroyed in an instant when a warehouse storing gunpowder exploded nearby.
I was fortunate enough to be an early reader of The House of Water written by the award-wining novelist and screen-writer, Fflur Dafydd. It comes to me as no surprise that since its publication earlier this year it has (and excuse the pun) received floods of praise for its originality and quality of storytelling. In the creation of this gripping, psychological thriller of breadth and depth, Dafydd has proved to her readership that she is a captivating literary talent.
This is no ordinary thriller. As Dafydd tells the reader in the first sentence: ‘Placing that key in the lock was the last moment of her (Iona Griffri) life.’ Iona returns home to find her family murdered, her father missing, and a strange unnamed girl dead in her bed. The reader is presented with a whodunit and a whydunit, but so much more. The novel is deeply layered, exploring identity, belonging (to family, to country, to language, to culture), climate change, mental health issues, through this family saga set in the fictional town of Pont Sulyn, a town in the grip of a devastating flood in the widest sense.
The novel has an innovative structure: Iona and morgue attendant, Cain, driving the unfolding narrative following the initial discovery of the bodies and the search for the main suspect (Eurov, Iona’ father); with flashbacks, counting down from twenty-four days before the murders, told through the perspectives of Lisa (Eurov’s wife) and Urien (Iona’s brother). Interspersed with the revelations revealed, page by thrilling page, are extracts from the ‘Encyclopaedia of ‘Cymru’ The Country also known, erroneously as Wales, as experienced by Eurov Griffri.’
Employing this framework, allows Dafydd to show herself as a writer with many voices: personal and political. Here is a writer who is proudly Welsh (and not afraid commercially to set her writing in Wales) and is inviting her wider readership to engage with what that means. As her character, Cain says:
And perhaps that’s just what this small country was all about: submersion, drowning, being unable to keep our heads above water…
Here is a writer who also showcases the evidence of her successful career in screen-writing to seep onto the page, creating a fast-flowing cinematic experience. In all this there is also humour, and sympathy and empathy in oodles.
To mark the publication of The House of Water in paperback, Jane Fraser will be in conversation with Fflur Dafydd at the Tabernacle Chapel, Mumbles, Swansea.on 25/02/26 at 18.30pm. This event is organised by Cultural Institute Swansea University in conjunction with Cover to Cover bookshop. Tickets are free but you will need to register here.
Much of my reading comes by personal recommendation, or from reviews in The London Review of Books, to which I subscribe and which I read from cover to cover. On the flight back from Paris in October there was a piece on Kate Kennedy’s Cello – A Journey through Silence to Sound. (Head of Zeus, £10.99.) I immediately ordered a copy when I got home.
This is a remarkable book by a remarkable woman. Copies will be gifted to friends this Christmas. Kate Kennedy had several important positions at Oxford and is a frequent broadcaster. She also plays the cello. This book follows the often obscure or apparently lost journeys of four cellos and their owners – one is dropped into the Amazon, one’s owner vanished on a tour of Siberia, one was murdered in Auschwitz, one was played in the women’s orchestra in Auschwitz and its cellist survived. These stories are astonishing and the survival of them as narratives, together with the hunt for the actual cellos is compelling.
As much as any novel read this year, and more than almost all poetry read this year, Cello has engaged and inspired me. I owe as much to wider reading for my own poetry as to reading the work of other poets. The title poem of my last collection, Leaving the Hills, was taken from a review of a book on Aldous Huxley in California in the Sixties and his near-death in the Bel Air Wildfire. That LRB again.
Of course, there’s a new poem:
…This ‘cello is made of snow and tears, salt and hail, wolf and bear.
Whomsoever the Stradivari passes on to,
All the players who shall follow me and those who made way for me,
As they play, through their hands shall pass from this magical body
All the stories we have and those we are yet to hear…
It’s always good to have a piece of writing that will stretch from the old year to the new. Happy holiday to all our readers.
This year I consumed mostly nonfiction as opposed to my usual penchant for poetry and fiction. Robert Macfarlane’s highly anticipated Is a River Alive? deserves all its accolades. Written with his signature jewel-like prose, Macfarlane traces the titular question over the course of three visits to rivers in Ecuador, India, and the First Nations territories of what is now Canada. It is both nature writing and social treatise, blending science and myth together with his quest to experience first-hand the ‘aliveness’ of these rivers. He thinks in terms of legal rights, arguing that if we recognised the animacy of rivers and forests again, then we could protect them from destruction – and, perhaps most significantly, protect the world from ourselves. While Macfarlane’s subject matter is couched as a radical proposition, I’d urge readers to recognise that this has always been an unquestionable reality for many Indigenous peoples. This said, Is a River Alive? is a remarkable book of emotional depth and spiritual complexity, with strong ethics and politics.
Also, I must mention Anelise Chen’s memoir, Clam Down: A Metamorphosis. I love surrealist writing, and in this witty and moving book, Chen is transformed into a clam post-divorce when her mother sends her a text with the typo: ‘clam down’. This sends Chen on a journey to explore her family’s own inability to emotionally open up.
In fiction, I gravitate towards the short story. Perhaps this is because I’ve spent half my life living in southern Mexico, where short fiction is highly prized and commands the same respect and prestige as the novel. My favourite for 2025 is Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn, a young writer from the North of Ireland. Their prose is propulsive, the stories brave excavations of loss and the ways trauma lives on in our bodies, minds, and landscapes. It is easy to see that Ní Chuinn possesses a searing intellect and talent for deep psychological studies of the human condition. Several stories actually moved me to the point of tears, particularly the opening, ‘We All Go.’ My favourite, however, was ‘Russia’, a profound meditation on kinship and alienation as well as colonial dispossession. I appreciated the dark sense of humour laced throughout. It is the kind of collection that one can write an entire doctoral thesis on.
On the poetry front, I read six collections this year. Two of them were re-readings: W.S. Merwin’s 1988 collection, The Rain in the Trees, and Joy Harjo’s Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. But Sam Furlong’s debut poetry collection, Crowd Work, is my pick for must-read. It’s an intimate and frank study of transfiguration, how bodies are made, inhabited, and broken. As a poetry of becoming, I cannot help but look forward to seeing what Furlong turns to next.
I tend to spend most of my reading time each year absorbing new work by poets and short story writers in current magazines or journals, in print and online. A lot of the novels I read tend to be older – books I’d always meant to read or had recommended to me by other people. This year my novel highlight was Penelope Lively’s 1987 Booker Prize winner Moon Tiger. It’s an almost perfect novel. Among other very satisfying novels I read this year were Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952) and Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (2024). I also thoroughly enjoyed re-reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) in its centenary year.
In poetry this year I enjoyed the Collected Poems of Eavan Boland and Louise Gluck as well as John Burnside’s Selected Poems. New poetry collections that stood out for me were: Tidal by Karen J. McDonnell (Doire Press), Storm Damage by Catherine Ann Cullen (Dedalus Press), Hymn To All The Restless Girls by Annmarie Ní Churreáin (Gallery Press), Brink by Cian Ferriter (Dedalus Press) and also Mark Ward’s wonderful chapbook Masters (The Emma Press). Of special note was Lynda Tavakoli’s important sequence Unbroken: The Gaza Poems published online by Live Encounters Poetry.
This year The Stony Thursday Book in Limerick published its 50th anniversary edition and it’s packed with wonderful work. 14 Magazine continues to publish an annual selection of 14 line gems. Now in its second life under the stewardship of Richard Skinner and in Series Two, Issue Six this year it continues to publish new writers alongside some of the bigger names in the UK poetry scene. And finally a special mention for Poetry Bus, edited by Collette and Peadar O’Donoghue, who once again in the PB12 issue this year have produced one of the most interesting poetry journals around.
See our website next week for more Books of the Year.
Main photo by John Lavin.