Contributors to The Lonely Crowd choose the books they have most enjoyed this year.

John Lavin

 

Twenty years in the making, Sarah Hall’s seventh novel, Helm, is an imaginative tour de force. The Eden Valley, where the author grew up, is dominated by the shrieking Helm (the only named wind in Britain) and Hall personifies the wind to tell the history of her home. It is a daring conceit and let’s be clear, only a writer in possession of Hall’s considerable abilities could pull it off. This she ably – actually, let’s say, astonishingly – does in a novel that is somehow both reminiscent of her other work and yet nevertheless transcendent of it.

I have long held the view that Hall is the best short story writer in the country but I have to confess that I’ve sometimes struggled with her novels, which can occasionally feel almost the opposite of her concise and intimate short fiction. Stripped of the need for brevity, these longer works can sometimes feel over generous and arguably lose some of their potential power as a result. This being the case, I won’t deny that I was a little anxious about approaching Helm. There is something of the grand folly about a 340-page novel told from the point of view of a specific wind, something almost – let’s be frank – a bit prog rock. But while a medieval wizard does make an appearance at one point there are no literary equivalents to the ten-minute guitar solo here. On the contrary, Helm is Hall’s most sparely and beautifully rendered novel to date. Composed of what are essentially several short stories, there is an argument to be made that this is more like a conceptual short story collection rather than a conceptual novel. But then there is also something of the long narrative poem about Helm because it is, in a sense, a work of poetry. Ultimately, these designations don’t matter one iota because this is a work as free-spirited, wild and implacable as the force of nature that it takes its title from.

Helm is about about many things including evolution, the industrial revolution, the courage of women, our relationship with the natural world and, of course, the climate crisis. It is an old-fashioned novel of ideas that speaks directly to this moment. But Helm is really about the landscape Hall loves and grew up in and this is where it’s true power lies. In a recent interview with The Observer, Hall described the Helm wind as being ‘almost like a childhood friend’ and that is something that the reader senses in every page of this bold and poetic book. Helm is a hymn to the Eden Valley and to the idea that nature is a tangible presence. It speaks to the idea that nature is something that you can name and that it can be someone that you can know.

 

Mary O’Donnell

 

FICTION:

Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey is a ‘London’ novel that captures the essence of a love story that doesn’t become sentimental. Highly recommended.

I’d read anything by Clare Keegan, but recommend So Late in the Day, and Tessa Hadley really grabs my attention with most of her longer fiction.

I also enjoyed Seascraper by Benjamin Wood, which was long-listed for the Booker. It introduces us to Tom Flett, a ‘shanker’ or shrimp gatherer who daily trawls the sand at low tide with horse and wagon, risking his life in a job that is simultaneously boring and dangerous. There’s an authenticity to Wood’s voice that I loved, also an unfashionable aspect to his subject which appealed to me, although everything was down to the writing, which is brilliant.

One Boat by Jonathan Buckley also caught my attention and (mostly) held me, taking risks on the question of how much thinking is good thinking or worthwhile in this idyllic Greek setting where ‘Teresa’ explores both the past and the present. I didn’t for one moment feel that Teresa was a true female character, but the nature of the story kept me holding on. This is an interesting novel!

Selma Almada published a crackingly spikey and interesting novel in Not a River, which is about two boys working a river in rural Argentina and the undertone of risk, adventure and violence that surrounds them. Beautiful writing.

I also loved Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais, also about two socially unequal boys, one of them in a high-end housing compound, the other a gardener’s helper in that compound. The writing is horrifying, necessary and brilliant.

Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter was tip-top of my best reads and as an Irish person I found myself marvelling at the abundance of possibility that existed in the United Kingdom during the 1960s. Life during the ‘great snow’ was challenging, but these characters were the product of a State that largely treated them as adults. The writing is beautiful, unstinting, precise, and ought to have won the Booker.

POETRY:

On the poetry front, I despair of the bread loaf production line of new collections not worth the paper they’re printed on, so I tend to stick to anthologies these days. However, great poetry still exists and I’d recommend…

Enda Wyley’s Sudden Light is a meditative, beautiful achievement from a highly achieved poet.
I re-read The Important things by Audrey Molloy.
Quality Control at the Miracle Factory by Patrick Cotter.
Leanne Quinn’s pitch perfect Some Lives.
about: blank by the brilliant and original Adam Wyeth.

 

Eleanor Hooker

 

My standout read this year is Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.

First published in 1987, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. Set in post-civil-war America, Beloved tells the story of a black family of free slaves coping with the traumatic legacy of slavery. The novel demonstrates that freedom is never just that; it is haunted by past horrors, the extreme physical and psychological violence of enslavement, and the trauma of ‘rememory’.

Sethe, the main character was not manumitted. It was her escape from ‘Sweet Home’ and the consequences of recapture for her children that made her kill Beloved, her baby girl. This is the act around which the entire fragmented narrative revolves. Beloved returns, first as a malign spirit that haunts Sethe’s home, and later as a young woman who arrives mysteriously to take up residence, before she is eventually exorcised by the other women in the community.

Morrison drew on the true life of Margaret Garner, a young enslaved woman, who like Sethe, escaped pregnant from her plantation and when trapped, killed her daughter with the intention of killing herself and three other children rather than have them return to a life of slavery.

Never comfortable with her writing being characterised as magic realism, Morrison considered that the ghostings and magic in her writing represented an African-American cultural world view grounded in beliefs and traditions shaped by slavery rather than a literary style.

In an 1987 interview with Gail Caldwell at The Boston Globe, Morrison said she came late to the work of writers such as García Márquez, and unlike these writers whose origins were ‘so readily available to them’, she felt she ‘didn’t have any literary precedent for what I was trying to do with the magic’. Furthermore, whilst readers of Márquez and others ‘understood the sources of their magic right away’, hers were ‘discredited, because it was held by discredited people’.

The scene in which Morrison describes how Paul D and the forty-six other slaves to whom he was chained escape appalling conditions and cruelty in Georgia, to find themselves at the edge of an encampment of sick and displaced Cherokee, is one of quiet devastation. The tribe demonstrate the utmost grace and humanity by feeding the men, unshackling them, tending their wounds, and when they’d recovered their strength showing them the route to safety north. This was done with gestures and kindness, in a language beyond speech.

While the novel is rooted in the African-American experience of slavery, this scene evoked for me the intergenerational memory of another act of solidarity between two oppressed people when in 1847 the Choctaw Nation, though they were suffering displacement from their lands on the Trail of Tears, raised money to send to the starving Irish during the Great Famine.

A core theme explored in the novel is how the past will continue to haunt the present and the future if the trauma of slavery is not addressed. It is ironic that a book that seeks to preserve and interrogate the memory and history of slavery is banned and challenged in some states in the US in an attempt to evade the memory and discomfort of that history.

If you haven’t already, I recommend you read Beloved.

 

Taz Rahman

In collating my personal shortlist of books published this year, I have specifically selected poets and writers who are either Welsh or have a strong Welsh connection. My selection of poetry collections span from the arrestingly wry to the quietly meditative, and employ language that shifts from the incisively pithy to the radiantly lyrical.

Emily Cotterill’s debut poetry collection Significant Wow  swings between playful tributes to the figures and artefacts of 90s and 00s pop culture and incisive reflections on social class, queer experience, and growing up. I was impressed by the balance of unexpected softness and biting wit, and how the poems combine in creating an edgy, street-wise, alternative lens on selfhood.

Gwyneth Lewis’ First Rain in Paradise traces an arc from the crucible of childhood emotional abuse and persistent illness, moving toward a hard-earned renewal. For me, these poems mix the formal with a quiet informal intimacy. Trauma is deciphered in measured candour in a language functioning simultaneously as the site of injury and an instrument of reclamation.

Tracey Rhys’ Bathing on the Roof is a compelling debut recasting the Biblical Bathsheba as an everywoman negotiating the sensual and social intricacies of contemporary life. A second part lends its voice to Flood, an almost mythic celebrity embodying nature’s turbulent reckoning with humankind. I love the language in these poems in the way vivid imagination is finely calibrated to question femininity, power and identity.

Maggie Harris’ I Sing to the Greenhearts is an arresting collection that animates nature, colonial legacy and the diasporic condition through sensuously personified plants and evocative terrains. Holding ecological peril in dynamic tension with ancestral memory, for me, these poems entwine lyricism with finely honed political intelligence and resilience, all the while interrogating the enduring scars of displacement and ecological rupture.

Roberto Pastore’s Graveyards on Other Planets is a striking second collection charting a time of upheaval, violence and sorrow through self-reflective, elegiac poems threaded with sly, unforeseen wit. I love Pastore’s outsider voice that delivers intimate, sharply contemporary revelations remaining firmly rooted in an alluring and otherworldly strangeness.

Deryn Rees-Jones’ Hôtel Amour is a mesmerising, book‑length poem set in Paris, following a woman’s arrival at the eponymous Hôtel Amour. Interlacing memory, desire, illness and the passage of time, it unfolds as a fractured meditation on love and endurance fusing playful surrealism with profound introspection. For me, the collection is a showcasing of formidable poetic mastery.

Two poetry anthologies were surprisingly compelling reads for me this year. The first combines the wry wit of three students at Aberystwyth University from the 1970s: Shared Origins, A Collaboration between Three Poets by Mike Jenkins, David Annwn, David Lloyd. The second, Afonydd, Poems for Welsh Rivers, edited by Sian Northey and Ness Owen is a breathtaking bilingual anthology celebrating the waterways in Wales.

There have been two memorable non-fiction reads for me this year: Peter Finch’s The Literary Business is a witty, intimate guide through six decades of publishing, blending memoir, insight, and sharp observation, and Jon Gower’s Birdland: A Journey Around Britain on the Wing charts the climatic and other changes impacting birds around the British Isles over the last fifty years.

I am completing my shortlist with two deeply moving memoirs and a stunning novel by debut authors. Lottie Williams’ The Edge of Everything and Sophie Calon’s Long Going both start with the death of their fathers and explore the process of healing in language that is at once elegiac and deeply sensorial in the ability to explore the unseen detail in each scene. Anthony Shapland’s A Room Above a Shop is a tender love story exploring the tentative connections between two gay men in 1980s South Wales.

 

The first of my top three fiction picks is Lucy Rose’s The Lamb. This dark fairytale cast its spell over me, with its echoes of Angela Carter and The Brothers Grimm. And while undoubtedly grim, it is also beguilingly tender. Margot and her Mama lure lost ‘strays’ to their cottage at the edge of the woods, then they cook them up for supper. Then newcomer Eden arrives – and she’s different from the others. I so admired the way Margot’s relationship with her mother was portrayed: the sheer intensity of the love, the longing and the regret. It’s a special book.

Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson is a stunning, mosaic-like novel. The story centres around a family heirloom – a pot made by freed slave Moses and passed down through generations of the Freeman family. Ebby Freeman a wealthy African American, is forced to confront the truth of a tragic family event from twenty years earlier, when armed robbers invaded the family home. I first encountered Charmaine’s work through her flash fiction, and that skill is on abundant display in the novel’s short chapters, which read like an intricate patchwork of fragments that, when stitched together, reveal the whole. And, given that the novel is about piecing together broken things, it’s perfect.

My final choice is Love Forms, Claire Adams’ Booker Prize-longlisted novel. This quietly devastating book deserved all the praise. It’s about who gets to make decisions and their lasting impact. Told in the unforgettable, idiosyncratic voice of Dawn, who left Trinidad in 1980, aged 16, to give birth to a baby girl and leaves her with nuns to be given up for adoption. Forty years later, now in England and with two more children and a divorce behind her, Dawn hears from a woman who might be her long-lost daughter. The novel is about family, belonging, and the ache of loss, culminating in a pitch-perfect ending.

 

Penny Simpson

I tried to come up with a Book of the Year but failed. So many good titles have been published this year, simple as. So, more of a lucky dip from the pile of books by my bed, beginning with an author new to me but now firmly on my radar: Rachel Kushner. Creation Lake is a detective novel, which defies easy categorisation thanks to its wonderful narrator, Sadie Smith, a thirty-something American undercover agent who is whip smart, devious, funny, mercurial and well a lot more like that. Kushner writes so well, even what shouldn’t work does. It’s set in a sleepy corner of France where Smith has been sent to surveill a charismatic cult leader called Bruno who heads up a commune of radical activists. To say more, would be to turn this round-up into a big spoiler alert.

I’m a fan of the UK’s independent presses and each year I discover new, inspirational writers through their lists. That’s how I came across the writing of Olga Tokarczuk who’s writing also defies definition but is so worth spending time with. In 2025, Fitzcarraldo Editions published her novel House of Day, House of Night (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones) one of Tokarczuk’s ‘constellation novels.’ It is set in a remote Polish village but evocative of a wider world thanks to its mosaic-like structure of intertwining stories. It’s a novel about history, borders, saints, cosmology and birds, and it’s magical, complicated and thought-provoking. Tokarczuk’s characters are always searching for some kind of order or meaning behind the worlds they exist in but are never truly part of; a point of view which means they possess an uneasy fascination with their place in the world and with others around them. Tokarczuk describes herself as being like an ‘acrobat with words,’ and that’s a perfect description for what she achieves in this novel.

Next up, The Time of Cherries a novel by Catalan writer Montserrat Roig (trans. By Julia Sanches) set in Barcelona in the 1970s. Technically, I’m cheating on the brief again as Roig’s novel was originally published by Daunt Books in 2024, but as I was gifted it this year, I’m sneaking it in because it deserves a wide readership. The Time of Cherries features multiple narrators but opens with the character Natàlia Miralpeix returning home to Barcelona after twelve years abroad. It’s a great opening device to depict a city and family on the cusp of change: Franco’s dictatorship is close to ending and a new generation is discovering the possibilities of a better future. Roig is a brilliant writer, with a keen eye for detail and an evocative setter of scenes including a truly unforgettable account of an X-ratable Tupperware Party! Don’t miss out on that.

Read Part One and Two of our Books of the Year.

Main image by John Lavin.