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TThere aren’t many giants of 20th-century literature still writing, but 2025 sees the first novel in 12 years by American great Thomas Pynchon, now in his late 80s: Shadow Ticket (Jonathan Cape) is a quintessential Prohibition-era mystery novel, set against rising Nazism and making sprawling connections with the specter of fascism today. Other elder statesmen publishing this year include Salman Rushdie with The Eleventh Hour (Cape), a hilarious quintet of short stories filled with mortality and his first novel since the 2022 attack that blinded his right eye; While Ian McEwan has also been thinking about endings and legacies in What We Can Know (Kipp), in which a twenty-second century literary scholar looks back, from the other side of the apocalypse, at a cohesive collection of (mostly) fictional literary lions of our time. In a time of climate terror, the novel is both a fascinating struggle over the limits of what humans can care about—from survival, to emotion and poetry, to the enormity of environmental catastrophe—and a poignant love letter to a vanishing past.
But perhaps the most anticipated return this year is another international figure: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose first novel in more than a decade, Number of Dreams (The Fourth Estate), follows the lives of four interconnected women between Nigeria and the United States. Taking into account love, motherhood, and female solidarity, as well as privilege, inequality, and sexual violence, it is a rich, beautifully crafted distillation of the women’s experience.
Two of the year’s biggest novels were – by all accounts – longer to write. Kiran Desai took 20 years to make The Unity of Sonia and Sunny (Hamish Hamilton), the Booker Prize-shortlisted epic that follows two globe-trotting Indians whose meddling families try to bring them together, and then drive them apart. It is a broad canvas that has been meticulously painted. Filled with brilliant natural writing and wistful human comedy, an exploration of where one can find one’s center in a globalized world, and how to write a novel that incorporates both Eastern and Western traditions.
Over the course of two decades, Sarah Hall’s Helm (Faber) – the story of the winds of Cumbria, from the formation of the Earth to the present – is considered a monumental achievement, and I was surprised not to see it on the Booker list. The cast of characters includes not only the mercurial wind itself, but Neolithic shamans, medieval fanatics, Victorian meteorologists, and modern-day scientists, building on the strength of the narrative and the urgency of intervention in the climate crisis.
The Booker Prize winner, David Salai’s “Flesh” (Keep), was a bold but excellent choice: bleak in mood, uncompromising in form and utterly intriguing, putting the primacy of the body front and center as it traces the rise and fall of a man whose inner life remains opaque. Meanwhile, Madeleine Thien’s richly philosophical book of records Granta highlights the lives of the great thinkers of the past through the story of a girl and her father who become stranded in a strangely transformed immigrant hotel. This is a beautifully written interrogation of migration and memory.
For a big, immersive American epic, hugely enjoyable but tinged with melancholy, you can’t do much better than Dream State by Eric Bochner (Scepter). The film begins against the backdrop of glorious Montana with a golden couple preparing for marriage, then unfolds over half a century through complications, children, and existential crises, as the depredations of the climate crisis and our relationship with the natural world increasingly come to the fore.
Another American novelist, Susan Choi, charted a family saga about the geopolitical turmoil of the twentieth century in her riveting book Flashlight (Cape). Its story of a Korean immigrant, his American wife, and his daughter ranges from post-war Japan and North Korea to the suburbs of the United States. With a tragic mystery at its core, it is a masterclass in pitting the prickly privacy of the individual against the currents of history.
Gurnaik Johal followed up excellent short stories with Saraswati (The Tail of the Serpent), a hugely ambitious tale of family history and contemporary politics in a changing India, while he began a caste-based and intimate Tash or quadrilogy about family inheritance: In the South (The Fourth Estate), two boys come of age in modern Malaysia. The family is also the arena for a sharp and unusual study of female ambition, The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha (John Murray). Two friends in patriarchal Delhi grapple with their entitled brethren, where ecological collapse threatens all ways of life, both traditional and modern, in a side-shot of a state-of-the-nation narrative. Meanwhile, in her Booker Prize-shortlisted experiment (Fern), Katie Kitamura uses family and theater as the stage for a slippery investigation into performance and identity: how we construct ourselves in relation to the people around us. Comprising two separate and contrasting narratives, it is a puzzle box of a book that demands immediate re-reading.
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In Gunk (Bloomsbury), set around a run-down Brighton nightclub, Saba Sams puts a new spin on motherhood and the chosen family, with a tale of two women, a baby boy and a real baby; The club scenes are authentically gooey, and the writing about pregnancy and birth is very tender. Another British novel not to be missed is Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper (Vikings), in which a young man gets stuck in a mid-century seaside town, where he searches the beach for prawns like his grandfather before him, where he gets a glimpse of freedom and modernity. Deep and eerie like sea mist rolling in without warning, it’s a visceral charge that resonates long after reading.
I found comic relief in a trilogy of wickedly funny novels. The Pretender by Joe Harkin (Bloomsbury) is a dirty, clever, immersive ragtag thriller about a pretender to Henry VII’s throne you never knew you needed, while Emma Jane Unsworth’s Slags (Borough), in which two middle-aged sisters take an ill-advised caravan holiday through the Scottish Highlands, is essential reading for anyone with a sisterly bond. Rebecca White excels at tragicomedy, and Havok (Riverrun), set at a rundown girls’ boarding school at the height of Cold War paranoia, is St. Trinian’s on steroids.
In Maria Riva’s Ending (Virago), the comic tone suddenly turns darker when a Ukrainian caper hunts endangered species of snails, and the marriage industry is disrupted, in both writing and reading, by a large-scale Russian invasion. Riva handles the formal demands of combining autofiction, road trip, and acerbic reportage with poignancy and good taste. The comedy is also dark in Oisín Fagan’s Eden’s Shore (John Murray), a freewheeling satire on revolution, colonial greed and human folly, in which an 18th-century Irishman finds himself stranded in Latin America: Fagan is shaping up to be one of its most dazzling and daring designers.
This year’s debut was Florence Knapp’s The Names (Phoenix), which carried the Sliding Doors-style high concept — a mother gives her newborn son three different names, and three very different lives unfold for Gordon, Julian and Bear — into a tender portrait of possibility, hope and family love in difficult times. Nasiba Younis’s debut, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, is another success: a brave critique of international aid, which finds great laughs in the story of a fed-up British academic trying to rehabilitate a teenager lured into becoming an Islamic State bride.
Wendy Erskine’s The Benefactors (Scepter), a choral novel about class and power in Belfast that follows the fallout between different families when three boys assault a teenage girl, more than delivers on the promise of her short stories. While Charlie Porter’s feature debut Nova Scotia House (Private Books), in which a bereaved middle-aged man honors the life and legacy of his older partner, and the passing of a generation of gay men, is told with authenticity and courage.
There have been a host of great early works about young people, including Sean Hewitt’s tender story of first gay love, Open, Heaven (Cape); Colwell-Brown’s poignant novel about a disenfranchised 2000s childhood in Doncaster, ‘We’re Pretty Pieces of Flesh’ (Vintage); and Harriet Armstrong’s prickly, very contemporary portrait of awkward college life, For the Comfort of Our Minds and Bodies (Les Fugitives).
Notable short story collections included Rejection by Tony Tulathimut (The Fourth Estate), a series of utterly scathing critiques of modern life as lived and distorted by the digital world. We meet fetishists, “perverts” and social media addicts of all kinds in deeply funny and linguistically inventive stories that are more compelling than doom scrolling. But the group of the year was undoubtedly All Who’s Still Here by the young Northern Irish writer Liddan Ní Chuín (Granta). From the generational trauma of the Troubles to profound questions of memory, identity and the quirks of contemporary society, these stories are intensely political and confrontational, but they also resonate with life’s mysteries. It represents the arrival of a tremendous new talent.
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