The Best Books of 2025

Irish Fiction

The Ghosts Of Rome
Joseph O’Connor
(Harvill Secker)
Round two of the Rome Escape Line trilogy – that there won’t be one in 2026 means the whole year is already a dead loss – shows O’Connor’s mastery of the literary thriller. There’s poetry inspired by Urbs Aeterna and plenty of action to go with it, kicking off with an airman falling towards the Nazi-occupied city before the chase, while “bullets spit at his back”, begins. O’Connor’s reimagined adventures of our man in the Vatican, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, will hit a screen at some point but don’t wait.

Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way
Elaine Feeney
(Harvill Secker)
A funny account of a social media-influenced woman trying to find love after moving back from London to the west and, as the past leaks into the present, a moving examination of female roles in Irish society now and then. The concerns of the present placed in sharp relief against events years earlier, when “laughing without caution” was a luxury. It’s also a meditation on grief and, as generational wounds are reopened, asks how much can be explained, but not excused, by residual trauma.

Venetian Vespers
John Banville
(Faber)
As great as Banville’s more serious work is, and there’s no denying that you need to be up early to get the most out of the likes of The Singularities, his Quirke thrillers are an entertaining joy. Good news then with this turn of the 20th century trip to the floating city, as it’s a literary work that rattles along at a delightful clip, helped immensely by its central character, hack writer Evelyn Dolman, being an awful prat who should have spotted the comeuppance headed towards him a mile off.

The Benefactors
Wendy Erskine
(Sceptre)
Anyone familiar with Erskine’s shorter fiction – seek out 2022’s Dance Move straight away if you’re not – knew this debut novel would be good but perhaps not this good. It centres around the sexual assault of Misty by three teenage boys, but it’s the way Erskine tells it that floors you. To call it polyphonic would diminish the size of a cast that David Lean might have thought excessive, although each voice is crucial, especially Misty’s good-hearted adoptive da Boogie, her car crash of a ma Leigh, and her gas altogether granny.

Nesting
Roisín O’Donnell
(Scribner)
A worthy Irish Book Awards Novel Of The Year winner about Ciara, a pregnant mother of two fleeing abuse. While this topic has been tackled before, what was new to this reader at least was the way it examines a broken support system for such cases, where temporary accommodation stretches into permanence, and questions how emotional abuse can somehow be seen as less ‘worthy’ than the physical kind. The bastardness of husband Ryan, who blocks passports and promises the moon, and the way Ciara doubts herself when she shouldn’t, seem painfully realistic.

Also Recommended: The Bureau - Eoin McNamee, The Boy From The Sea – Garrett Carr, Paradise House – Paul Perry, Injury Time – Kevin Smith

Irish Non-Fiction

The Dublin Pub
Donal Fallon
(New Island)
If the prohibitive price of the pint has you stuck, then why not go on a page-based pub crawl with Fallon, he of the excellent Three Castles Burning podcast? This takes in all the glorious boozers, past and present, of the capital and relates the lore behind them, from why they’re so named to the characters who frequented them. Everyone from Con Houlihan to Elizabeth Taylor feature and any book that stops into Kilmainham’s Old Royal Oak, “a piece of the country in the heart of the city”, is fine by me.

Great Irish Wives
Nicola Pierce
(O’Brien Press)
While history may not be as dominated by ‘great men’ as it appears, the recounting of it certainly is, which is why a book like this matters. Pierce gives ten Irish wives who stood beside their husbands as often as they did behind their deserved due. To offer just one example, you may have been aware that Matilda Tone blocked Napoleon’s carriage to petition for her only surviving child, but I wasn’t and I’ve a history degree. That don’t teach you this stuff, or at least they didn’t, but they should have.

Pure Gold
Eamon Carr
(Merrion Press)
While he’ll always be best known as the ideas man behind Horslips’ drum kit, Carr had an equally remarkable second career as a journalist. 2023’s Showbusiness With Blood chronicled his ringside role in Irish pugilism’s golden age, and this collects his Evening Herald interviews from a time where things were done differently. He sits across an often well-stocked table from Brenda Fricker, Sex Pistols defender and Rumpole writer John Mortimer, Jack Charlton, and even Eartha Kitt, but saves his best work for an encounter with ballet behemoth Rudolf Nureyev.

Charlie Vs Garret
Eoin O’Malley
(Eriu)
I remember how omnipresent Charlie Haughey and Garret Fitzgerald were back in the day, and even to a child, it was obvious there was no love lost. Utilising interviews with anyone who ever ran into them and the two men themselves, Dr Eoin – who happens to be Dessie O’Malley’s son, which is another can of worms altogether – offers a fair assessment in that he has a go at both, branding Fitzgerald an “intellectual snob” and Haughey, the chancer’s chancer, as the man who turned “crony capitalism” into a fine art.

The Poems Of Seamus Heaney
(Faber)
Is poetry strictly non-fiction? Well, it is now, because we couldn’t leave this out. Following on from 2022’s equally desirable Translations, this gathers all Heaney’s deservedly Noble-snaring couplets in one shelf-improving compendium. Charting his poetical progress from 1966’s Death Of A Naturalist to 2010’s The Human Chain, it also includes the outtakes, the poems that didn’t make it for one reason or another but which were often recycled into finer finished forms. R.F. Foster recently called Heaney’s work “indisputably miraculous” and there’s no arguing with that.

Also Recommended: Not Making Hay – Frank McNally, The Bass Player – Stephen Travers, Deadly Silence – Jacqueline Connolly & Kathryn Rogers

International Fiction

What We Can Know
Ian McEwan
(Jonathan Cape)
One hundred years from now, after a Russian nuke accidentally explodes, much of Europe is underwater thanks to a tsunami, with Ireland presumably gone the way of Atlantis. What’s left of the internet broadcasts out of Nigeria in a very changed world. An academic on England’s remaining archipelago searches for a lost poem from our time, allowing McEwan to comment on both today and what he reckons will come next. The second part of the book, narrated in a female voice, is some of the best prose I’ve read all year.

Flesh
David Szalay
(Jonathan Cape)
This year’s Booker winner concerns István, a protagonist – although that’s almost certainly the wrong word for a man more buffeted than buffeting – who goes through life from his teens to his middle age in a curiously detached manner. He has an affair, joins the army, moves from Hungry to London and ascends through society, but as he does so, it dawns on you that perhaps this is as good a way as any to go about things. What do the rest of us really get for wrestling with the vicissitudes?

The Loneliness Of Sonia and Sunny
Kiran Desai
(Hamish Hamilton)
Doorstop of the year, this was apparently 20 years in the making, but it’s all up there on the screen. Sonia is recovering from a relationship with an older and not very nice man. Sunny is a bit lost in America, until 9/11 sadly makes all South Asians painfully visible. As in real life, stones are thrown in true love’s path, but the joy of a novel of this size is the time given over to everyone from hairy-legged aunts to bonking pigeons. Place your phone in a drawer before opening.

Universality
Natasha Brown
(Faber)
There’s a lockdown anarchist rave at a farmhouse, where someone gets battered by a gold bar that was left lying around by an asshat of a banker. Around this Brown builds a state-of-the-English-nation satire, which begins with a long article about the incident that goes viral, allowing an elbow to be jabbed into where most journalism is now. But this is not the only well-aimed dig thrown here, as the rhetoric of anti-woke columnist ‘Lenny’, and the painful middle-class dinner party that would ruin anyone’s appetite, provide more very worthy targets.

Flashlight
Susan Choi
(Jonathan Cape)
A father, Serk, and his young daughter go for a walk. They don’t come back, although the girl is eventually found. The father, it’s presumed, has been washed out to sea and so begins a novel that spans decades, as Serk moves from Korea to Japan and then to America. Across an epic canvas, Choi paints an impressive account of pain and identity, which also takes in the political history of the period, pointing the sternest finger at North Korea. There’s a good twist too, but I can’t be telling you about that.

Also Recommended: The Predicament – William Boyd, The Names – Florence Knapp, The Pretender – Jo Harkin

International Non Fiction

The Thinking Machine
Stephen Witt
(The Bodley Head)
AI will inevitably enslave us all and Witt’s biography of Jensen Huang, the man behind Nvidia who provide the chips that sparked the revolution, serves as a history of our demise. Nvidia’s gaming GeForce chips made parallel computing – speeding things up using multiple processors to simultaneously execute calculations – possible and away we sailed towards the abyss. Huang displays no self-doubt. “There’s nothing there,” he says of possible AI engendered human obsolescence. “It’s no different than how microwaves work. All it’s doing is processing data.” Yeah, but the microwave isn’t after my job.

The Gods Of New York
Jonathan Mahler
(Hutchinson Heinemann)
This has been called “a real-life Bonfire Of The Vanities”, but it’s even more than that, as Mahler chronicles the Big Apple of the 1980s, when the city recovered from its financial nadir and Wall Street’s boom carried it towards its future. Familiar figures from Spike Lee to Antony Fanucci feature, but readers will be fascinated by the rise of Donald Trump and the arm-chancing he would become famous for. Reagan’s money-as-manna ‘80s were tailor-made for the chicanery of this thoroughly unlikeable fellow.

The Boundless Deep
Richard Holmes
(William Collins)
Holmes’ 2008 book The Age Of Wonder illustrated how the romantics faced the advances in science of their age. Alfred Lord Tennyson was mentioned in passing, as was his poem ‘The Kraken’, which forms the jumping off point for this masterful biography, concentrating on the younger Tennyson rather than the famous poet laureate of The Charge Of The Light Brigade. The young poet is a proto rock star in his cloak and hat, troubled by an existential dread brought on by the Darwinian repositioning of man’s place in the universe.

The Genius Myth
Helen Lewis
(Jonathan Cape)
Lewis takes a swipe at the notion of genius which is fair game as it’s a term – along with ‘legend’ – that’s bestowed on every indie chancer who masters a fourth chord these days. Her debunking stretches from the distinctly dodgy ‘science’ of Francis Galton to the “assholeness” of Steve Jobs and the if I can build a spaceship I can run the government (well, it’s not rocket science) hubris of Elon Musk. After examining several archetypes – and offering a worthwhile take on The Beatles – Lewis’s conclusion is that the term is better employed when describing the art rather than the artist, which is as it should be.

The Illegals
Shaun Walker
(Profile Books)
A history of Russian illegals – secret agents rather than embassy employees – and also a potted history of communist rule, Walker’s thrilling book tells the stories of sleepers like ‘Don and Ann Foley’ getting turfed out of America, the wild adventures of chameleon Dmitri Bystrolyotov, and Putin’s rise. Ireland features too thanks to Yuri Linov, sent to Dublin to “scout for interesting contacts” in the mid-1960s. Posing as a door-to-door salesman, he had an unusual problem for a spy, in that he couldn’t get people to shut up.

Also Recommended: The Big Hop – David Rooney, The North Pole - Erling Kagge, The Traitors Circle – Jonathan Freedland

Music

Wings: The Story Of A Band On The Run
Paul McCartney
(Allen Lane)
An oral history of what Paul did next after his first band broke up, this details every step he took during the ’70s, from his wound-licking retreat to Scotland, to his sojourn with the Japanese authorities for foolishly trying to import a half pound of grass in his suitcase. As Macca’s is the main voice, he sometimes makes excuses for shoddy work, although Wings did make some great records. Linda McCartney is equally impressive, a strong-willed woman determined to do what she wanted despite taking more flak than the RAF.

1975: The Year The World Forgot
Dylan Jones
(Constable)
Jones, an astute commentator, quite rightly scoffs at punk’s year zero nonsense by convincingly claiming 1975 as a musical high point. In between asides on everything from Quentin Crisp to Fawlty Towers, he picks the platters that matter from his annus mirabilis. Born To Run and Horses are obvious nods, but there’s also room for Curtis Mayfield, NEU!, Keith Jarrett and even, Janey Mac, Return To Forever. Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing Of Summer Lawns isn’t better than Hejira, and Young Americans is nowhere near Bowie’s best, but arguing is half the sport.

The Colonel And The King
Peter Guralnick
(White Rabbit)
Elvis nuts, like me, have always seen Colonel Tom Parker as the villain of the piece, as Peter Guralnick admits he did before he started investigating. Completing his brilliant Presley trilogy, he rescues Parker from the stocks and confirms him as kingmaker. His early life is the stuff of a Mark Twain novel, and once he met his charge, he devoted himself to their shared cause. Did he make a few bob? Did he like a flutter? Were there questionable moves? Sure, but overall, Elvis was lucky to have him in his corner.

Truly
Lionel Richie
(William Collins)
This was unexpected, although it shouldn’t have been. Even the most cloth-eared hipster would have to admit that Lionel knows how to write a tune, but here he proves himself just as adept at spinning a yarn. Everything from The Commodores’ rise to USA For Africa is related with humour and warmth and, no, he didn’t think the bust in the Hello video looked like him either. Truly doesn’t avoid brushes with racism and personal struggles, but it seems a good guy who knows he’s been blessed actually won for a change.

Prince: A Sign O’ The Times
John McKie
(Blink Publishing)
The further we get away from Prince’s untimely demise, the more we realise just how spectacularly awesome he really was, and if you were forced at gunpoint to pick one record as evidence, the answer would always be 1987’s double masterpiece Sign O’ The Times. This is the exhaustive, but never exhausting, tribute it deserves. McVie deserves a PhD for the digging done, with hundreds of interviews and revelations about the actual man himself, as well as the album’s minutiae. Shut Up Already, Damn!

Also Recommended: Living In The Present With John Prine – Tom Piazza, Insomnia – Robbie Robertson, Bread Of Angels – Patti Smith