The ultimate guide to the best books of 2025 – as chosen by Big Issue critics

While Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief and Birdsong by Michael Symmons Roberts has been crowned Big Issue’s book of the year 2025, our critics have plenty more recommendations to keep you going

Billie Walker 

None of us would like to admit it but for most, our daily screen time far surpasses time spent reading novels. It is monumentally impressive when a book manages to capture our attention by evoking curated algorithms while offering the addictive quality of scrolling. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (translated by Sophie Hughes, Fitzcarraldo, £12.99) does just this. But the book is more than just a mimicry of social media, it encapsulates the aesthetics we have deluded ourselves are uniquely ours. It centres on a graphic design couple who believe their decision to move to Berlin and Airbnb their apartment, while trotting across Europe, makes them tastemakers. As biting as the narrative is about those fastidiously participating in global gentrification, there is a great loss at its core; one of the culture differences being glossed over by rampant sheen. 

Annie Hayter 

Eloghosa Osunde’s Necessary Fiction (HarperCollins, £16.99) is a delicious novel – a fever dream in barefaced brilliance, singing to the gays, theys and those who shimmer with desire. 

Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, edited by Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro (Verso, £12.99), is a devastating anthology that documents the catastrophic reality and past that Palestinians inhabit. Through astonishing poetry, scholarship, reportage and essays, this searing collection remembers dead martyrs, forges resistance and remains steadfast in its defiant hope for Palestine’s future. Ultimately, as journalist Yara Eid affirms, “despite the occupier’s best efforts, love endures among the Palestinian people”.

In Arundhati Roy’s mesmerising memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (Penguin £20), Roy honours the strange marvel that was her mother – the courageous but ruthless Mrs Roy – and acknowledges what it took to survive her. 

Patrick Maxwell 

Colm Tóibín wrote the short story A Long Winter a long time ago, in 2005, and has republished it as a standalone (Pan Macmillan, £12.99). It is a beautifully written and heartrending book, set in the Catalonian foothills of the Pyrenees. Tóibín does something special with the narrative voice: it’s in the third person, but we’re always in the  mind of Miguel, our central character. At the start, his mother disappears. Miguel thinks she has died in an attempt to return to the village of her birth. That attempt stands as an extended metaphor for the stunning variety of themes raised in Tóibín’s lucid and momentous prose. Although we’re in a world of pain, that pain is not unrelenting. A whole world is here in the confines of Miguel’s response to a family tragedy; the tension between Miguel and the new farmhand Manola is only one case in point. The aspirations and despair of Miguel are just as captivating as they are sorrowful. This is a wonderful novella.  

Doug Johnstone 

Two very different books have really stayed with me this year, both packing an incredible punch. I read Omar El Akkad’s One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Canongate, £16.99) with increasing rage as it detailed the ongoing genocide in Gaza, focusing on the complicity of western leaders and the media in gaslighting ordinary people about the unbearable daily atrocities. Written with hope and fury in equal measure, it’s incredible. 

In comparison, Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico is more measured, a novella examining the existential crisis of modern living in pinpoint prose and dry wit. Tom and Anna are millennial ‘digital nomads’ living in Berlin and struggling to find meaning in their performative, empty lives. Shimmering with despair, it’s bleakly hilarious and quietly profound. 

Barry Pierce 

Given its fairly high-concept premise and the proposed length of the project, it was remarkable to see Solvej Balle’s novel series, On the Calculation of Volume (Faber & Faber, £12.99 each) embraced so wholeheartedly by the reading public this year. Reading about the same day over and over again is a hard sell (as a part-time bookseller, believe me!) but Balle completely enthralls us with her masterful control over the planned seven-volume cycle. With the release of Volume III just last month, it’s slowly becoming clear how Tara Selter’s story will unfold. This is very much one novel, told in seven parts. Volume IV is slated for next spring and it’s easily my most anticipated release of the season.” 

Read more:

• From rowdy forest animals to wig-loving goths: These are the best children’s books of 2025
• We’re Going on a Bear Hunt creators reunite to tell new, exclusive Christmas tale for Big Issue
• The ultimate guide to the best books of 2024 – as chosen by Big Issue critics

Big Issue recommends

The Hour of The Predator by Giuliano Da Empoli

Dark, chilling deep dive into the tech bros really running the world. Essential. 

Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck

A collection of the celebrated German writer’s newspaper columns, on memory and what remains. 

Flesh by David Szalay

Booker prize-winning, remarkable, lean, picaresque tale of the impulsive life of Hungarian István. 

A Quiet Place by Seicho Matsumoto

Latest in series of translations from the Japanese great, this one driven by jealousy and quiet obsession. 

The Death of Stalin by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Smart, flinty and detailed telling of the period around Stalin’s death and the aftermath. 

Fall, Bomb, Fall by Gerrit Kouwenaar

Reissue of a funny and at times heartbreaking European classic coming-of-age tale, set right at the outbreak of WWII. 

Twist by Colum McCann 

Irish master delivers a tale that begins around cables at the bottom of the sea, then takes off. 

Ghost Wedding by David Park

Beautiful, layered twin-time story on class and regret in Belfast, a city always haunted by the past. 

The Predicament by William Boyd

Second instalment of Gabriel Dax series, this one set against the JFK assassination. A new spy classic collection in the making. 

Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood

Wilderness childhood to global recognition and influence. The Handmaid’s Tale author’s long-awaited, revealing autobiography (of sorts). 

The Sound of Utopia by Michel Krielaars

Inside the fear, and absurdity, musicians faced trying to create in the Stalin years. Eye-opening and revelatory.  

A Life in Letters by John Updike

Dizzyingly great collection, from undergraduate to world-striding voice, of the loves and deep interests of an American titan. Such writing! 

Revenge of Odessa by Frederick Forsyth, with Tony Kent

Crackling page-turner and the final book by Forsyth, revisiting his classic Odessa File hunting re-emerging Nazis in contemporary Germany. 

The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis

Like Revolution in the Head for the Nobel Prize-winner, and arguably greatest poet in the English language of the last 60 years. Vast and complete. 

The best thing I read: readers pick their favourites

Colony by Annika Norlin is an ensemble cast story of a group of misfits living on the edge of a Swedish forest, trying to avoid society. It is wry and funny with some great social commentary on modern life versus a return to nature. Then it starts to highlight the dangerous and intoxicating power of charisma within the group, and in a way becomes a small-scale reflection of our political age. @wixey

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty takes the tropes of a murder mystery, and then messes about with them, ending up somewhere more soulful than you might have ever expected. Cosy? No. Full of cleverness and compassion? Yes. @BetaRish

Pereira Maintains: A Testimony by Antonio Tabucchi A short book that could be read in an afternoon, it’s a subtle, very clever tale that’s ostensibly about a few weeks in the life of Pereira, a newspaper editor in 1930s Lisbon. Half the book is about his daily routines and liking for lemonade, but in reality it’s about his political and moral awakening as he realises he can’t ignore what’s happening in his country any longer. Very readable yet very profound, and scarily relevant. @swintonwriter

The Friendship Fling by Georgia Stone is the easiest five stars I’ve given in a long time. It’s fresh, hilarious and packed full of chemistry between the main pairing. The bucket list plot built is well developed and doesn’t feel like a simple aside to the romance, and the side characters are just as built up as Ava and Finn. It’s a really refreshing way to do romance. Perfect for fans of Talia Hibbert or Sarah Adams. @Charliclement

We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown I knew I’d enjoy this book, but I didn’t expect it to absolutely floor me, especially for a debut. The Yorkshire dialect gives it a vivid, lived-in authenticity and once you settle into it, the story hits hard. Raw, gritty and tender in equal measure, it captures ’90s girlhood, the diet culture, whispered rumours, pressure to fit in – all of it. A powerful, poetic look at class and coming of age that’s stayed with me long after finishing. @kiki.reads.stuff

The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery A perfect locked-room murder-mystery set in  Edwardian England with the most unlikely duo combining to find out who done it: Stephen the new valet who is under suspicion, and the grand dame of the house – who has the best lines and is incredibly sweary! Love it. @aliruthpalmer

My Friends by Fredrik Backman This is a story with incredible humanity and understanding of those who don’t necessarily conform to societal expectations. It’s a narrative that is packed with humour and emotion so that the reader both cries and laughs. @ljh50hill

These books are available to buy from the Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support the Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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