Year in Review: Favourite books of 2025

In my introduction to my Honourable Mentions, I already shared that 2025 has been a somewhat unfortunate year for me. This unintentionally had an impact on my reading as well, and you might see this reflected in some of the recurring themes throughout the books on this list. In a strange way, these favourites lists are a bit like journal-entries, reflecting a little snap-shot of my overall mood of a year. There’s something beautiful in that, and it’s why I personally love looking back at these years down the line.

Unlike my Worst and Most Disappointing list, this is ranked and I will take you through my 10 best reads of 2025 in order, building up towards my absolute favourite.

10. Beings by Ilana Masad 

 “There was nothing, really, that could stop life from continuing on, except for its opposite, and even then, it went on for everyone else.”

In the number 10 spot is a book that took me by complete surprise, and it might just be the most underrated book on this list. It also requires a little personal background, in order for me to explain why this made such an impact on me.  

At the start of this year I started writing a novel of my own, which I unfortunately had to abandon temporarily when Black-Dog reared its head. The story is (in very oversimplified terms) about two characters, who must learn to navigate their lives after witnessing an event that’s so unexplainable and incomparable to anything else, that they don’t have the words to talk about it, or process it properly. It’s about the isolation of trauma, healing from pain you cannot voice and friendship that doesn’t require words to offer comfort.

Because of that project, these themes were on my mind a lot this year, and Beings probably clicked with me so much because it engages with some of these same themes.

Beings is a literary/historical fiction novel, told through 3 interconnecting stories. In 1960, an unnamed couple (only referred to as “the husband and wife”) encounter an object in the night sky that defies explanation. The encounter is so traumatic that it shapes their lives for years to come. Seeking the help of a psychologist to uncover lost memories of that night, they recall through hypnosis a string of events that comes to inspire the first Alien-abduction-legend of its time. In 1961, a young female author takes inspiration from the UFO-craze and attempts to get her science-fiction writing published. The fact that she’s a woman (let alone a lesbian woman!) hinders her chances greatly. Finally, in our current timeline, we follow the Archivist, a reclusive historian who attempts to understand a strange forgotten childhood encounter while descending into obsession over both Phyllis’s letters and the testimony of the first alien abductees.

Apart from the themes of how to cope with something you cannot voice, the novel addresses alienation and othering of queerness in many forms. All three of our central characters are “queer” in their own way. The couple’s interracial relationship is scrutinized almost as much as their alien-encounter in the press-attention that follows it, in a time where this was still a huge taboo. Phyllis struggles with the expression of her queerness and feelings for another woman, specifically in a male-dominated field. Then there’s the Archivist, who’s non-binary and disabled, and therefore othered in their own way. I really loved the way the author explored these topics organically through their stories. It also engages with questions of storytelling and mythmaking. Specifically about who gets to tell a story, and how this changes the actors within it.  The author does a fantastic job of packing a lot of meaning and depth into only 300 pages. The same goes for the characters; despite literally not even knowing some of their names (!), I came to care deeply for Phyllis, the couple and the Archivist through the intimate glimpse into their lives Masad offered us.

I obviously highly recommend this novel, but don’t let the cover fool you into expecting an adventure-packed sci-fi-romp. It’s a character-study and a portrait of a time in our history where being queer often truly meant being alien.

9. Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodidov

translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

“My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.”

Next up is another book that took me by complete surprise. I picked this book up without any research or reading reviews, because of its beautiful cover, title and opening line. Although it’s sold as fiction, this reads much like a literary memoir, and you cannot convince me that the author didn’t draw from very personal experience when writing this. Death and the Gardener is a very intimate and understated portrait of a father and son in the final days leading up to (and following) the formers passing. Our unnamed narrator recounts memories of his dad at various stages of his life, many of them taking place in the beloved garden that his father tended to. It explores (anticipatory) grief, aging and caregiving through the different seasons of life, as imagined through gardening glasses.  

Gospodidov is a poet with a PhD in philosophy, and that background shines through the text on every page. I ran out of sticky-tabs trying to mark every quotable passage only to discover that I’d marked up almost every single page. This is the kind of slim novel where not a single word is wasted. It’s internally consistent with its garden-metaphors, looping back to earlies word-choices in significant moments, to land their emotional resonance even more. It does so subtly, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it way, but it’s very intentional once you pick up on it. It’s a literary feat to write like this, but perhaps an even greater feat to be able to translate it as Angela Rodel did. As far as I’m concerned, both Gospodidov and Rodel share the credits for this placement.

Besides its prose, the reason this book resonated with me as much as it did, is likely due to its themes and its gardening metaphor. As many of you will know, I lost my mother – who was a biologist – at a young age after a prolonged period of caregiving, and have often linked nature and flora to her memory for myself. Simultaneously the theme of aging parents (specifically aging fathers) has been on the forefront of my mind this year, which too made this extra significant to me. Death and the Gardener helped me to put words (and stunning words at that!) to some of that. 

8. A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

“People don't often get murdered in banks. They're usually rather difficult to escape from.”

Coming in at number 10 is the first fantasy novel, and the only sequel to make my list this year. A Drop of Corruption is book 2 in the Leviathan Wakes series – book one of which made my list last year in the form of The Tainted Cup.

As this is a sequel, I won’t go into too much plot-detail to avoid any spoilers. In short, this is a series of episodic mysteries that follows a Sherlock-Watson-style detective-duo, solving crimes within the high political spheres of a fantasy-world full of alchemical and botanical magic. Book one introduced us to the eccentric lady Ana Dolabra and her assistant Din, both of whom are gifted with unique magical alterations that provide them a special edge, as well as special challenges, towards their investigative work. It gave us a tight closed-room-murder-mystery plot, whilst easing us into the larger political and physical landscape that Bennett has created here. Book two delivers on the promises made in that first book, by delving deeper into the history of our characters and their world, and significantly raising the stakes in the process.

In the hands of a lesser author, this series could’ve felt like it was trying to do too many things at once. Intriguing and flawed characters, a high fantasy-world populated by leviathans, a murder mystery, a magic system involving alterations and augmentations to a select few in society, and a series-spanning apocalyptic threat that I won’t spoil… It sounds like it would be too much to juggle, yet somehow Robert Jackson Bennett does it to perfection. Let’s just say he’s one of my favourite fantasy-authors working today for good reason.

7. Three Wild Dogs by Markus Zusak

“When you think about it’s not a bad way to live, to remember your life by your dogs”. I can usually measure which year something happened, purely by the dog in the picture.”

I’ve described this book multiple times as being “a combination of three things I love most in the world: books, dogs and Markus Zusak’s writing”, and I still stand by that description. This is Zusak’s memoir in which he relays experiences of his own (family-)life and writing career, by the timeline of “problem-fosterdogs” he took in over the years.

The thing about Zusak’s prose, is that he seemingly has a free-pass into my heart with his words. Whether in his fiction, or now in his non-fiction; he writes lines that puncture straight through my emotional defenses and stick with me.

Three Wild Dogs is a beautiful story. It’s about family and the perseverance of love, care and commitment to those we chose to include under that umbrella. It’s also a wonderful insight in Zusak’s process of writing Bridge of Clay, which I loved. Yet it’s not the what, but the how that lands it a place on this list: Zusak’s prose, the words he chooses and the scenes and images he focuses on. He writes emotion without sentimentality, and in a year where tears were often behind an emotional wall, this book offered me an almighty cathartic sob in the best way possible.

6. Ghost Fish by Stuart Pennebaker

“But did it make me broken, or did it make me invincible that I wasn’t afraid of that? That I wanted her forever, but knew I could reckon with that loss. Maybe that was why my sister had come back. To remind me of how I survived.”

In the number 6-spot is a book that you could probably tell would be my kind of thing from the description alone. It’s my “magical-realism-grief-book” of the year, following the likes of Our Wives Under the Sea, Watch Over me, The Astonishing Color of After and Ghost Music in previous years. It’s also criminally underhyped with only 600 Goodreads-reviews, so I will happily shout it out to anyone even remotely interested.

Ghost Fish is a coming of age story of a 23-year-old woman in desperate need for a fresh start. She’s recently moved to New York, trying to leave the recent losses and bereavement she suffered behind her in her hometown. Alone in an unfamiliar town, barely making rent as a restaurant-hostess, Alison finds herself haunted in more ways than one. One night on her way home, she senses a strange shape in the air: a ghost-fish. Without any hesitation, Alison knows this is the ghost of her deceased sister, who drowned at sea. Unable to lose her sister for a second time, she traps the Ghostfish in a pickle-jar and takes it home.

To some, that premise might sound a little cooky, but I promise you that this story is anything but. Deeply human and relatable, this is a portrait of a young woman’s journey of carrying her past filled with disproportionate losses, in to her future. It’s about sisterhood, grief, tentative healing and the difference between moving on from and moving on with your past. I loved Alison as a character; she’s flawed and messy, but very clearly trying to do her best in the given situation. Her attachment to – what seems to the world – an empty pickle-jar is both endearing and heartbreaking, and strangely sensible when you realise what this thing means to her. What I especially loved about Ghost Fish is how it uses its metaphor to explore how grief an (disproportionate) loss can isolate a young person from their peers. At a time when her peers were concerned with crushes and late-night-parties, Alison has had to cope with some of the worst losses imaginable: losing every family-member she’s had before she’s even 25. Her attempts to compartmentalize and hide these losses from her new-life-friends (literally having to hide the secret of the ghostfish) were incredibly relatable and well-portrayed. I loved watching Alison grow through this over the course of the book, seeing her slowly and tentatively letting in new people, and seeing a beautiful friendship develop over the course of the Key-West piece of the novel. Extra credits to the author for not shoehorning in a rushed romance, but keeping the focus on the power of true connection through friendship.

5. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

“But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.”

Wild Dark Shore is proof that I’m not completely incompetent in predicting which books I’ll love, as this was my most anticipated release of 2025, and ended up cracking the top 5 on this list. Part character-driven family portrait, part page turning mystery-thriller, part harrowing climate-fiction, a hint of modern gothic and all of Charltote McConaghy stunning signature prose make for a recipe to an all-time favourite for me.  

Wild Dark Shore tells the story of Dominic Salt and his three children, who live and work as caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. This island houses the world’s largest seed-vault- an ecological time-capsule for a future in which climate-change may render the world inhospitable to the flora we rely upon to survive. Dominic and his children have lived alone on the windswept shores of  Shearwater for years now – thousands of miles away from the nearest inhabited mainland, and the utter isolation has taken a toll on each member of this troubled family. Everything changers when on a dark night following a devastating storm, the impossible happens: a woman mysteriously washes ashore.

I think this third novel is McConaghy’s most ambitious novel to date, and probably ties as my favourite with Migrations. Where her previous novels already share similar themes (climate change, environmental collapse, familial ties and damaged characters grappling with grief, guilt and self-imposed isolation) Wild Dark Shore adds in a solid mystery-plotline to the mix. The fantastic part is: she does so without sacrificing any of the other elements that made her previous works so incredibly. It has all the same devastating and heart wrenching emotional impact, the same gorgeous nature-writing and the same haunting themes to ponder, but is delivered through a mystery-vessel that might actually make it more accessible to an even wider audience.

Wild Dark Shore is a novel I feel confident to widely recommend to literary readers, and mystery-fans alike. If you haven’t picked up McConaghy’s work, and love the likes of The God of the Woods by Liz Moore or The Lightkeepers by Abby Geni, this book is a fantastic place to start!

4. One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford

"The frontline was a brutal place to be. Everyone else had the luxery of obscurity."

Here we have our last 2025-release and another one that is criminally underrated in my opinion. This is technically speaking a zombie-book, which I’d never thought I’d enjoy, but the spin Leigh Radford put on it put it firmly within my ballpark.

In the wake of a viral pandemic that leaves its victims reduced to half-living-creatures without any control of their mental faculties, we follow virologist Kesta Shelley working on the frontline in the desperate scramble for a cure. To her, this race against the clock isn't just a scientific-, but a personal one too. As she works overtime at the laboratory, no-one is aware of the secret she’s harboring back home. Chained to her radiator, hidden from governmental agencies and the CDC, is her husband - one of the last surviving infected - barely clinging to life.

In her desperation to keep her undead husband "alive", Kesta twists every rule of medical ethics she's been taught, for better or worse.

This reads more like a pandemic-novel mixed with a Frankenstein-retelling that any zombie-book I’ve read before, and I loved it all the more for it. Kesta’s perspective as a frontline scientist with a hidden personal stake in the game is a fascinating one. We see her struggling with her dual identities as both a professional and a caregiver for her husband, and the emotional- and ethical dilemmas that brings. Through her eyes, we see an intimate metaphor of caring for a critically ill loved one, and the anticipatory grief that comes with facing their mortality.

Kesta’s scientific background however, also opens the door to some more in-depth exploration of the biomedical science-fiction surrounding the nature of this virus. The plotline of the team slowly unraveling new information about this virus in their search for a cure was genuinely gripping, and I actually think the answers the author provided were very smart.

Finally, Kesta’s position as a frontline worker during a pandemic prompted some commentary on that point that I personally related to. It sheds light on the (often unrealistic) expectations placed by the larger public on frontline workers. How medical personal is expected to sacrifice personal health and time with family “for the greater good”, how scientists are criticized for “not having a cure within the first few weeks”, and  how governmental representatives are hounded for being unprepared for a situation that literally no one could’ve been prepared for. There’s a lot more nuance to that conversation that I can convey in this short paragraph about the book, but I loved  how Radford included it in her narrative and highly implore you to read the book for yourself.  

If you go into this novel with the expectation of an action-packed zombie-narrative, you’re going to be disappointed (as I’ve seen happen in plenty of review on this book). If you expect something lighthearted and rompy, as the US-cover might suggest (seriously Tor, how did you mess this one up so badly, especially when the UK-cover by Gallery Books is literally my favourite cover of the year!), you’re in for a similar fate. If however, you’re in for a speculative sci-fi with Frankenstein-vibes that explores the edges of biomedical in(ter)vention through a heartfelt story of love and dedication: I can’t recommend this book enough to you.

3. Solaris by Stanislav Lem

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.”

From this point on, I can no longer take any credit for discovering any hidden gems, as my top 3 is made up of a classic, a wildly popular fantasy novel, and a Booker-Prize finalist. I believe I read Solaris before as part of an assigned reading back in 2012, which makes this technically a reread and disqualifies it for this list. That being said, 14-year-old me was definitely not in the right mindspace to fully appreciate this gem, and since I couldn’t remember anything about it, I picked up my battered paperback copy for a fresh read this year. I was not disappointed.

Solaris is a first-contact-novel that explores what an encounter with a truly alien alien lifeform might look like. It follows psychologist Kris Kelvin, who’s sent to a remote research-station orbiting Solaris – an distant exoplanet covered in a vast viscous ocean that’s a lifeform in itself. Kris is sent to investigate a series of psychological collapses that have befallen the crew of the research station. As he arrives, he soon discovers the root of that madness, as he’s confronted by the physical embodiment of a memory of his deceased lover. These apparitions turn out to be the product of Solaris’s ocean’s neutrino-like particles. Is this the oceans conscious attempt to communicate with the humans in its orbit, is it simply a form of particle reflection in its most literal form, or is it something else entirely?

Since this is a classic, any meaningful literary analysis or insight I could provide has already been stated more eloquently than I ever could by someone before me. There is so much to gain from this slim novel (as well as the rocky history surrounding its author, publication and adaptations), and that’s partially why it had the impact on me that it had. Solaris is the kind of story that has you thinking about its themes and implications long after you turn the final page. What is  the oceans purpose, if it even has one? How would you react when faced with something so incomprehensibly alien, that even the idea of communication is up for debate? What might the ocean reflect back at you? And what would that mean for your life – or that of the reflection?

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lem draws the focus away from the space-crafts and extraterrestrial adventures, and focusses instead on the humans and their responses to it. To me, this approach to sci-fi is often far more effective, and I had a wonderful experience exploring one of the foundational works that set that trend.

2. The Will of the Many by James Islington

“There comes a point in every man’s life where he can rail against the unfairness of the world until he loses, or he can do his best in it. Remain a victim, or become a survivor.”

This one probably needs little introduction… The Will of the Many graced plenty a favourites-list in 2024 when it first released, and I’ve seen quite a few people mention its sequel The Strength of the Few as a top-contender for 2025.

This follows Vis Telimus, a young orphaned fugitive from a political war, who – through a series of unlikely fortunes – is adopted by a powerful senator and enrolled in the Republics most prestigious academy. Success here means acceptance into the elite of the Republics highly hierarchical society, and failure can spell certain death, or worse… But Vis’ adoptive “father” has ulterior motives, and even Vis himself has different plans for his time at the academy, rooted in his own secretive past. What follows is a journey of (magical) academic rivalry, political infiltration, a game of precarious alignments and the search for answers to an ancient mystery that dates back deep into the history of the Empire.

I have to admit that I had some reservations based off its synopsis alone, as it sounded so much like another generic Roman-inspired-academy-based-fantasy. And although it is admittedly a little formulaic, Islington executed that formula to perfection. It mixes an interesting magic-system (Will), complex crossing-and-double-crossing political schemes and, the secrets of an ancient civilization and forgotten technology and a cast of colorful (if a little one-dimensional) characters. The result was the best escapist-fun I’ve had with any book this year. In a year where many things (sometime even reading) on a daily basis felt like chores to push through, I deeply appreciated the fun that reading this story brought me. So much so, that I read this 650-page behemoth not once, but twice this year. The ending is one of the best out of any first-book-in-a-series I’ve read in a long time, and I’m more than committed to pick up the sequel in 2026.

1. Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

“We all make saints of the dead, I said. It's the only way we can bear it.”

My favourite book of the year is one I read at the very start 2025, and proceeded to reread not once, but twice over the course of the year. Each time, I came to love it more than the last.

Set during the latter half of the Covid pandemic in Australia, we follow an atheist woman, who abandons her life to go live inside a reclusive rural nunnery. An incomprehensible decision on the surface, but one that beings to make more sense as we explore our narrators inner world. I will quote from the back-flap here, as I don’t want to give too much away: “As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can't forget. Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand - then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past.”

Stone Yard Devotional is not a fun book to read. It’s contemplative, melancholic and heavy with regret and a strange sense of resigned grief. The chord it strikes is in minor, but it’s also one that resonated with me through various periods in 2025. It’s about the long-lasting (if not permanent) effects of lingering grief and it’s cyclical nature – how a new loss will always reignite a little spark of the old losses you carry. It’s about a pandemic, sure, but it’s more so about the effects of isolation and contemplation it forces on the people living though it. It’s also very much about memories and seeking atonement within ourself, perhaps from our own memories.

The way Charlotte Wood choose to tell this story mirrors the sparsity  that dominates the monastic life that our protagonist immersed herself in. There is so much in the silence between lines with this one; silence that’s not void, but highlights an absence at the center of this story. In that way, “composed” might be a better word to describe the tone, setting and prose than “sparse”. Wood has simply stripped her sentences of all the inessential, sticking to the bones of what needed to be said.

Stone Yard Devotional is not the book on this list I’d most broadly recommend. That honour probably goes to the number 2 spot. But it is the one that stands out by a mile for the title of my personal favourite of the year.

With that, we have reached the end of 2025 and my 2025 Year in Review. I'd love to know your favourites and recommendations if you'd like to share them. I wish everyone happy reading for 2026; may it be a better one than the last (regardless of how good your 2025 was!).