Happy New Year! It's been a great one for me so far: With two days to go before the exhibition closed, we finally went to see "Resistance" ("how protest shaped Britain and photography shaped protest"), which has been at a gallery that is at most a five-minute walk from our apartment for nearly six months!

I am one of those people who loves to do end-of-year look-backs. (I don't miss having a "jobby job," but I kind of miss annual reviews.) So, today, although absolutely no one asked for it, here are some of my favorite books of 2025.

First, my stats. I read 81 books; 52 works of nonfiction, and 29 fiction. When it comes to the gender breakdown of the authors whose works I read, 46 were by men, 31 by women, and four were anthologies or male-female co-authors. Once again, audiobooks made up the vast majority of my listening: My format breakdown was 62 audiobooks, 11 physical books, and eight on Kindle. You can see the full list of what I read here, but the following were my favorites:

NONFICTION

(This is the order I read them, rather than a ranking.)

1. Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman's Astonishing Life of Seduction, Intrigue and Power, by Sonia Purnell. Pamela Churchill Harriman was often described as a “courtesan”–she had affairs and marriages with numerous powerful men, usually older fellows. She was often dismissed because of that, but this book shows how hard she worked and how much good she did. She married Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph, an absolute shit, and at the age of 20 she was a valued sounding board for her father-in-law, who was prime minister at a rather crucial time in European history. He eventually deployed her as a secret weapon to persuade America to get involved with World War II. Nearly 50 years later, she played a crucial role in Bill Clinton's shift from ambitious but unpopular regional politician to two-term president, which landed her in Paris as the U.S. ambassador. Between those two periods were decades of men and travel and glamour, a lot of bad relationships and a few very good ones. Purnell does a great job of presenting Harriman’s life in a sympathetic but not at all hagiographic way. It’s great storytelling, and also a reminder that the figure we sometimes see in movies–people who are in the middle of everything–really do exist in “real life.”

2. The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale, by James Atlas. I have long been fascinated by the biographer’s art, and Atlas is a very gifted writer, reader, and editor of biographies. When I read this, I was working on the proposal for my biography of Rita Mae Brown, and so I was especially interested by all of the challenges–many of them extremely frustrating–that Atlas encountered writing biographies of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow.

3. Queen James: The Life and Loves of Britain's First King, by Gareth Russell, about King James VI of Scotland and I of England (1566-1625), who loved (a bunch of) men and (a few) women, and more or less got away with it because he was the king. It's a wonderfully accessible but deeply researched book. As much as I love a provocative title, the book's U.S. moniker, The Six Loves of James I feels better suited to the content. James' sexuality is a sizable part of the story, but there's a lot more to it.

4. A Bookshop of One's Own: How a Group of Women Set Out to Change the World, by Jane Cholmeley. This tells the story of Silver Moon, the feminist bookstore that operated in the heart of Charing Cross Road between 1984 and 2001. Given the book's topic, I had no doubt I'd enjoy it, but I was surprised by how rousing I found it. I'd known the store--and Jane and Sue, the more visible of the three owners--so I figured I knew what was coming, but I was floored by Jane's willingness to tell all (well, a lot anyway). Just a great read.

5. Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, by Francesca Wade. Another book that exceeded my (high) expectations. I'd read Janet Malcolm's and Diana Souhami's Stein biographies relatively recently, but I learned so much from this book, which is massive but also extraordinarily readable. (This is now my go-to wedding present, BTW!)

6. All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art, by Orlando Whitfield. For once a subtitle that truly expresses the contents of a book! It really is a gripping story of a friendship, a growing realization that said pal is up to no good, and a revealing look at the art world. (This was also the first place that I came across a line that later appeared in at least two other books I read this year: the observation, about Conservative politician Michael Heseltine that "he had to buy all his own furniture." Ain't no snob like a British snob!)

7. King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Unmaking of the Modern Middle East, by Scott Anderson. One of those books that the term "authoritative" is made for, though reading it I wondered why anyone ever believed that Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was up to the (admittedly pretty much impossible) job that so many people assigned him.

8. Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, by Emily Van Duyne. If there is a theme here, it's that I like being surprised. This is such a great biography, which points out in indisputable ways why so many other biographies of Plath (many of which I enjoyed) failed to face and convey the truth of her life.

9. V13: Chronicle of a Trial, by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by John Lambert. In December, I read two outstanding books chronicling trials that, for different reasons, gripped their respective nations. This one, about France's nine-month effort to figure out how a series of attacks on Friday, 13 November, 2015, cost the lives of more than 130 people in the center of Paris, is just superb. Carrère ends up focusing on the survivors, many of whom testified in the trial. It's a really disturbing book, but SO well-written.

10. The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial, by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, and Sarah Krasnostein. I can't believe how quickly this book went to press–given that it doesn't feel even slightly rushed. The trial of Erin Patterson, who killed three members of her estranged husband's family (and almost killed another) by baking death cap mushrooms into the beef wellington she served them at lunch, seemed to be the only bit of Australian news the rest of the world was interested in. I was turned off by that, so I didn't follow the trial. Clearly what I needed was three of Australia's great nonfiction writers to talk it through. If my description has made this book seem trivial, that's all on me–it's fantastic.

FICTION

1. Libertad, by Bessie Flores Zaldívar. I guess technically this is a YA novel, because the main character turns 18 in the period the book covers. That young woman is Libertad–she was given that name because she was born on Honduras’ independence day–and while her burgeoning queer identity is part of the story, it’s just one of the many things she is trying to figure out. It’s a very political novel, taking as its background the 2017 presidential election, which–spoiler alert–was undemocratic. The book is really good at giving a sense of what life is like for lower-middle-class teens in Tegucigalpa, and of family life, when parents and grandparents routinely work 12-hour days to survive. In an era when migration is so central to politics, it is fantastic on the forces that push people to leave places that they love. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Spring Inés Peña, and I highly recommend it.

2. Great Expectations, by Vinson Cunningham. Maybe because I know Cunningham as a New Yorker writer, I almost feel like I experienced this novel as a series of nonfiction vignettes. It is about David Hammond, an extraordinarily perceptive Black man in his early 20s, who, having dropped out of college when he became a father, drifts into working on the presidential campaign of an unnamed charismatic Black senator who bears a remarkable resemblance to … Barack Obama. Cunningham worked on that campaign and later in Obama’s administration. I was really happy to spend time with David, who had really smart things to say about a huge array of topics—art, music, the sociology and psychology of rich people giving money and support to a political candidate, and that feeling of interacting with people who you don’t know but kind of know because of their identity, whether that’s rich, Black, smart, calculating, ambitious, artistic, whatever, and of course, how they respond to you because of how they perceive your identity.

3. Spent: A Comic Novel, by Alison Bechdel. Mo! Lois! Sparrow! Those old pals from the Dykes to Watch Out for gang, plus inky versions of Alison and Holly pondering fame and aging and change and ... oh, it was just so great to consider big ideas while hanging out with the gang. I always loved the non-topical DTWOF strips that appeared in calendars and other venues–this book had the lovely art and laughs of those strips without losing the profound insights on life that DTWOF always provided.

4. Glassworks, by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith. This is surely a dumb thing to say since every work of fiction is by its very nature a feat of invention, but this novel just kept surprising me in an utterly delightful way. I also loved that a historical novel (at least in part--it tells the story of several generations) could bring such a fresh approach to queerness and gender.

5. Perfume & Pain, by Anna Dorn. I read this for the LGBTQ fiction reading group at Topping bookstore in Edinburgh--my first-ever book group, which I loved. While I know for a fact that I could not stand to spend more than five minutes with protagonist Astrid Dahl, I absolutely LOVED Dorn's evocation of the character, who is caught between contemporary sapphistry and mid-20th-century pulps (and is dedicated to maintaining a high intoxicant level).

SPECIAL MENTION: There are four writers releasing novels as part of series, whose work I always read as soon as I can. They all released great books this year, but I feel weird putting them in my "top" lists. Still, I whole-heartedly recommend Hang on St. Christopher, by Adrian McKinty; King of Ashes, by SA Cosby (though it does pain me that everyone involved in writing and editing this book thought that a rich guy could get a whole bunch of busted teeth replaced with implants ... the day after he got hit in the face!); Clown Town, by Mick Herron; and Silent Bones, by Val McDermid (which gives a shoutout to our favorite Edinburgh restaurant!).

Normal service will be resumed later this month!