In 2025 I read about the same number of books as the previous year – 85 books, mostly contemporary or a novel from an author’s backlist, and I also made a promise to my friend Lizzy to read a ‘classic’ – this year, Pride and Prejudice. A couple of my top ten books came late in the year (A Sport and a Pastime and Heart the Lover, and one, The Infamous Gilberts (which isn’t published until 2026) jumping into my top three. I always feel a little sad for those books that are bumped off my ever developing list of ten favourites. Perhaps I should do a second post about almost made-its.

Two of the books in the picture are mock-ups. We listened to the audio book and forgot to buy the physical book. Can you spot which ones?

So, here are my and Tim’s favourite ten books of the year. We share a record-breaking three this year: Take What You Need by Idra Novey, Heart the Lover by Lily King, and Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry which we read over twelve months in our book group.

All of my and Tim’s books can be bought from my list on Bookshop.org.

Let me know if you’ve read any and which catch your eye.

You can see previous year’s lists here: 2024 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.

Claire’s Top 3 (in no order)

The Infamous Gilberts by Angela Tomaski

My lovely, funny, frustrating father died in last March, and I’ve been clearing his flat. One thing I brought home to put on my own wall was a family tree. There is dust along the top of the frame that has been there for years and I cannot bear to wipe it off. Angela Tomaski gets this. She writes about loss, but in such a darkly funny, brilliant way, that I have fallen in love with The Infamous Gilberts. Maximus, an enigmatic neighbour, takes us on a tour of Thornwalk, a dilapidated stately home, just before its contents are removed and it’s made into a hotel. Object by object he introduces us to the Gilbert siblings, Lydia, Hugo, Anabel, Jeremy, and Rosalind, and their morbidly amusing tragedies. It is an unusual narrative style, one I’ve never read before, but it is so worth sticking with. The chapter headings give a hint and flavour of the book: ‘A Small Pile of Mouldy Hay,’ ‘Some Very Small Socks’, and ‘The Greasy Window’. I was swept into the siblings’ lives, even while most of them are pretty awful human beings. I laughed, and sniggered and underlined and yes, I cried at the end. Although it might have been dust in my eye. Buy The Infamous Gilberts from Bookshop.org

Leaving by Roxana Robinson

Leaving by Roxana Robinson was one of three books recommended by author Huma Qureshi as part of my Books under the Radar series on my website and Instagram. I couldn’t possibly read all the books suggested in the series each week but this one caught my eye and I bought it and read it as soon as it arrived, and it completely absorbed me. It reminded me of the very best Sue Miller in that it is at the heart a family drama but with a lot to say about loyalty, love, and parental relationships with adult children. Sarah and Warren meet each other again at sixty by chance. They were girlfriend and boyfriend when they were twenty or so, but split up and lost touch. Now they reconnect and start a relationship even though Warren is married. He decides to leave his wife for Sarah but this act has consequences far beyond anyone can imagine. The ending hit me really hard (don’t go into this book thinking it will be a light family drama) especially since almost this same scenario recently happened to someone close to me. Highly recommended, and very likely to be on my top reads of the year. Buy Leaving from Bookshop.org

Take What You Need by Idra Novey

Take What You Need by Idra Novey was recommended to me by fellow author and friend, Judith Heneghan, and I loved it. In rural Pennsylvania, sculptor, Jean is mourning the estrangement of her step daughter, Leah, and remembering how four years ago their relationship broke apart. Jean is a sculptor in her sixties welding metal alone in the sitting room of her father’s old house, when a family move into the almost derelict house next door, where the water has been cut off. Jean starts a friendship with the young man of the family who helps her with her work. In alternate chapters we hear from Leah who is returning, to Jean’s house having learnt of her death – and is examining the prejudices she encounters and finally, her own. Goodness, this is so good. Propulsive and with brilliant writing. It looks at the sexuality of older women, American poverty, sculpting, bias and expectations, motherhood – there is so much to think about, but without the story feeling overloaded. Highly recommended. Buy Take What You Need from Bookshop.org

And Claire’s next 7

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

This is Salter’s third novel, written / set in the early – mid 1960s in rural France, and it is AMAZING. For its prose – descriptions of France and travelling by train and food and buildings. For its atmosphere – out of season France, a slow, languid feeling where nothing really happens. And for its characters and very graphic descriptions of sex. An unnamed and unreliable American narrator goes to stay in his friends’ house in Autun, a small town in Burgundy. While he is there, summoning up courage to speak to a local woman, another American man – Philip Dean arrives in a Delage convertible, and decides to stay. Dean meets a local shopgirl, Anne-Marie and they start a relationship. From here on, the unnamed narrator imagines the time Dean and Anne-Marie spend together: their trips out for meals in the car, their overnight stays in hotels, their visits to her parents, and the sex they have. Soon Dean runs out of money, and although naive Anne-Marie is expecting marriage, something else happens that Salter cleverly foreshadows if you pay attention. Buy A Sport and a Pastime from Bookshop.org

Castaway by Lucy Irvine

Who remembers this from the first time around? First published in 1983 it’s about the year that Lucy Irvine spent on an uninhabited island in the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia, with Gerald Kingsland who is twenty-five years older than her (she is 25). I think I read it in the 1980s (I took this copy from my dad’s shelves recently), and on this re-read I loved it. On the island Lucy wants to be busy fishing, making a shelter, exploring, but Gerald either wants to lie in the shade or persuade Lucy to have sex. As they nearly starve and run out of water, instead of Gerald, Lucy falls in love with Tuin, the island. And her writing, about the sun, the interior and the sea, is incredibly sensual. She is also, it feels, very frank with her own frustrations, desires, and needs – and in fact some details that made me squint as I read – and the book opens up all sorts of interesting questions about couples, compromise, affection, and sexual needs. In the end, the couple are ‘saved’ by local islanders who bring their engines to Gerald to repair in return for food and water. Even this adds a complication, because it means Lucy can stay on the island but at what price? It’s fascinating stuff and I’m still mulling it over. Buy Castaway from Bookshop.org

The Adversary by Michael Crummey

This is the fourth Michael Crummey novel I’ve read, and like all the others I loved it. In the late 18th Century two siblings – the Widow Caines and Abe Strapp are fighting for commercial supremacy in Mockbeggar, a small town on the shore of Newfoundland. Abe is an awful man – a drunkard, a thief, a murderer, and you can only hope that the Widow Caines is better. She seems to treat her servants and the villagers better, but she has her own devastating schemes that are only shockingly revealed at the very end of the novel. There is weather and plague, and curses, and brilliant characters. In a weird way it reminded me of Lonesome Dove – in the way the POV shifts, in the language that they use, in how they both feel like a brilliant saga that you never want to end. Highly recommended. Buy The Adversary from Bookshop.org

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

Five big stars for The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. I chose this book for the book club I run at the Cabinet Rooms in Winchester. It was pretty divisive, with lots of people actively disliking it but I adored it. An unnamed narrator is a writer and creative writing teacher living in Manhattan when a close friend of hers – someone she had a brief affair with and is also a writer and teacher – kills himself. The narrator is persuaded by the man’s widow to look after his Great Dane, Apollo even though her apartment doesn’t allow pets. This rather slight story is interspersed with musings about creative writing teaching, loss, suicide, friendship and much more. And it made a brilliant book club book even though many people hated it. There was so much to discuss and some of the things other members pointed out were brilliantly revealing. Buy The Friend from Bookshop.org

You Like it Darker by Stephen King

Twelve creepy, weird and brilliant short stories. I had my favourites and they tended to be the longer ones: Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream (Danny dreams that he discovers a person, murdered and buried behind a gas station, when he visits he discovers his dream is true); Rattlesnakes (a man befriends his neighbour – a slightly mad but harmless woman who pushes a stroller around with, supposedly her dead twins in it); and Slide Inn Road (a family take a wrong turn in their car and are apprehended by two men who terrorise them). Plenty here to get your teeth into and keep you up at night. Buy You Like it Darker from Bookshop.org

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

An epic – in storytelling, in length and in writing ability. 843 gripping pages. I don’t really understand how McMurtry did it, kept all the storylines interesting, all the characters completely real, kept surprising me with who he killed off. And how he wrote the women who have so often been left out of, or relegated to inconsequential characters in Westerns. In the late 1870s, Gus and Call, the owners of the Hat Creek Cattle Company decide to make a cattle drive north from their Texas home of Lonesome Dove to Montana, where they hear the grass is greener and there is plenty of land. They take with them an assorted bunch of cowboys – some teenagers, some experienced hands, some troublemakers – as well as a local prostitute, a cook and a couple of pigs. Some men are lost, others are hanged, there are fights along the way with Indians, and the reuniting of a long lost love. I fell so hard for this book, and if I’m being truthful, Gus. Oh Gus. Sob, Sigh. I read it split into about 10 chunks with my book club. It was universally loved. Buy Lonesome Dove from Bookshop.org

Heart the Lover by Lily King

“A long tender farewell to youth”, as one character says in this intense, emotional, lovely book. The narrator (only named at the very end) has her first relationship at college, unsurprisingly there are issues, but through this man she starts a love affair with Yash, someone who will move in and out of her life with desire, and love, and pain. I don’t want to say too much about what happens, but there are mostly two parts: youth in college, and middle-age. I cried. You will cry too. Buy Heart the Lover from Bookshop.org

Tim’s Top Reads of 2025

Tim’s Top 3 (in no order)

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

What an epic! – I’ve never read a Western before but this is something else. Enthralling characters, blistering dialogue and storylines that are both brutal and tender. It’s very long, but when I got to page 843 I wanted to start all over again. I travelled every mile from Texas to Montana with the Hat Creek Cattle company. Everyone I’ve met who has also read it has felt the same way. Buy Lonesome Dove from Bookshop.org

Back in the World by Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff’s short stories are amazing. I seem to have read some every year for the past 5 years, and keep coming back to them. Favourite one in this book is ‘Coming Attractions’ where a precocious teenage girl working late in a movie theatre makes prank calls to strangers, including a man named Mr. Love. She thinks she’s smart but in reality she’s lonely and abandoned. Top marks.

Flesh by David Szalay

Szalay has written a cracking, and Booker Prize winning worthy, tale of a man’s life – from Hungary to England, from poverty to money and from brutality to peace. It’s such great writing – where you find yourself rooting for István even though he can be a git. Every bit as good as ‘All that Man Is’ by the same author. Thoroughly recommended and surprisingly fun. Buy Flesh from Bookshop.org

And Tim’s next 7

Click here to buy any of these from Bookshop.org

That’s it from us in 2025. I’d love to hear about your favourite reads of 2025.

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My novel, Hunger and Thirst will be published in May in the UK, and June in the US and Canada. Buy it from Bookshop.org in the UK. In the US, if you pre-order on 30th or 31st December 2025 from Barnes and Noble you can get 25% off if you are a Premium or Rewards member (free to join). Just type PREORDER25 at the checkout.