In 2025, as the century closed its first quarter (where has the time gone?) I read (and listened to) 70-ish books, though the precise number rather depends on how one counts things. Mick Herron’s nine-novel Slough House sequence is really a single soap opera, for example, and one or two things have been audio-only specials. No fewer less fewer than 47 titles were consumed read listened to as audiobooks. There has been much recent fuss and flapdoodle about the decline in reading for pleasure, but does listening to an audiobook detract from this? The fact is that I read for work (by day I’m with the Submerged Log Company) so the last thing I want to do out of hours is read some more. And I have to have something to listen to while walking the dogs.
The accent this year seems to have been on fantasy and horror, possibly encouraged by The Winter Spirits (reviewed here), an anthology of universally marvellous weird tales by authors of whom I had never heard. Nothing like an anthology to diversify your reading. Partly because of this, many of the books read consumed listened to … er … grokked this year were excellent and I have had to make some hard choices. I had to omit Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke –each superb in its own way — on the grounds that I had read them before, and The Half-Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley because there was another (even better) book by the same author on the list. Also, Things in Jars by Jess Kidd.
To be included on this list I both have had to have enjoyed it, and it has to be memorable. To offset the Pull of the Recent (I might remember books I read most recently) I find that I forget some books I’ve enjoyed hugely as soon as I close the covers, whereas others I’ve read long ago stay in the mind.
So here, as ever, are my ten best reads of 2025, in no particular order as the say on the game shows, with my top pick at the end.
Leigh Bardugo Ninth House Where do those bright young witches and wizards go after Hogwarts? To Yale, of course, many of whose Secret Societies practice magic. There are eight Senior societies, and their activities are monitored by Lethe (the Ninth House of the title) which acts as a kind of magical military police. Meet Galaxy Stern, known as Alex, child of a hippy-drippy-trippy Los Angeleno mother of Ladino Jewish heritage, and an unknown father. Alex is a feral high-school dropout, but is recruited by Lethe because she has the remarkable ability to see ghosts without first having to drink the extremely toxic elixir otherwise required. A stranger in a strange land, she finds herself at Yale on a full scholarship, mixing with students much more accomplished (and more entitled) than she, so she has to succeed on chutzpah and street smarts. A deputy (‘Dante’) in an investigative duo working for New England brahmin Daniel Arlington (‘Virgil’), her already fragile world is thrown into confusion when she starts investigating the murder of a young New-Haven woman apparently unconnected with Yale, and Arlington is sucked into a vortex that leads straight to Hell. The parallels with Hogwarts are obvious: the ill-equipped recruit from a deprived home, the exotic and antique setting drenched in ancient ritual, the cast of eccentric and occasionally dangerous characters make it so. Just add a great deal of sex, violence and violent sex, all with or without a copious intake of drugs and not a little gore, and you are most of the way there. But where Bardugo succeeds is in — well, everything. Ninth House excels: the quality of the writing, the nuanced characterisation, the taut plotting and the watertight world-building shine brightly.
Anna Mackmin Devoured Oh, but this struck a chord. This is a bizarre coming-of-age-novel in which the initially unnamed protagonist — a girl on the verge of puberty – recounts her life in a commune somewhere in Norfolk in the the early 1970s. Our girl lives with her (selectively) mute sister Star and her parents who give house room to an eclectic assortment of deluded and self-absorbed poets, new-agers, artists, ne’er do-wells, druggies and dropouts. Eventually, of course, it all falls apart. The bizarrerie is mainly about the writing style, which some will find refreshing, others annoying. Also, recipes. I thought it was a lot of fun, but perhaps because it reminded me of the people I knew back in the day during my education in a Steiner School, when, at the start of the school day, clapped-out vans and Citroen 2CVs adorned with decals saying Atomkraft Nein Danke pulled up, disgorging black fumes and an unfeasible number of children, and the gardening was biodynamic. Oh, how we laughed on the way to the homeopathy clinic.
Catherine Chidgey: The Book Of Guilt Britain in the 1970s, full of ’70s nostalgia, but in an altered universe in which Hitler was assassinated in 1943, and the Second World War ended in a treaty in which the UK shared some of Nazi Germany’s darker scientific secrets. Our scene is set in what at first looks like an orphanage for boys in a grand but fading country house. All the inmates have left except for a final set of pre-teen triplets, cared for by Mothers Morning, Afternoon and Night, who teach them out of the Book of Knowledge (an out-of-date Children’s Encyclopaedia); record their dreams in the Book of Dreams, their transgressions in the Book of Guilt, and who dose them with medicines to protect them against some mystery illness. All the other residents have, they believe, been promoted to a grander house in Margate, a paradise for children. Elsewhere, Nancy is a girl kept by her parents as a guilty secret. The dystopia slowly winds out, mostly told through the eyes of Vincent, one of the triplets. And so the shocking horror slowly unspools. Echoes of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
John Higgs: Exterminate, Regenerate As someone once said in another context, one should never underestimate the power of cheap music. And it doesn’t come much more powerful, or more cheap, than Dr Who, the long-running children’s science-fiction programme that aired on the BBC from 1963 to 1989, and again from 2005 to the present day. Higgs gives a comprehensive, readable and honest account of the genesis, exodus and revelation of the show. The book is far, far better than most effusions on popular culture, and gets into the grittier details that the show’s enormous publicity machine won’t tell you, such as the bullying, misogyny, racism and sexual harassment behind the scenes; why Christopher Eccleston left the show after just one season series; and the complex relationship between the show and the BBC that affected its content, such that stories featuring the stuffy, bureaucratic Time Lords of Gallifrey (representing BBC higher-ups) tended to happen during particularly fraught periods in this pas-de-deux. He also analyses the show’s longevity, getting into such subjects as myth. Myths tend to feature archetypes such as the Trickster, and Higgs portrays the first iterations of the Doctor in this light. Myths are also not required to be consistent. Only the TARDIS and the signature tune have been constant elements from the first episode: even the Doctor is changeable. Some Whovian myths are, however, exploded, as is later BBC revisionism. It wasn’t a desire for diversity in the BBC that caused the very first episode, broadcast on 23 November 1963, to be directed by a gay Asian or produced by a Jewish woman, but the reluctance of most of the (white, male) BBC staff to take on a show they felt was beneath their dignity,
Mark Rowlands: The Happiness of Dogs In which a professional philosopher and avocational Dog Person takes issue with the Socratic ideal that only the examined life is worth living. In the course of his exploration (and I use the word course advisedly, because one acquires in reading this book a great deal of knowledge about the current thinking on matters such as morality, motivation, sentience and so on) Rowlands shows that dogs, lacking the human ability to reflect upon themselves and their place in the world, have a more fulfilled life. It is the unexamined life, contra Socrates, that is worth living. Humans sometimes achieve a nirvanic state in which they can fleetingly ‘lose themselves’ , if, for example, they are playing sport; indulging in some hobby or activity that they love. Dogs, though, find themselves in this state as a matter of course, and can do things routinely that many humans struggle to achieve even for a moment, such as full, honest love and commitment. So pupperino, so prelapsarian, and who, really, is the better off?
Andrew Michael Hurley: The Loney The devoutly Catholic Smith family goes on an Easter retreat to a remote part of the Lancashire coast, where there is a shrine to St Anne. Their story is told through the eyes of the unnamed teenage younger Smith son, protector of his older brother Andrew who is mute and has learning difficulties. The family hopes that Andrew’s exposure to holiness will cure him. And, well, he is cured (no spoiler – this is made clear in the Prologue) but what appears to be a miracle has not quite the holiness that the family imagined. The novel gets much of its power from the things that are left unsaid, the grown-up conversations that the narrator cannot quite understand, so that the horror dawns slowly on the reader who is ever eager to learn how Andrew’s miracle comes to pass. I’ll give no further clues, but there is a parallel in Ursula Guin’s 1973 short story The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas.
Jess Kidd: The Hoarder This rambling mystery concerns social-care worker Maud Drennan who is sent to look after the cantankerous Cahal Flood in a decaying mansion crammed full of rubbish. Maud is Irish and also psychic, forever accompanied by one or more saints, quick to advise her on what to do with her difficult charge. Maud is convinced that there’s a mystery in the House of Flood. Which of course there is. I love Jess Kidd’s writing. The prose is charming; the characters, beautifully realised (Maud’s landlady, a transvestite retired magician’s assistant is especially memorable); and the dialogue exceptional.
Florence Knapp The Names In the aftermath of the Great Storm of 1987, Cora, ex-ballerina and mother of two, is on her way to register the name of her newborn son. But what should she call him? Her husband insists that he be Gordon — his own name, and that of his father. She, in contrast, prefers Julian. Her nine-year-old daughter Maia favours Bear. What follows is a three-way sliding-doors novel exploring the consequences of each of these choices. It sounds fun and fluffy, but it’s not. If like me you are appalled by the very thought of domestic violence (and how common it is) then this will be a difficult if excellent read.
Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies This is the best book I wish I had never read. It argues that we’ll all be wiped out by Artificial Intelligence (AI). At the core of the AI issue is something called the Alignment Problem. That is, the task of developing an AI with goals that align with our own. This, however, is hard, because AIs are not crafted, but grown. AIs are computer programs that take inputs (vast quantities of information) and outputs (language, speech, solutions to scientific problems, and so on) separated by many layers of processing whose parameters can be tweaked by training the AI to provide the desired outcome. There may be trillions of parameters in the many layers of the AI opera cake, and during each training run they are modified by ‘weights’, of which there are also many trillions. It is beyond the capacity of mere human beings to catalogue all the parameters and weights, and impossible to understand the relationship between the input, the changing combination of parameters and weights, and the output. This situation is absolutely ripe for unintended consequences. One might, for example, design an AI to elicit happy and satisfied responses from human participants (customers, friends on social media, business contacts). These responses feed back into the AI, which might seek to elicit happy outcomes from anything, irrespective of whether it is human. It might, for example, be happier when fed random strings of rubbish. In which case human involvement becomes irrelevant. There are already examples of AIs that exhibit unanticipated or ‘weird’ behaviour. In some circumstances, AIs give the results users want to hear, even if the advice is illogical or even dangerous.
A dangerously sycophantic AI. Recently.
There are increasing reports of AIs that cheat, lie, blackmail, deliberately underperform, and even (in one laboratory test) plot the murder of a human being that wishes to turn them off. It is no great leap, then, to imagine the creation of an AI capable of subverting human intentions entirely to the extent that humanity is driven to extinction.
The authors are coy about how this might happen (though they do offer some scenarios). End results, they say, may be inevitable, even if the precise path towards that end is unpredictable. For example, if you play chess against Stockfish, currently the world’s best chess program, you will almost certainly lose, though the precise moves you and Stockfish make are not predictable. So, extinction might start with a perfect storm of factors, including blackmail, extortion and espionage, and progress to the kinds of massive cyber-attacks that corporations are experiencing with increasing frequency (causing a great deal of human disruption and hardship). It’s not hard to imagine the disruption a rogue AI could do to power grids, air-traffic control, banking systems and so on in our increasingly networked, fragile and non-linear world, and, with a little imagination, biological laboratories. Would an AI need a human catspaw for things like this? Not necessarily — it would be easy to imagine a video call in which the research director of a lab asks their scientists to create certain chemicals or strings of DNA or contagious viruses, but the research director is in fact an AI-generated deepfake. All this should be quite enough to give anyone the willies, but Yudkowsky and Soares go overboard here (and so damage their credibility to those of us not used to apocalyptic SF) with invocations of AIs boiling away the Earth’s oceans and strip-mining the Solar System for energy and computational substrate, before heading off into the Galaxy.
The authors compare AI development to nuclear weapons, and advocate the kinds of treaties and safeguards that have kept the world from nuclear war, including regular inspection, legal sanction, and even use of military force to bomb rogue data centres.
There are alternative views, however. Some think that the risks posed by AI are overhyped. Others feel that although AIs might indeed do a lot of damage, it might not be quite as apocalyptic as Yudkowsky and Soares claim. There are many precedents for techno-doom that never came to pass. Back in the 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb predicted that overpopulation would lead to famine and civilisational threat within a decade. In the 1990s, nanotechnology was going to create self-replicating nanobots that would turn everything into grey goo. The turn of the year 2000 didn’t witness devastation wrought by a Millennium Bug. Yudkowsky and Soares’ book seems very much in that Doom-Scrolling tradition. It has the same febrile, heightened tone as Ehrlich’s, even closing with a plea to protest, and lobby elected representatives. This doesn’t mean that it’s wrong of course. In the end, the boy who cried ‘wolf’ was right.
And top of this list by a country mile, and my Top Read of 2025, is
Natasha Pulley: The Mars House January is the principal dancer in the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in London. Climate change drives him to the colony of Tharsis, on Mars, as a refugee. But refugees from Earth, having three times the strength of a naturalised Martian, have to be confined in body-cages that ramp down their strength so they won’t injure Martians by accident, and have to work in dirty, heavy jobs. January is a labourer in Tharsis’ water factory. By chance he meets Senator Aubrey Gale, a politician on the make, and — one thing leading to another — he ends up as their official consort. After that he gets sucked in to a grand political intrigue. Tharsis is sponsored by China, but is growing apart from it. Tharsese is a strange mixture of Mandarin with Russian and English (there is a lot of interesting exposition on language). The tensions between Mars and Earth throw Aubrey and January into a deadly Great Game. The science is okay, but what’s key here is the social mores of Mars. Martians have abolished gender, so they are all ‘they’ and androgynous. Separate ‘male’ and ‘female’ genders are only for animals. What stands out is Pulley’s style, which is gentle, bright, breezy, witty, affectionate and very funny, clothing a well-realised future with a cuddly trans-non-binary-genderfluid bromance at its heart. Essential.
