Favourite Books of 2025 | Modern Books

I loved her debut amazing Grace Adams as well and I think she's one of those writers that just does family dynamics and family problems really well and it's just really good.

and then we have the Austin Christmas murders which is a Christmas novela. Both of these came out this year and both of these I really enjoyed.

a very short, really impactful historical novel set in the 19th century, looking at the Scottish clearances... I just absolutely loved it and would highly recommend it.

This is a tense political thriller about the election of a new pope... it's so tense. I love Robert Harris a lot, and I just thought this was fantastic.

so here we have the second book in the series A fortune most fatal... Both of these came out this year and both of these I really enjoyed.

I love both of these but especially funny story which I just yeah found really entertaining and really heartwarming which is kind of how I always find Emily Henry books.

this is a wonderful, really heartwarming, lovely novel that I read this year in one sitting... It's just so utterly delightful and really hopeful and a book with a real sort of belief in the power of humanity.

It is an absolutely incredible novel. one of the best explorations of power that I've ever read with amazing characterization... It's so funny and so devastating and dark and I just I just thought it was absolutely amazing.

The two books I read by her this year were Funny Story and Great Big Beautiful Life. Both of which I really loved.

It's such a fascinating book. Really, really powerful, really, really excellent psychology... I thought kind of as a character study and a look at how this situation would affect this character, it was just impeccably done.

This is Jane Austin's bookshelf by Rebecca Romney, which is a really fascinating work of literary investigation and literary history... I found it fascinating and it also guided me to read some 18th century novels that I hadn't read before and enjoyed.

My favorite poetry book of the year was in fact not a collection by an individual author but a anthology called Joy edited and produced by the poetry pharmacy. This is a collection of joyful poems that was just beautiful and so well chosen and just really exquisite.

This is Mammo by Sas Malledge which I read in December and really loved. This is a really sweet coming of age story love story about two young women who are trying to save a village from some magical stuff.

The reading experience above the naked was just wonderful. it's just one of those books that is just kind of perfect.

which is a really fun romp of a novel set in the late Victorian period... it's also a really fantastic coming of age story dealing with issues of gender and sexuality in a really complex, wonderful way.

this is simultaneously a really, really good crime novel that is intensely gripping and really, really fast-paced and also a really complex, nuanced, authentic look at OCD and the experience of living with OCD... I just think it is amazing.

this book is just so exquisitly written that I just I just absolutely loved it... I just thought this was an absolute masterpiece.

The Queen of Fives is a con novel about a woman in the late Victorian period who is trying to con a duke out of his fortune, and it just it's not what you expect and it's so good... It was magnificent.

this book is really well written really accessible really interesting dealing with really complex things taught me a lot about a bit of history I didn't know very much about as well as being a truly fantastic character study I would really recommend this book.

just the way this book is interwoven is just so well done... Would highly recommend this very much though it is quite festive so maybe save it for Christmas.

it's so well done. It's so exquisitly created. The characterization is just great and these three sisters very different stories and very different problems are really well explored and I just thought it was magnificently done.

The Housekeepers is a heist novel about some former servants in the Edwardian period pulling off a heist on a house where they used to work... and it's so good.

this one was a really good read with some fascinating elements. I really liked the depiction of ancient Greece and the society captured in this book and the twists and turns of the plot were very well done indeed.

I haven't even included in this video the winner of the W Scott Prize in 2005, the Landon Winter by Andrew Miller, which I did also really love and maybe should also be on this list.

The first one I want to talk about is The May bye by Angra Hampshire which is a complicated novel to say that you love because it's quite a upsetting novel in many ways... I would really recommend The Mayor.

This is a really weird book that is not going to be for everyone, but I just thought was so much fun and just like an utter delight and a very me kind of book.

which I thought was a really fantastic novel... I thought it was really, really well written. Very intense.

This is a YA thriller about a terrorist attack and four teenagers who are caught up in it. And it's just really powerful and really tense and very well done... So I'd highly recommend this.

It's a powerful coming of age story with really interesting characterization and really great themes and I really liked it as a take on Mansville Park that was doing something very different and was more like a thematic retelling than a plot retelling.

It's just really clever, really, really well-crafted with really good twists and turns, really great characterization, and just a great mystery. And I just yeah, I was just really impressed by it.