Top Books of 2025: Critics' Picks

“Chang’s use of personal and intimate experience to make unfathomable political events accessible works as triumphantly today as it did 34 years ago”

“An engaging account of Chang’s life in Britain and China in the years since the Cultural Revolution ... thoughtful without being sentimental”

“A gripping memoir ... Chang is brilliant at excavating the psychology of totalitarianism”

“Has the dullest title of any novel published this year, but is easily the best I’ve read. The prose is blissfully good, up there with Roth and Bellow in old age”

“A philosophical novel masquerading as a bizarre dystopia of climate disaster”

“A piece of late-career showmanship from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure, I sometimes felt like laughing”

“Full of gorgeous nature writing and rueful human comedy, exploring where to find one’s centre in a globalised world”

“Magnificent ... A beautiful, haunting epic about love, loss and the search for personhood in the modern world”

“‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’ is among those most rarefied books: better company than real-life people”

“Sharp and funny ... a ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’-style tale of a young woman thrown into a series of improbable situations from which she manages to extricate herself”

“Fantastically gripping ... hilariously funny, and tells the truth about our new rulers, the tech billionaire elite”

“I loved ‘Careless People’ ... a gripping account of how Facebook became a corrosive force in democracy and people’s daily lives”

“A gripping, exhaustively researched and fast-paced account of Starmer’s rise to power ... It reads as if the authors were alongside McSweeney and Starmer as they grapple with multiple crises”

“The go-to book for anyone trying to understand what has gone wrong with Sir Keir Starmer’s government”

“McSweeney is the hero – or antihero, according to taste – of a rattling tale terrifically well told”

“Curious and idiosyncratic”

“Latronico has written one of the most brilliantly controlled works of social realism I’ve read in a while ... made me want to whoop and vomit at the same time”

“A crushingly sad indictment of a rootless generation – digital nomads wandering through a generic Europe ... it is funnier and far more moving than a book about the woes of late capitalism ought to be”

“Holmes proves a master of his craft ... he evokes Tennyson’s early years against the backdrop of the shifting scientific discoveries of the early 19th century”

“Holmes swats the crepe and the cobwebs away to restore the living Tennyson as he was before he fossilised into a Victorian sage”

“A fascinating insight into a great British poet whose depths ... remain boundless themselves”

“A wonderfully restrained vision of one man’s life. It’s a stunning portrayal of modern masculinity and a worthy Booker winner”

“Absolutely worth your time – a compelling, unobvious novel from an intriguingly restless writer”