Another year is almost over, and it’s time to look back at the books we read in 2025.

As always, it’s a rich and varied collection. The fiction section includes three Booker Prize longlisted books, including the winner, David Szalay’s Flesh, as well as Tash Aw’s The South and Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper. There are books from Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, France, Lithuania, Malaysia, Pakistan, Peru, South Korea and Switzerland, to name a few of the countries; and several from India, including ones translated from Kannada and Telegu.

There are a number of novels that centre on water: Playground by Richard Powers, This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson, Not a River by Selva Almada, James by Percival Everett, and There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak. Many of the books listed involve journeys, including the This Thing of Darkness, Not a River, and James, as well as Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong, Eve J. Chung’s Daughters of Shandong, Christian Kracht’s Eurotrash, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, which is set in space. And, as always, there is separate section for crime fiction.

This year’s picks for non-fiction include several from India: Sumanta Banerjee’s book on democracy in India, Ravinath Kisana’s examination of India’s urban elite, the contributions of ancient India (William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road) and of Hyderabad, my home town (Dinesh C. Sharma’s Beyond Biryani); as well as Sam Dalrymple’s look at the various partitions in Asia in the 1940s.

Under memoirs and biographies, we have writers, actors, the man who shaped New York City, and much more.

This year we have sections dedicated to poetry, and arts and crafts, as well as to the natural world and science, which includes books on microchimerism, birds and the nature of time. Travel books this year focus on the Americas.

There is a lot more, but I will let you discover them for yourself.

There were a few overlaps in your lists: Arundhati Roy’s memoir was popular this year as was Elif Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky and Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp. Other books making it onto more than one list were Samantha Harvey’sOrbital (if you haven’t read it, you should), Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands, Percival Everett’s James, and Susan Abulhawa’s Against a Loveless World. In these cases, I have included all the reviews. I was happy to see Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead on the list again this year, and I suspect we will be seeing it again in the years to come as more people discover it.

The books are arranged by category, year of publication (for works read in translation, I have used the year of publication in English unless the book was read in the original language), and author.

Links lead to reviews on this blog, or to my reviews of travel books, either on my new website or on Women on the Road.

A big thank you for your lists! The 2025 contributors are: Abbas Hassan, Caroline Dommen, Chanis Fernando-Boisard, Christina Nambiar, Dunja Krause, Fabien Dumesnil, Ismat Mehdi, Joannah Caborn-Wengler, Kristine Goulding, Leslie Jones, Mariana Duarte Mutzenberg, Naheed Bilgrami, Nandini Mehta, Paddy Torsney, Rishad Patell, Sadhana Ramchander, Sally-Anne Sader, Sonia Francis, Suroor Alikhan, Syeda Imam and Usha Raman.

Enjoy the list—I am sure you will find plenty of books you will want to read!

To help you navigate this long list, I have added links that take you directly to various sections:
Fiction / Crime fiction / Non-fiction / Arts and crafts / Memoirs/Autobiography/Biography / Nature and Science / Travel / Poetry

Fiction

The South: Tash Aw (2025)
A quiet book. That’s what I thought when I finished reading this lovely little gem of a story from Malaysia. To write a gay love story set in a deeply conservative country like Malaysia is a task and a half, but Tash Aw manages to give us a tender heart-warming coming out/coming of age story. The first book in a planned quartet by Aw, the story is narrated by Jay, the youngest child of a Malaysian couple of Chinese origin and is set in 1997 rural Malaysia.
The character of Jay and his relationship with Chuan, the caretakers’ son, is the main focus of this novel with smaller relationships slowly evolving as we get into the book—no doubt being set up for the remaining planned books.

The Hunger that Moved a Goddess and Other Stories:Endapalli Bharathi (2025, translated from Telugu by V.B. Sowmya; original version published in 2019)
Extraordinary stories of the lives of ordinary women in a village in Cuddapah, Andhra Pradesh. The stories, simply written in everyday language, are raw and powerful, much like Shyam Benegal’s Ankur or Nishant.

Londres 13h30: Laurence Boissier (2025)
My second 2025 favourite is at the opposite end of the spectrum from War and Peace (my other pick). It was published in 2025, runs to 112 pages and has only a handful of characters. Laurence Boissier’s Londres 13h30 is amusing and touching. Set in Geneva’s airport, its poignant premise, acute observations and deadpan humour make this zany story seem real. Certainly, now every time I’m in the airport I look to see the things hanging from passengers of flights from England and wonder when the hammam is going to open.

Railsong—A Woman Forges Her Life in a Changing India: Rahul Bhattacharya (2025)
Epic in scale, lyrical in its prose and gripping in its narrative power, this is the coming-of-age story of Charulata Chitol, who runs away from her home in a small railway colony with its narrow, stifling life, to forge her own path in Bombay. Parallel to her own journey runs the journey of independent India as it goes through industrial modernization, strikes, repressive governments and political upheavals, census enumerations and communal strife. Railsong is the portrait of an unforgettable woman pursuing her personal and professional destiny with grit and ingenuity, a layered and loving portrait of Bombay and its different worlds, and an intimate and often delightfully comic account of the Indian railways and the people who run it.

Solitaria: Eliana Alves Cruz (2025)
Centering on a mother and daughter who work as live-in maids for a wealthy Brazilian family. Offers a sharp perspective on race, class and colonialism. A brilliant coming-of-age novel that expertly crafts the value of the unseen lives of people who serve others.

A Guardian and a Thief: Megha Majumdar (2025)
Two disastrously entangled lives in a future famine-ridden Kolkata, India, follows two families over one week. Ma, her daughter Mishti and her father Dadu are trying to leave for America, but their passports are stolen by Boomba, a desperate thief.
A page-turner, edge-of-your-seat story that explores the moral compromises people make for family in a world of scarcity, showing how love and hope can lead to actions that are protective and destructive.If you liked Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, this is for you.

Heart Lamp—Selected Stories: Banu Mushtaq (2025, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi; original versions of stories first published in 2013 and 2023)
A selection of stories translated from Kannada about the Muslim community in Karnataka. Banu Mushtaq is an activist for women’s rights, and this comes through in her stories. Women put up with a lot from men—from their husbands, brothers, fathers, maulvis and others. Some of them manage to get their own back, but others just bear it.

In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. It has been awarded the International Booker Prize.

This collection of short stories centres on the lives of Muslim women from small-town Karnataka—their daily tragedies, hopes, and small rebellions. It is about oppression and the possibility of liberation, however remote. The translation is remarkable, even as the stories seem all too familiar, conveying the sensibility of the culture and language.

Flesh: David Szalay (2025)
Follows the life of a young Hungarian man, Istvan (who seems more acted upon than acting) through the course of his life from adolescence to old age. Written in strikingly spare prose.

Girl, 1983: Linn Ullmann (2025, translated from Swedish by Martin Aitken; original version published 2021)
Ullmann fashions a novel out of memory and forgetting, bringing into the present her 16-year-old self, lost in Paris, confused and earnest, seduced by the promise of having her photograph taken for Paris Vogue. It is at once heart-breaking and heart-warming, drawing on the love of a mother and the desire of an adolescent as it navigates the unreliable terrain of remembering.

Seascraper: Benjamin Wood (2025)
Haunting and timeless. This story sings on the page. Tells the story of a quiet existence upturned over the course of a day and a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows. He ekes out a living for himself and his mother by using a horse-drawn cart to trawl for shrimp and sell at the local market but he has dreams of becoming a folk singer.

Martyr: Kaveh Akbar (2024)
A young Iranian-American grapples with questions of faith, mortality and the complexities of cultural identity in today’s America. A fresh new voice in contemporary fiction.

Not a River: Selva Almada (2024, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott, original version published in 2021)
Three men go to an island in Argentina to fish: two middle-aged men, El Negro and Enero, and a younger one, Tilo, the son of Eusebio, their friend, who drowned in a similar expedition. But they are not welcome on the island. A short, pared-down book that packs a punch. Almada blurs the boundaries between the past and present, and the living and dead.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories: Julia Alvarez (2024)
Playful and reflective, this is a novel that begins in the voice of an acclaimed author and is taken over by the characters in the books she never wrote—whose stories eluded her as words. She builds a graveyard for these stories, where her groundskeeper, Filomena, hears their many tales. It makes one think: who has the right—and the means—to tell stories? And who has the ears and the heart to hear them?

Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung (2024)
Inspired by her grandmother’s story, Chung describes the harrowing passage of a mother and her daughters fleeing to Taiwan as the Communist Revolution sweeps across China. Beautifully told from the perspective of the oldest daughter, the story is one of resilience and strength in the face of abandonment, sexism and persecution. The book had me really captivated until the last page.

James: Percival Everett (2024)
A take on Huckleberry Finn, seen from the point of the view of the slave, Jim. I love Everett’s books: his writing is sharply observed, and he tells a great story. Jim has run away because he has heard he is going to be sold and separated from his wife and daughter. Huck pretends he is dead to escape his violent father. The two go down the Mississippi, hoping to elude their pursuers. A book about race, friendship and much more. Brilliant.

An alternative telling of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn from the point of view of Jim. This gives us entry to the slave’s story, his dangerous bid for freedom, the hypocrisy of the white slavers, and the power of language and naming.

Eurotrash: Christian Kracht (2024, translated from German by Daniel Bowles; original version published in 2021)
A man takes his 80-year-old mother for a trip around Switzerland. The mother’s father was a Nazi, and she married a man whose beliefs were diametrically opposed to her father’s. Mother and son decide to withdraw the large sum of money that she had invested in the arms trade and give it away. So they hire a cab and drive around the country, trying to disperse large sums of money. And also trying to resolve some of the issues between them (basically, they bicker throughout). Neither of them is particularly likeable, but the book is thoroughly enjoyable.

Playground: Richard Powers (2024)
A love letter to oceans and all its creatures. The book follows four people: Rafi, a Black boy whose father is determined that he will be better than white folk; his best friend Tod, the white son of a wealthy father; Evelyn, a French-Canadian diver in love with the ocean; and Ina, a child of the Pacific islands who marries Rafi. This is a story about how we are destroying the oceans, about friendship, the virtual world and the internet, and much more.

Polite Conversations: Usha Raman (2024)
A story about a family and three generations of women, the relationship between mothers and daughters, and all the things we leave unsaid. Raman captures grief and trauma very well.

Intermezzo: Sally Rooney (2024)
Two brothers, one an established lawyer and the other a chess prodigy, are separated by a generational age gap and very different personalities in contemporary Ireland. The novel traces their emotional journeys towards an understanding and acceptance of each other in the aftermath of their father’s death. Rooney’s signature style—characterised by sharp dialogue and deep psychological insight— is used to absorbing effect here.

There are Rivers in the Sky: Elif Shafak (2024)
Apart from its subject on the importance of water, which is timely as it becomes such a precious commodity in so many parts of the world, there is something rather magical about this book. It takes the reader to different times and places and three different points of view. All this following the story of one drop of water. I learnt about Mesopotamia, the plight of the Yazidi people, rivers in and under London, and human nature in general. A rich book with some delightful as well as some horrendous descriptions.

A novel that connects the lives of three characters across different centuries and continents through the journey of a single drop of water. It uses water as a metaphor to explore themes of interconnectedness, memory, cultural history and the lasting impact of trauma and stories.

Beginning with a raindrop that falls on King Ashurbanipal, the great Assyrian king, the story winds like a river through history. “King” Arthur of the Slums and Sewers escapes his miserable childhood on the banks of a polluted Thames to become a seeker of the lost tablets holding the epic of Gilgamesh. Naren is a 9-year-old Yazidi girl who grows up on the stories of early Mesopotamia but is captured by ISIS, one of thousands of Yazidi women so enslaved. Zaylekah is a hydrologist whose life’s work is about unravelling the mysteries of water, and the memories that it carries.

The Dark Side of Skin: Jeferson Tenório (2024, translated from Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato; original version published in 2020)
A man tries to put his own life into perspective by revisiting his father’s life and death. Set in São Paolo, the book is about racism and the way families affect the lives of children. Excellent.

The Book of Records: Madeleine Thien (2024)
Possibly my favourite book of the year. The beautiful prose carries you through a complex and intriguing story that unfolds in a building made of time, its characters staying in place as they converse across the space of centuries. Lena, who marks the present, finds her story intersecting with those of three “voyagers”—the Chinese T’ang era poet DuFu, Benedict Spinoza, and Hannah Arendt—whose ideas and lives jostle in her own journey of making meaning.

Brotherless Night: V V Ganeshanathan (2023)
The Sri Lankan civil war may have faded from global memory but this novel—which reads like narrative non-fiction—brings out vividly what it was like to live in the northern peninsula during the years of struggle for Eelam by the Tigers. Told from the point of view of 16-year-old Sashi who is studying to become a doctor, it narrates the saga of a single family that loses sons (and Sashi’s brothers) to the movement, the moral and ideological conflicts that drive communities apart.

Time Shelter: Georgi Gospodinov (2023, translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel; original version published in 2020.)
A man decides to create “clinics of the past”, carefully curated places where people with dementia and Alzheimer’s can live in a time that they knew. The idea spreads until entire countries want to go back to a specific decade. A book about memory, nostalgia and the danger of slipping into a version of the past. It feels very relevant, especially now with the rise of nationalism in many countries, and a nostalgia for a golden past that never really existed.

Restless Dolly Maunder: Kate Grenville (2023)
Born at the end of the 19th century when society’s long-locked doors are just starting to crack ajar for determined women. Growing up in a poor farming family in rural New South Wales, Dolly spends her life pushing at these doors.

Orbital: Samantha Harvey (2023)
This is the best book I’ve read this year. There is not much of a plot, just six astronauts in space and their thoughts. The only things that happen is that one of the astronaut’s mother dies, and a typhoon builds on earth. It is beautifully and thoughtfully written, the kind of writing you go back to. The detail is incredible: you would think that Harvey has been to space. Watching the earth from afar, as one continent melts into another, no borders to be seen, brings home how precious our planet is and how the divisions we create among ourselves are so utterly meaningless.

The novel takes place over the course of a single day on board the International Space Station, where six astronauts from different countries circle the Earth. The passage of time is marked by the orbiting of the station, which experiences multiple sunrises and sunsets in a 24-hour period. The story moves between the perspectives of the six astronauts as they carry out their routines, and explores themes of isolation, interconnectedness, and the fragility of the planet below.

Yellowface: Rebecca F. Kuang (2023)
The Times review quoted on the inside cover of my copy says, “A wicked little satire of publishing, racial politics and icky internet culture”, and I can’t do better than that for a summary of this excellent, highly entertaining and clever book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, including the twist at the end. It does what the best satires do in turning our assumptions on their heads to make us question them. Highly recommended.

August Blues: Deborah Levy (2023)
A strange, beautifully told story about a pianist in search of a lost past, and her relationship with her dying mentor. Elsa is convinced she has a psychic double who communes with her, turning up at unexpected moments, and through whom, she is convinced, she will reconnect with her mother who abandoned her at birth.

Glory: NoViolet Bulawayo (2022)
A satirical novel set in the fictional African country of Jidada. A Zimbabwean version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the book uses a cast of animals to allegorise the fall of Mugabe’s despotic regime and the turbulent aftermath.

Homesick: Jennifer Croft (2022)
A girl cares for her younger sister, who falls sick. A coming-of-age story, beautifully told from the older sister’s point of view, a story about the relationship between the two siblings and how it develops as they grow older.

As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow: Zoulfa Katou (2022)
The quotation at the beginning of As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow is “Every lemon will bring forth a child, and the lemons will never die out” suggests both the promise and poignancy of the story to come. Braving the tragedies that seem prescient of the events in Gaza, the story tells of the human resolve to survive. On the one hand, there are the horrors and atrocities the soldiers of Bashar al Assad rain upon those who resist, and on the other, the humane qualities of the sufferers. Their ability to rise above their own tragedies, to do all they can to help fellow human beings in the face of bombings and chemical attacks, makes reading this book possible. Then the growing romance of Salama and Kenan suggesting a better denouement. Salama, the brave young woman fighting against many fronts to save family, friends and an endless stream of patients, and Kenan, who in his own way joins Salama to face the waves and leave their homeland behind. Unlike most novels painting scenes of couples coming close to each other in normal milieus, this is set in turbulent times, but the coming together is not marked by urgency but subtle restraint even when challenges are overwhelming.

Demon Copperhead: Barbara Kingsolver (2022)
Now, I know the blog has already covered this book, but I couldn’t resist, it is SOOO good! So much of the place and time where it’s set, yet so Dickensian (it is a retelling of David Copperfield). Come for the fantastic story-telling, stay for the intelligence, humour and social justice.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: Gabrielle Zevin (2022)
Two totally different but magically talented game developers hurtle their way through their lives and careers: between kudos and fiasco, triumph and heartbreak, between Los Angeles and Boston. And all the while, Zevin holds the reader because her book is superbly written. Her writing is unaffected, rare, I would say exceptional. An author to watch.

Against a Loveless World: Susan Abulhawa (2020)
Nahr, a Palestinian woman grows up in Kuwait, and marries the wrong man, who abandons her. She becomes an escort, and eventually returns to Palestine, where she falls in love with her husband’s brother and finds a purpose to her life. She ends up imprisoned in a state-of-the-art Israeli prison, known as The Cube, and that is from where she narrates her story. Harrowing.

A searing, beautiful, heart-breaking novel about Palestine, displacement, resistance, survival and love. Nahr/Yaqut is a young Palestinian woman whose family arrives in Kuwait as refugees, then is forced to flee to Jordan in the aftermath of the US invasion to oust Saddam Hussein. She turns to sex work to support her family, then finds herself in Palestine where she joins the resistance to Israeli occupation. The story is narrated by Nahr as she serves time in the Cube, an infamous Israeli prison.

The Last Day: Jaroslavas Melnikas (2018, translated from Lithuanian by Marija Marcinkute; original version published in 2018)
These are a collection of absurdist short stories from a Lithuanian writer. People are given the knowledge of the date of their death, and everyone reacts differently: some celebrate their death day with a big party, others take it less well. A man spends his life dictated to by an unknown authority, telling him where to go and what to do, and finds comfort in not having to think. A woman regresses through time until she is a foetus. A man discovers a cinema showing a film that never ends, and it takes over his life. I found these stories intriguing: they are surreal and dreamlike.

Chéri / The End of Chéri: Colette (2017, translated from French by Rachel Careau and published as a single volume; original versions published in 1920 and 1926 respectively)
A story about the ending of the relationship between Lea, an older but beautiful courtesan at the end of her sexual career and Chéri, a young supremely beautiful but shallow man. They have loved each other for a long time, but Cheri must get on with his young life and must marry.

Human Acts: Han Kang (2017)
A harrowing novel about the student-led Gwangju Uprising in South Korea in May 1980, which was violently suppressed by the military and resulted in a massacre of citizens. Through a series of interconnected narratives, the book shows how the lives of ordinary people were affected by the violence and trauma of the event.

Ernesto: Umberto Saba (2017, translated from Italian by Mark Thompson; original version published in 1975)
A classic gay literature of sexual awakening. A sixteen-year-old boy is sent by his mother to get work experience in a local business warehouse. One day an employee makes advances to Ernesto who responds with willing curiosity.

Love in Chakiwara and other Misadventures: Muhammad Khalid Akhtar (2016, translated from Urdu by Bilal Tanveer; original version published in 2000)
Four hilarious stories comprise this volume—The Smiling Buddha, The Love Meter, The Downfall of Seth Tanwari and the longest story, Love in Chakiwara and other Misadventures.
A small Karachi neighbourhood, Chakiwara is humdrum and unspectacular to all appearances. But inside its shops and at the street corners, there is curious business afoot. Chronicling the drama that unfolds daily is Iqbal Hussain Changezi, bakery owner and collector of writers and geniuses. He has his eyes on out-of-work comedian Chakori, apprentice to a Chinese dentist, even as the town’s mostly unsuccessful healer of physical and spiritual maladies prepares to unleash his top-secret invention, the love meter.
Muhammad Khalid Akhtar presents a world at once familiar and peculiar but always surprising, his unforgettable characters keeping alive the old ways in a quietly changing Karachi in post-independence Pakistan. Love in Chakiwara is a true testament to the wit, sagacity and quiet brilliance of one of the greatest storytellers of his time.

Le Quatrième mur : Sorj Chalandon (2013)
This is a harrowing read, and I had difficulty with some passages, especially due to my connections with Lebanon, but the book is beautifully written and one becomes very attached to the characters. However, as I said, it is not an easy book to read.

The Hussaini Alam House: Huma R. Kidwai (2012)
In the writer’s words, “The central character of my life was the house itself. A larger than life presence, brooding and funny at the same time, it still permeates my dreams. They are situated in that house, I once resided in it, now it resides in me. I could not belong to any other.” The book is an elegy to a vanished way of life, a psychologically nuanced portrait of the women of the household as they thread a fine line between society’s expectations and their own yearning for freedom.

The Vegetarian: Han Kang (2007)
A powerful and unsettling novel that explores themes of the body, autonomy, societal expectations, and resistance. It is about a woman who, after a series of disturbing dreams, suddenly decides to stop eating meat. This seemingly simple decision escalates into a disruption of her relationships with her husband, family and wider society, leading to tragic consequences.

Travesuras de la niña mala: Mario Vargas Llosa (2006; translated into English by Edith Grossman and published in 2007 as The Bad Girl)
I was prompted to read this book by the writer’s death in April 2025. He was a Latin American “transfuge/defector” who fell in love with France, like I did during my teenage years. I had never read any of his books before, despite his winning the Nobel Prize in 2010.
The novel starts in Peru, where the main character (the author’s alter ego) grew up, hoping for a life in Paris. He falls in love with a “bad girl” who herself wanted to become someone else, pretending to hide her lower socioeconomic class behind a false Chilean identity. And that identity changes throughout the book.
The male protagonist as an adult lives a modest life in Paris, and stumbles upon the “bad girl” throughout his life, in different circumstances and places, and under varying identities. What does not change is his unconditional surrender to this woman.
This is a story of absolute love, imperfection and loyalty despite all the odds. Where intensity of feelings supersedes reason. Where forgiveness appears as a strength, not weakness.
I would highly recommend it.

This Thing of Darkness: Harry Thompson (2005)
This is a fictionalized biography of Robert FitzRoy, commander of HMS Beagle, set between 1828 to 1865. FitzRoy was commander of the ship when Charles Darwin made his famous voyage.
I loved this book. True, it is somewhat on the long side, but so worth the time invested.
I highly recommend it to those who have not yet had the pleasure. I learnt an awful lot about sea travel during that period, the creation of the UK meteorological office, Darwin’s work, the tribes of Patagonia, the Falklands, and other remote parts of the world.

The Story of the Night: Colm Toibin (1997)
Set in Buenos Aires in the 70s to the early 90s, the novel is about a man with British roots navigating life through the events taking shape in Argentina and how those affect his situation. The novel highlights themes of culture, war, homosexuality, mother-son relationship and seeing life being torn apart with helplessness and sombre reflections. This book’s atmosphere haunted me for days and made me more curious about Argentina and life in its largest city during that period.

Lonesome Dove: Larry McMurtry (1985)
An epic of the frontier. A love story, an adventure with an extensive cast of eclectic characters. It follows a couple of Texas rangers on their last cattle drive from Texas to Montana: a journey filled with danger and hardship. The book explores themes of friendship, loss and unrequited love.

So Long, See You Tomorrow: William Maxwell (1980)
A brief and exquisite story about a murder in 1920s Illinois that resulted from an adulterous relationship that broke up two families. It is narrated by a boy who seems to be a young Maxwell and was friends with Cletus, the son of the murderer. Themes of loss, memory, guilt and the impact of the past on the present. It emphasizes the lasting damage caused by the actions of adults that deeply affect children and friends for a lifetime.

Shadows on our Skin: Jennifer Johnston (1977)
A terrifyingly everyday rendition of living in the midst of the Troubles in Ireland in the 1970s, but that’s just the background. The characterisation is fantastic, as always in Jennifer Johnston’s novels, she helps you see right through people and the difficult choices they sometimes make in impossible circumstances.

The Hour of the Star: Clarice Lispector (1977)
This novella recounts scenes from the life of Macabea, a poor girl from the northeastern region of Brazil who is working in Rio, scraping by, living a life of marked poverty. The narrator provides a biting description of a woman considered to have no feminine charms, little intellect and is just plain ugly. And to top it off, he questions her personal hygiene. But Macabea has good points; her friendliness, willingness to make do, her joy at the little things in life. At times she seems happier than the bitter man who describes her humdrum life. Macabea realizes that there is a big world out there, somewhere, and one cannot help but feel for her.

The Bridge of Beyond: Simone Schwarz-Bart (1974)
An intoxicating tale of love and wonder, mothers and daughters, spiritual values and the grim legacy of slavery on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe. Long-suffering Telumee tells her life story and that of the proud line of Lougandor women she draws strength from.

Titus Groan: Mervyn Peake (1946)
This book is incredible in so many ways: fantastical, grotesque, slow-moving, yet it draws you in like a moth to a flame and is utterly fascinating. Each sentence is almost a poem in itself, it has a density of imagination that’s quite unique, and honestly sometimes a little overwhelming. Not sure I’ll read the next two in the trilogy, but my word, it was a good read.

Middlemarch—A Study of Provincial Life: George Eliot (1871-72)
Reread this book after decades. Beautifully observed, interesting characters and a book you can get lost in. Eliot has a way of capturing the essence of her characters with all their strengths and weaknesses.

War and Peace: Leo Tolstoy (first English translation published in 1886, translated from Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in 2007; original version published in 1869)
This was the most noteworthy book I read this year. Luckily Suroor didn’t require our 2025 favourites to have been published this year, as this one is 150 years old. War and Peace has been on my to-read list for a while but never made it to the top, which is hardly surprising given its weight. The nudge came late last year when I learned about slow-reads of big books, one chapter a day. As War and Peace has 361 chapters and an epilogue, it is perfect for a year-long read. And as most chapters are only a few pages long, it seemed a manageable way to approach such a lengthy book. The experience has been amazing. The story itself is rich, accessible and enjoyable. And the granularity a slow read offers made it even more of an experience. It gives each chapter time to sink in, and also offers the opportunity to consider each chapter from different angles through discussions with other year-long slow readers via the Footnotes and Tangents platform, and through a weekly podcast summary.

The Count of Monte Cristo: Alexandre Dumas (first English translation published in 1846, translated from French by Robin Buss in 1996; original version published in 1846)
For a book that is over 1200 pages long, I found it difficult to put down! It seldom flags—well, a few times, but not enough to make me put it down—and the story is compelling. Edouard Dantès is a young man, about to be made captain of his ship, engaged to be married to a woman he loves. But the two men who are jealous of him—one because he wants his job, and the other because he wants his woman—conspire to have him arrested as a supporter of Napoleon, who is in exile. The public prosecutor is sympathetic until he finds that Edouard might unknowingly implicate his father. The result is that Edouard ends up being sent to the Château d’If—a notorious prison on an island—for 14 years. A fellow prisoner, an intellectual, passes on all his knowledge, and gives him a map to buried treasure. And Edouard emerges as the crazily rich Count of Monte Cristo, ready to wreak vengeance on the men who put him away. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Crime fiction

Hot Stage: Anita Nair (2024)
The third in the Borei Gowda procedurals, this fast-paced novel is similarly set in Bangalore, this time digging into the unholy nexus between the land mafia, underground fights that come with heavily weighted odds, and political power.

The Briar Club: Kate Quinn (2024)
A thrilling tale of female friendships and secrets, The Briar Club deftly combines mystery, history, and the complexities of female friendships. Set against the Red Scare in 1950s Washington, D.C., this book transports readers through secrets, suspense, and the relationships that develop in the most improbable settings.
The Briar Club is a boarding house for women where everything is hidden behind a white picket fence. The mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, which brings her neighbours from different backgrounds together in a way they did not expect. Her weekly dinner parties in the attic and homemade sun tea help the residents feel like they are part of a community, helping them heal. However, Grace has a dark secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence happens in the house, the women have to face the real enemy who lives among them.

The Last Devil to Die: Richard Osman (2023)
Another romp from the Thursday Murder Club, but this one has more depth. Stephen, Elizabeth’s husband, is getting worse—his dementia is taking over, and they need to find a way to manage the future. Osman’s description of the dementia is very real. I love the fact that the real love story here involves the woman who shows the least emotion. And then there is a missing box with heroin, a murdered friend, and drug dealers. But drugs aside, this is a book about love, friendship and farewells.

Murder in the Pettah: Jeanne Cambrai (2001)
A young English woman is found dead in the Pettah—an area in Colombo, Sri Lanka, that people don’t wander into at night. Her father hires CV, a Sri Lankan Burgher, to look into it. But the more CV investigates, the more secrets he uncovers; even the father isn’t all he seems to be. Although I guessed whodunnit, I enjoyed the book. It has a great sense of place and a good plot with plenty of twists and turns. And I learned about the Sri Lankan Burghers, a community I had not heard of before.

The Devil’s Flute Murders: Seishi Yokomizo (2023, translated from Japanese by Jim Rion; original version published in 1973)
Tsubaki, a man from an aristocratic family disappears; his body is discovered several weeks later. Then someone who looks like him—or the “dead” man himself—starts to appear, sometimes playing a disturbing tune on a flute that Tsubaki had composed. When a family member is murdered, Detective Kosuke Kindaichi is called in to solve the puzzles. I enjoy Japanese whodunnits because they’re a little strange, in a good way.

Non-fiction

A Political Dialogue—Diaries of a Long Journey: Sumanta Banerjee (2025)
One of the best critical treatises on the volatile state of democracy in India in the time of Modi. A selection of essays, written over the last decade, discuss state violence, dissent and its consequences for intellectuals and activists.

Shattered Lands—Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia: Sam Dalrymple (2025)
The idea of reading yet again another history of the partition of India was, quite honestly, unappealing. Every book based on the partition has its core in Delhi, the Punjab and Bengal with stories from some princely states thrown in for good measure. The stories are about Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Patel and Mountbatten. Rarely do we hear about partition and the history of the subcontinent from deep in the Deccan. Or from Myanmar. Or Yemen. All parts of the “Indian Empire” that were also deeply affected by the years running up to 1947. And this is the premise of this new book by Sam Dalrymple—a look at the history of partition from the many corners of the Indian empire.
The book covers the five partitions that changed South Asia including the partition of Aden and Burma from India and culminating in West and East Pakistan’s division into what is now Bangladesh. Dalrymple looks into the princely states through the oft-told stories of Hyderabad, Junagadh and Kashmir, but he peppers his stories with information that is current, relevant and often surprising. These have been researched through previously untranslated private memoirs written in Hindi, Punjabi, Burmese, Konyak, Urdu and Arabic—all of which give you a personal insight into ordinary stories from the partition.

A refreshing new look at modern Asian history through partitions, resulting not just in the creation of West and East Pakistan, but also divisions involving Burma, Aden and some Gulf States. Extensively researched from newly mined archival sources and written with great verve and narrative skill, this is an eye-opening work by a brilliant young historian.

Meet the Savarnas—Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything:Ravikanth Kisana (2025)Ravikanth Kisana documents the lives, concerns and the crises of India’s urban elites, to frame the Savarnas as a distinct social cohort, one that operates within itself, and yet oblivious of its own social rules, privileges and systems.
This book holds a mirror to the “Savarnas”: upper caste Indians (Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vysyas), who, merely by their advantaged position in life coming down through generations, hold important posts and run businesses.
Kisana states some hard truths that no one can deny. The book has eight chapters covering the corporate world, education, romance, marriage, development and the Savarna exodus from India.
As the newspaper The Hindu said, “No reader, whether from above or below the glass floor, can get through these pages without multiple moments of discomfiting self-recognition.”

The Golden Road—How Ancient India Transformed the World: William Dalrymple (2024)
An eye-opening tour-de-force of Indian history of the classical period. Filled with rich discoveries of how India’s soft power spread across the region through Buddhism, art, trade and mathematics, India’s links with the Romans, and how the advent of Buddhism influenced China during the ages. Written with clarity and witty prose.

Beyond Biryani—The Making of a Globalised Hyderabad: Dinesh C. Sharma (2024)
The developments and inventions in the city before its merger with the Indian Union are little known or acknowledged. The book tells in detail about the discoveries of chloroform, malaria, the first vernacular university, and the establishing of industrial laboratories before 1947, when Hyderabad was under the Nizam. And after the merger, of how Hyderabad has emerged as a highly developed technological city, leading IT giant, and the foremost producer of medicines and missiles.

The Panama Papers—Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money: Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer (2017, translated from German by Simon Pare, Seiriol Dafydd, Alice Paul and Jackie Smith; original version published in 2016)
The book about how two journalists at the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper received leaked files about how the rich hide their wealth in offshore accounts, using shell companies that are set up in such a complicated way that the owners’ names do not appear on them. The whistleblower (whose name is still not known) was sending them huge amounts of data which allowed Obermaier and Obermayer, along with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, to uncover the truth, implicating not only criminals but also celebrities and even heads of state. Shocking but not surprising (or have I become cynical?).

Sapiens—A Brief History of Humankind: Yuval Noah Hariri (2014, translated from Hebrew by the author with the help of John Purcell and Haim Watzman; original version published in 2011)
A history of humans from the Stone Age to the present. A book that I return to rather than read at a stretch.

The Wealth of Nations: Adam Smith (1776)
On my subway ride in to work in Manhattan, reading a few pages at a time, I spent the last nine months riveted by The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith’s celebrated work on the principles of a market economy. The Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776, the year that the US declared its independence from Great Britain. Adams Smith’s influence from Glasgow was far-reaching, immediate, and direct. George Washington’s copy of The Wealth of Nations is kept in the archives of Princeton University.
Adam Smith’s account of the troubles and hopes for the American Colonies are an insightful contemporaneous historical record at a time of transition where a world ruled by monarchies, mercantilism, and monopolies was being challenged and at times changed. Two hundred and fifty years later his voice is clear and accounts are vivid and rich for comparison to our contemporary reality.

Arts and crafts

Gobar Dhan—Artistic Visual Expressions in Cow Dung: Rekha Bhatnagar (2025)
A beautifully illustrated study of four expressive folk-art forms made with gobar or cow dung in India—Bitawada, Badkula, Sanjhi and Govardhan. This book is a tribute to the unrecognized rural and urban women artists who continue to practise these remarkable traditions. Over 250 photographs, drawings, interesting findings, experiences and stories make this a rich addition to the understanding of folk art in Rajasthan, the author’s home state.

Weaving with Compassion—The Rikhyas of Kutch: Meera Goradia, photographs and design by Ragini Siruguri (2023)
This is a book with a soul. It is about the life and work of the Meghwal weavers of Kutch—the source of their creativity and the spiritual wisdom that moors them to their craft. Drawing on interviews with weavers, their reflections on their craft and labour, and onsite photographs, the book documents a century of historical change. Equally, it celebrates the imagination that has sustained the weavers’ craft and their social lives and relationships.

Memoirs/Autobiography/Biography

Telling Me My Stories: Fragments of a Himalayan Childhood: Kunzang Choden (2025)
A portrait of life in a remote village in the beautiful Bumthang valley in central Bhutan, where the author grew up and where her family—feudal lords—owned a castle.
Kunzang Choden, author of the bestselling novel The Circle of Karma, evokes, in this memoir, a now vanished world, largely isolated from modern influences, with its magnificent landscapes and its changing seasons, its culture deeply spiritual as well as ruggedly pastoral. As Bhutan gradually opens to the outside world, the author describes the changes this brings into their lives, and the shock of being sent away to school in Kalimpong.
Poignant and moving, often melancholy, often humorous and always lyrical, this is a wonderful family story which is also an invaluable historical record of social and cultural life in Bhutan.

Mother Mary Comes to Me: Arundhati Roy (2025)Arundhati Roy’s memoir of her mother is, I am sure, a book that will feature on many ‘best books’ lists. In prose of breathtaking power and beauty, she presents a portrait of a woman at war with her community, with herself and with her children, a force for justice and equality, a woman capable of uncommon courage and shocking cruelty, and a pioneering and brilliant educationist. By turn deeply moving, horrifying, inspiring, darkly funny and searingly honest.

An engaging memoir of the author’s life, and her remarkable mother, told in Roy’s inimitable and highly original style.

Viewfinder—A Memoir: Amol Palekar (2024)Oh, what a beautiful book by a talented, kind, empathetic, sensitive artist-actor-director, whom I have always loved and admired. Amol Palekar goes down memory lane and shares distilled memories of his 80-year old odyssey framed through a viewfinder handed down to him by the director Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Palekar and his wife Sandhya Gokhale have generously shared, through QR codes, 24 links to his films and a few theatre performances. What a treat!

Living with Birds—The Memoir of One of India’s Greatest Ornithologists: Asad Rahmani (2024)The memoirs of one of India’s greatest ornithologists, about a life spent studying India’s birds and landscapes, fighting for endangered species and shaping India’s fledgling conservation movement.

Ratan N. Tata—A Life: Thomas Matthew (2022)
Biographies are often about famous people who strive through hardships to become legends in their fields, or about ordinary people with ordinary lives, until some incident leads them to shine. Others are born great as Ratan Tata was. His achievements inspired many to write about him and his extraordinary life.
The book traces in detail the long arc of Tata’s life and career: his lonely childhood, his schooling in Bombay where Zubin Mehta was a friend, his education at Cornell (which is one of the more interesting parts of the book), his joining Tatas after his return to India, and stints in NELCO and Empress Mills.
With inputs from a variety of interviews, this is a comprehensive account of Ratan Tata’s life and times, his struggles and his important contributions to contemporary India. What emerges is the story of a private individual, a great industrialist and a remarkable leader who steadfastly believed, above all, in the values that he inherited, and who spent his life in the service of his fellow humans and a fledgling nation.

Educated—A Memoir: Tara Westover (2018)
Tara Westover grew up in a family of survivalists in the Idaho mountains and did not go to school until she was 17. Education and the acquisition of knowledge became important to her, and completely changed her life: she went to Harvard and the University of Cambridge. It is tough to imagine that these two contexts of the author’s life can coexist. It is tougher to believe how she combines both of these, giving up neither. Hurtling between the suffocating, sacred, almost punishing diktats of one to the mind-opening, free-thinking regimen of Harvard is a journey of suspense. Certainly, an affecting read.

Examined Lives—From Socrates to Nietzsche: James Miller (2011)
Miller looks at what makes a life worth living through 12 short biographies of philosophers. Minds we know of and have been fascinated by and tried to fathom. Not just as leaders but as people coping with their lives: their times, trials, rivalries, their surroundings. Philosophers considered to be remarkable and key to an understanding of Western thought over time, each one different. The book looks at twelve minds of the Western world (Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, Aristotle, Seneca, Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Emerson and Nietzsche) in an account that makes them human.

Made in Palestine—journal d’une francaise a Ramallah—temoignage : Fanny Germain (2004)
After completing her studies in international law, 25-year-old Fanny Germain was recruited for a training internship at a Palestinian NGO in Jerusalem. She stayed in Ramallah for three years. She trained as a journalist, shared the daily life of the inhabitants and met the love of her life, Ali, a Palestinian son of a prominent personality.
Although the author approached her stay and her initial internship though the eyes of a Westerner and with pro-Israeli sentiments, daily life of travelling in perilous conditions to Ramallah and back, meeting many misadventures, taught her to change her outlook, to understand the human struggle on a larger scale as she journeyed through her three years.
She struggled to make her family understand the relationship she was in, which, seen through Western eyes, was one which could be easily dropped for the convenience of her family.
The end is abrupt; we see her returning to Europe. There is just one sentence which could reveal a final parting, when she watched her love walk away. Perhaps it is meant to be interpreted by the reader. The author dedicated the book to her Ali – “A Ali, ya rohi.”
The author, a journalist and documentalist, shuttles between France and Germany and has many programmes on French TV.

The Last Gift of Time—Life Beyond Sixty: Carolyn Heilbrun (1997)
Heilburn had decided not to live beyond 70, but looking back at her life during her 60s, she finds that they were the most fulfilling decade. A book about the pleasures of being older.

The Power Broker: Robert Caro (1974)
The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Robert Moses, tells the story of how one unelected man reshaped New York City and its surroundings through sheer will, intellect, and political cunning. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Moses built parks, bridges, highways, and housing projects on an unprecedented scale, transforming the physical landscape while also exposing the darker side of American power. Caro’s book reveals how Moses mastered bureaucracy, manipulated laws, and outlasted politicians to amass influence that rivalled that of mayors and governors.
I found this book because it was covered as a mini-project of one of my favourite podcasts, 99% Invisible. The mini-series revisits The Power Broker, examining how Moses’s legacy still defines urban life today. The series explores the tension between vision and control, public good and private ambition through an examination of the book and with interviews with politicians, urban designers, and other experts on questions that feel acutely relevant in today’s polarized political climate.
In an era where large-scale infrastructure projects, from renewable energy grids to public transit expansion, struggle under political gridlock and mistrust, Caro’s portrait of Moses is both a warning and a lesson. It reminds us that transformative change demands both vision and accountability.  The Power Broker endures because it shows how power, once seized, can be used to build—or to exclude—and how its consequences echo for generations.

Diary of a Young Girl: Anne Frank (1947; translated by Susan Masotty, first published in English in 1952)
Having just been to the New York exhibit here, where the family’s hiding rooms have been recreated, and there is much description of the decades leading to WWII and the restriction of human rights, it was a stark reminder of how much is at stake and how easily democracy and rule of law can slip and how quickly. 
The book surprised me as Anne Frank is a wonderful writer and observer, and her feelings are so well-articulated. 

Nature and science

Hidden Guests—Migrating Cells and How the New Science of Microchimerism Is Redefining Human Identity: Lise Barnéoud (2025, translated from French by Bronwyn Haslam; original version published in 2023)
Hidden Guests explores the striking phenomenon of microchimerism—the exchange of cells between mother and child that can persist for decades. Barnéoud blends science with thoughtful reflections on identity, asking what it means when part of someone else lives within us. A concise, accessible read that opens up fascinating questions about the body, family and the boundaries of the self.

Let’s Talk About Trees: Roopa Pai, illustrated by Barkha Lohia (2024)
Important facts about trees presented with enthusiasm, to answer the question, “What is a tree?”, an answer that will be revealed when you learn to see a tree with your heart. Descriptions about the ‘Desi dozen’ trees: banyan, peepal, tamarind, khejdi, neem, palash, deodar, semal, teak, jackfruit, badam and amaltas.

Owls of the Eastern Ice—A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl: Jonathan C. Slaght (2020)
Jonathan C. Slaght spends months in eastern Russia, researching the fish owl, a large owl that lives in the woods in eastern Russia and Japan. Slaght’s writing is so vivid, you feel you are there—in dilapidated huts with snow outside, trudging through woods and rivers, in search of owls that seem to be easier to hear than to see. His aim is to find out as much as he can about these birds, the better to protect them. When he finally holds one, it is almost halfway through the book, and you feel the triumph that he must have felt.

The Order of Time: Carlo Rovelli (2018, translated from Italian by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell; original version published in 2017)
Rovelli, a quantum physicist, looks at the nature of time in detail. It turns out that all the things we thought we knew about time are false—it is not linear, it is not universal, and it does not act the way we think it does. So what exactly is it? He breaks it down and builds it up again. I did not understand all of it, but it did give me plenty to think about.

The Last Elephant—An African Quest: Jeremy Gavron (1994)
This book takes its reader through an interesting journey through the wilds of Africa and the plight of its wildlife, especially elephants.
Although Burundi had lost all its elephants in the 1970s, it still exported many tons of ivory smuggled into the country. But there was one elephant left, and Jeremy goes to look for it in various places. He eventually finds the adolescent elephant on the Zaire side of the river.

Travel

South to America—A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation: Imami Perry (2022)
Imami Perry believes that, to understand the United States, you need to understand the South. She is from Alabama but has lived outside the state for many years. She heads back to the South, travelling through the region to try to make sense of the country. This is a mix of travelogue, memoir and history. It is quite harrowing to read in parts, and leaves you with the feeling that the country was built on bloodshed and pain, rather than the way many have seen it: as the shiny land of opportunity.

Spirit Run­—A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land: Noé Álvarez (2020)
Noé Álvarez is a child of Mexican immigrants, living in Washington state. His parents work in a factory—physically arduous, repetitive work. He gets into university but has trouble fitting in—the background of the students is very unlike his own. When he hears about the Peace and Dignity Runs, set up by and for indigenous peoples, he joins it (one of his grandmothers came from an indigenous tribe). The run is gruelling: it goes right across North America up to the Panama Canal and becomes a journey of self-discovery which helps him understand his roots.

Travels in a Thin Country—A Journey through Chile: Sara Wheeler (1999)
Sara Wheeler travelled through Chile, one of the longest countries in the world (4,270 km). An interesting and informative account of her time there.

Poetry

Varavar Rao—A Life in Poetry: edited by N. Venugopal and Meena Kandasamy (2023)
Varavar Rao is a poet, literary critic, public speaker, and teacher of language and literature. This is the first-ever collection in English of the poems by the Telugu poet, selected and translated from sixteen books that he wrote. The poems are a blend of tender response and thoughtful reaction to social realities and an explosion of powerful emotions from a voice sought to be subdued. According to Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, “Varavar Rao’s words are lyrics to freedom and social justice everywhere”.

Dearly: Margaret Atwood (2020)
These are poems of loss and absence, of the spaces left by someone who has gone, poems of memories, deaths and endings. But this is Atwood: although there is sadness and anger, there is also plenty of humour and playfulness.