Flesh by David Szalay
This year’s Booker Prize winner is a “stunning portrayal of modern masculinity”, says The Times. It follows István’s life from being a vulnerable teenager in Hungary to the rich and lofty heights of London, covering intimacy, class and power struggles. While the prose is “wonderfully restrained”, there’s also lots of sex, sexily told. A rare worthy winner.
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The Predicament by William Boyd
This is the second book in Boyd’s “delicious” historical espionage series starring the travel writer and reluctant spy Gabriel Dax, says The New York Times. Sent to Berlin in 1963, Dax is more “useful idiot” than James Bond, destined to never truly understand the mission he’s on, but makes for an “affable, everyman operative”. It’s beautifully crafted, with echoes of John le Carré, Graham Greene and Frederick Forsyth.
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What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
This is one of McEwan’s “strangest and most chilling yet”, says The Times. Set partly in climate-ravaged Britain in 2119, where nuclear war and ecological collapse has killed off more than half the global population, the novel takes a “long view of right now”. How will we be judged in 100 years’ time? What will the universities of the future teach students about our present culture, literature and politics? It feels like his “most richly layered work in years”.
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The Names by Florence Knapp
This is the story of three different versions of the same life, with the trio of wildly differing fates stemming from one simple decision: Cara’s choice of name for her newborn son. It’s a “scintillating debut”, says The Independent, which builds on a clever premise with a “sly unpredictability”, addressing teenage misogyny, sexual identity and the power of true friendship. It’s a “future classic”.
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The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
The former Booker winner Desai was one of the favourites to win again this year, says the FT, with this tale of “thwarted love” between two Indians – aspiring novelist Sonia and journalist Sunny – in the US. Desai amplifies the experiences of the two women to tell a vast story of migration, family, belonging and the loneliness that can arise from attempts to meet the expectations of others. It is “gorgeous, transporting” fiction.
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Fly, Wild Swans by Jung Chang
No 1990s bookshelf was complete without Chang’s first memoir of her life under Mao, says The Daily Telegraph. Now, “it has a brilliant sequel”. Picking up from when Chang moved to England as an aspiring young writer, this second instalment whisks readers into the curious mind of a sheltered and brainwashed young woman experiencing Western freedom for the first time, and details what it’s like to live with the Chinese state increasingly on your heels. “Spine-chilling.”
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1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin
Sorkin, a New York Times journalist, covers the “sprawling story” of the seminal stock market and banking crash in an enjoyably focused way, says The Economist, reconstructing how crucial figures experience the ructions almost hour by hour. For the most part, readers are left to draw their own parallels between 1929 and 2025 – “there are some concerning ones” – but the pattern of hubris, disaster and regret also offers an important reminder that “the darkest moments pass”.
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Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood
There’s a “gently eccentric vibe” to the way Atwood chooses to write about her life in this “memoir of sorts”, says The Times. She talks about being a “flat-chested weirdo” who loved nature as a child, mentions her first television appearance showing off her pet praying mantis, and says of her beloved late partner, Graeme Gibson: “His attitude towards casual sex was the same as that towards bar fights… ‘I have no interest in rolling around on the floor with strangers’.” It’s all “very Atwoody”.
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Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
In this “unsparing yet darkly funny” memoir, says The New York Times, the Booker Prize-winning author captures the fierce, impossible, inspirational woman who shaped her as a writer – her mother, or “Mrs Roy, to you”. Mary Roy rises from the pages as an “imperious and volatile” parent, rather like Logan Roy of Succession, hurling crockery, slinging insults and beating her son. But Arundhati “doesn’t let herself off too easily” either. “Unforgettable.”
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Apple in China by Patrick McGee
Over the past two decades, Apple has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the Chinese market, which in McGee’s view constitutes a “geopolitical event, like the fall of the Berlin Wall”. Drawing on 200 interviews with former company executives and engineers, says the FT, he examines the history of the company’s “dependence” on Chinese manufacturing and the tensions between Donald Trump’s White House and Beijing.
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For those not interested in the heft of a hardback, The Times has compiled a list of the 31 best paperbacks published this year. They include Butter by Asako Yuzuki, which follows the relationship between a journalist and a reviled female prisoner; Colm Tóibín’s Long Island, the long-awaited follow-up to his wildly popular Brooklyn; The Wedding People by Alison Espach, full of sharp social observations and sparklingly funny prose; the compulsive thriller Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, which offers a minute-by-minute account of how a nuclear apocalypse would unfold; and Craig Brown’s A Voyage Around the Queen, an unconventional and tremendously fun biography of the late Elizabeth II. See the full list here.