The Nerve's Best Books of 2025

Lead poisoning has been persuasively linked to rising crime in postwar America. Might a giant smelter in Tacoma, Washington therefore factor into the epidemic of serial killers in the Pacific north-west during the 70s and 80s? That hypothesis drives Caroline Fraser’s extraordinary page-turner Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers (Fleet). I find most true crime stories grubby and voyeuristic but Murderland has the sweep of a Great American Novel as Fraser interlaces the stories of killers like Ted Bundy with revelations of corporate amorality and environmental ruin – all the perpetrators united in the belief that life is cheap. For Christmas I’m hoping to get The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s by Jason Burke (Bodley Head): I can’t get enough of the weirdness of 70s politics so this story of terrorists, hijackers and celebrity militants should hit the spot.

There have been many great music books this year but Radio 3 broadcaster Elizabeth Alker’s debut, Everything We Do Is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop (Faber), deserves top billing for nailing the tricky task of making the avant-garde stuff make sense. A gateway drug into music that has historically been considered difficult, it explores the work of composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pauline Oliveros and Krzysztof Penderecki and links them to the Beatles, Radiohead and Donna Summer, mapping out a brilliantly detailed constellation of eccentrics and innovators, then and now. The dawn of the synthesiser gets ample attention and while it’s not easy to encapsulate electronic music, the way that Alker describes her way around a Moog is masterful. Speaking of NYC radicals, I'm hoping to get my mitts on Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde – Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop by J Hoberman (Verso). I love reading about how the counterculture intersects (and, let's be honest, who’s copping off with who), including Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann and Andy Warhol.

The Possibility of Tenderness (Penguin) is a book rich with feeling and honesty. Written by TS Eliot Prize and Forward Prize-winning poet Jason Allen-Paisant, it’s a moving and detailed rumination on class, identity and economics, all explored through Allen-Paisant’s relationship with plants, nature and landscapes in both his hometown Jamaica and current base in Leeds. You learn about the struggles of the grandmother who raised him, his difficulties reconciling with the poverty of his rural upbringing, and the politics of leisure and freedom. A book I’d like to receive is Foxglovewise by the American poet Ange Mlinko (Faber). She’s published six collections but this is her UK debut and it’s said to be bold and full of vivid images, family history and musical technique. 

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno (Seven Stories) is a truly extraordinary book about childhood trauma and its legacies – intellectual, physical, familial, emotional. But moreover, perhaps, and most powerfully, it is a book about how and why we speak or stay silent, tell and remake stories, use particular words that may or may not be enough, and turn to literature and culture to learn how to narrate, and understand, our own lives anew. Wise, true, profound and generous. The book I’m hoping to get for Christmas is Aqua: A Story of Water and Lost Dreams by Chiara Barzini (Canongate). Everyone I admire has been raving about this book and it's not hard to see why: Barzini is a brilliant, stylish writer and a diligent, innovative researcher who moves across genres with agility. This book has been described as a "hybrid" of every kind of writing I like, which usually means a book is essayistic par excellence. If it's not under my Christmas tree, I'll happily buy it myself! 

I can't remember when I was last as gripped by a novel as I was by David Szalay’s compelling, almost addictive, Booker prize winner, Flesh (Jonathan Cape). In taut, pared-back prose the author takes us on a 21st-century odyssey with his antihero, István, from a modest flat in Hungary to the elite circles of London’s super-rich, navigating the forces of sex and desire, money and power along the way. At its core, it’s a novel about what it means to be alive – as a man, yes, but also as a human being. And Szalay’s mastery lies in conveying not only what the monosyllabic István leaves unsaid but also what is sometimes essentially unsayable. In my Christmas stocking I would love to find Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye (Fitzcarraldo): she’s one of the exciting current wave of Irish writers I haven’t yet read and I’d like to put that right. May I please be greedy and also have another? Curtis Sittenfeld’s new collection of stories, Show Don’t Tell (Doubleday), sounds like the spoonful of pure pleasure that we all need right now.

Careless People (Macmillan), Sarah Wynn-Williams's jaw dropping account of working at Facebook (now Meta), is both unputdownable and enraging. As director of global public policy, she had a ringside seat for the narcissistic, frat-boy mentality at the heart of a company which wields such power and (destructive) influence. From Sheryl Sandberg allegedly asking her to share the only bed on the corporate plane to a seemingly “don't give a damn” attitude to magnifying hate speech, it's a memoir with the perfect title. Our art critic, Emily LaBarge, and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays back in 2009 – I want to sink into the sofa with her memoir Dog Days (Peninsula Press) over the break to find out more. 

From the off I was totally captivated by the lush, decadant world that Olivia Laing conjures up in The Silver Book (Hamish Hamilton). It's Rome in the 70s and designer Danilo Donati is working for both Fellini and Pasolini. An intense page-turning thriller. There's a trio of 2025 novels that I will be picking up as soon as they come out in paperback next year: Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri and Florence Knapp's debut The Names. But the Christmas hardback on my wishlist is Ian McEwan's latest, What We Can Know. McEwan is just a master storyteller - his 1987 novel The Child in Time gripped me when I read it as a GSCE text in the 90s and I've read everything he's written since. What We Can Know, set in a post-climate collapse future, sounds riveting - just the kind of tale to lose yourself in during the downtime between Christmas and New Year. 

Nothing will quite convey the greatness of Helen Garner's collected diaries like reading them. The rhythms and jolts of a life over 20 years– charting Garner's success as a novelist, and then as a non-fiction writer, while raising her daughter and falling into an all-consuming affair – are compelling in their own right. But what is particularly special about How to End a Story: Collected Diaries (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is Garner’s style. Her observations sparkle with a blend of generosity and wit (a highlight is when, at dinner at her “hippy” friends' house, she plucks out a pubic hair from a quiche and politely tucks it under a lettuce leaf). And the narrative – dominated in the third part by the brutal inevitability of the end of her marriage – is as propulsive a piece of writing I have read. Magnificent. For Christmas, I’d love to receive One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Canongate). The complacency of many in neoliberal circles during times of humanitarian crisis has truly shocked me these past two years. El Akkad examines this issue from the position of living in the west, which is what I was drawn to most.  

The moment cartoonist Becky Barnicoat unveiled the witty title of her debut graphic novel about new parenthood, I was sold. Gently skewering the “sleep when the baby sleeps” mantra forced upon new parents, Cry When the Baby Cries (Jonathan Cape) is a smart but hilarious, sick-stains-and-all memoir capturing the total chaos and loss of self that babies bring, along with the incomparable love and joy. Speaking of love, our dear former Observer colleague Rachel Cooke died recently – she was a true one-off and we’re all devastated. So I’m bending the rules here and asking to be given a book which came out last year in the UK (this month in the US) that she edited, The Virago Book of Friendship, so I can celebrate friendship while enjoying her voice once more. 

Arundhati Roy’s glorious memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me (Hamish Hamilton) is my book of the year. In part a tender and sharply observed portrait of her extraordinary mother, it is also an absorbing account of an unruly life of writing and reckoning with her home country of India. It’s a toss-up whenever a new Mick Herron Slough House book comes out – read it, or listen to Seán Barrett read it on Audible? The actor’s droll tones deliver the violence and comedy in the lives of Jackson Lamb and his crew perfectly. I’d love a copy of the latest, Clown Town (John Murray), however it comes.

A novelist known for her brilliantly dark, gnarly tales, Jenn Ashworth's non-fiction debut, The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North (Sceptre), is something different – a chronicle of her solo journey on Alfred Wainwright's epic coast-to-coast walk. Full of unexpected, sometimes moving, sometimes startling, diversions, it's lingered with me all year. I’m hoping to receive Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton) or The Poems of Seamus Heaney (Faber): an insightful poem or essay over Christmas feels like the ultimate gift – a moment of clarity alone, away from the madness.