The best fiction of 2025

There aren’t many giants of 20th-century literature still writing, but 2025 saw the first novel in 12 years from American great Thomas Pynchon, now in his late 80s: Shadow Ticket (Jonathan Cape) is a typically larky prohibition-era whodunnit, set against rising nazism and making sprawling connections with the spectre of fascism today. Other elder statesmen publishing this year included Salman Rushdie with The Eleventh Hour (Cape), a playful quintet of mortality-soaked short stories and his first fiction since the 2022 assault that blinded him in his right eye; while Ian McEwan was also considering endings and legacy in What We Can Know (Cape), in which a 22nd-century literature scholar looks back, from the other side of apocalypse, on a close-knit group of (mostly) fictional literary lions from our own era. In a time of climate terror, the novel is both a fascinating wrangle with the limits of what humans are able to care about – from bare survival, to passion and poetry, to the enormity of environmental disaster – and a poignant love letter to the vanishing past.

But perhaps the most eagerly awaited return this year was another global figure: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose first novel in more than a decade, Dream Count (4th Estate), follows the lives of four interconnected women between Nigeria and the US. Taking in love, motherhood and female solidarity as well as privilege, inequality and sexual violence, it’s a rich and beautifully composed compendium of women’s experience.

Two of the year’s biggest novels – in all senses – were even longer in the writing. Kiran Desai took 20 years over her Booker-shortlisted epic The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hamish Hamilton), following two globe-trotting Indians whose meddling families try to bring them together, and then keep them apart. It’s a vast canvas worked with precision; full of gorgeous nature writing and rueful human comedy, exploring where to find one’s centre in a globalised world, and how to write a novel that incorporates eastern and western traditions.

Also two decades in the making, Sarah Hall’s Helm (Faber) – the story of a Cumbrian wind, from the formation of Earth up to the present – is a colossal achievement, and one I was surprised not to see on the Booker list. The cast of characters includes not only the mercurial wind itself, but neolithic shamans, medieval zealots, Victorian meteorologists and modern-day scientists, building to a tour de force of narrative and an urgent intervention on the climate crisis.

The winner of the Booker, Flesh by David Szalay (Cape), was a bold but excellent choice: bleak in mood, uncompromising in form and completely riveting, it puts the primacy of the body front and centre as it traces the rise and fall of a man whose inner life remains opaque. Meanwhile, Madeleine Thien’s richly philosophical The Book of Records (Granta) illuminates the lives of great thinkers of the past through the story of a girl and her father stranded in a strangely shifting migrant hotel. This is a beautifully written interrogation of migration and memory.

For a big, immersive American saga, deeply pleasurable yet tinged with melancholy, you could do no better than Dream State by Eric Puchner (Sceptre). It begins against a glorious Montana backdrop with an apparent golden couple poised to wed, then unspools over half a century through complications, children and existential crises, with the depredations of the climate crisis and our relationship with the natural world coming increasingly to the fore.

Another American novelist, Susan Choi, mapped a family saga on to the geopolitical upheavals of the 20th century in the impressive Flashlight (Cape). Her story of a Korean émigré and his American wife and daughter ranges from postwar Japan and North Korea to the US suburbs. With a tragic mystery at its heart, it is a masterclass in situating the prickly particularity of the individual against the tides of history.

Gurnaik Johal followed up excellent short stories with Saraswati (Serpent’s Tail), a sweepingly ambitious tale of family history and contemporary politics in a changing India, while Tash Aw began a layered and intimate quartet about family inheritance: in The South (4th Estate), two boys come of age in a modernising Malaysia. Family is also the arena for a sharp and unusual study of female ambition, The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha (John Murray). Two friends in patriarchal Delhi contend with their entitled brothers as environmental collapse threatens all ways of life, both traditional and modern, in a sideways take on the state-of-the-nation novel. Meanwhile, in her Booker-shortlisted Audition (Fern), Katie Kitamura uses family and theatre as the stage for a slippery investigation into performance and identity: how we construct our selves in relation to the people around us. Composed of two separate and contradictory narratives, it’s a puzzle box of a book that demands immediate rereading.

In Gunk (Bloomsbury), set around a grubby Brighton nightclub, Saba Sams puts a fresh spin on motherhood and chosen family, with a tale of two women, a manchild and an actual baby; the club scenes are authentically sticky, and the writing about pregnancy and birth is viscerally tender. Another British novel not to miss is Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper (Viking), in which a young man stuck in a mid-century coastal town, where he scrapes the beach for shrimp like his grandfather before him, is offered a glimpse of freedom and modernity. Deeply atmospheric and as uncanny as the sea mist that rolls in without warning, it’s a depth charge that resonates long after reading.

I found comic relief in a trio of wickedly funny novels. The Pretender by Jo Harkin (Bloomsbury) is the filthy, clever, immersive picaresque about a pretender to Henry VII’s throne that you didn’t know you needed, while Emma Jane Unsworth’s Slags (Borough), in which two middle-aged sisters take an ill-advised caravan holiday through the Scottish Highlands, is essential reading for anyone with a sibling bond. Rebecca Wait excels at tragicomedy, and Havoc (Riverrun), set in a crumbling girls’ boarding school at the peak of cold war paranoia, is St Trinian’s on steroids.

In Maria Reva’s Endling (Virago), the comic tone turns suddenly much darker as a Ukrainian caper taking in endangered snail species and the marriage industry is disrupted, in both the writing and the reading, by Russia’s full-scale invasion. Reva handles the formal demands of melding autofiction, road trip and blistering reportage with poignancy and flair. The comedy is also pitch-black in Oisín Fagan’s Eden’s Shore (John Murray), a freewheeling satire on revolution, colonial greed and human folly, as an 18th-century Irishman finds himself stranded in Latin America: Fagan is shaping up to be one of the most dazzling and daring stylists around.

The biggest debut of the year was Florence Knapp’s The Names (Phoenix), which carried off its Sliding Doors-style high concept – a mother gives her newborn son three different names, and three very different lives unfurl for Gordon, Julian and Bear – to become a tender portrait of possibility, hope and family love in tough times. Shortlisted for the Women’s prize, Nussaibah Younis’s debut Fundamentally (W&N) was another hit: a fearless critique of international aid which finds big laughs in the story of a fed-up British academic trying to rehabilitate a teenager lured into becoming an Islamic State bride.

Wendy Erskine’s The Benefactors (Sceptre), a choral novel about class and power in Belfast which follows the fallout among different families when three boys assault a teenage girl, more than fulfilled the promise of her short stories. While Charlie Porter’s debut Nova Scotia House (Particular Books), in which a bereaved middle-aged man honours the life and legacy of his much older partner, and the passing of a generation of gay men, is told with originality and courage.

There were a host of great debuts about youth, including Seán Hewitt’s tender tale of gay first love, Open, Heaven (Cape); Colwill Brown’s blistering account of girlhood in deprived 00s Doncaster, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh (Vintage); and Harriet Armstrong’s spiky, ultra-contemporary portrait of awkward university life, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies (Les Fugitives).

Standout short-story collections included Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (4th Estate), a series of utterly unforgiving excoriations of modern life lived in, and warped by, the digital realm. We meet fetishists, “incels” and social media addicts of all kinds in brutally funny, linguistically inventive stories that are even more compulsive than doomscrolling. But the collection of the year was undoubtedly Every One Still Here from the young Northern Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn (Granta). From the generational trauma of the Troubles to profound questions of memory and identity and the quirks of contemporary society, these stories are fiercely political and confronting, but also hum with the mysteries of life. They mark the arrival of a phenomenal new talent.