(NOTE: This post is cross-posted from my dedicated books and music blog)
I’ve been doing these best reads of the year lists since 2017 and it’s become one of my favourite traditions. This year, I thought I’d recognize the top 25 of ‘25, fifteen fiction and ten fiction. (Scroll to the bottom for links to previous editions)
Fiction
15. Life, and Death, and Giants, by Ron Rindo (2025)
If I wanted to be nitpicky, there were things I could critique about this modern tall tale about a giant baby born into a Wisconsin Amish community. But it handles complex issues of faith, belonging, community, and choice with such nuance and elegance that by the end I found I had no interest in criticism. A beautiful book with a heart as giant as its main character.
14. The Women of Troy, by Pat Barker (2021)
At the risk of spoiling the rest of the list a bit, this was actually the volume of Barker’s Trojan Women series that I enjoyed the least, and it still easily placed among my best reads of the year. It follows Briseis, the woman who had been at the heart of the feud between Achilles and Agamemnon that is the background for The Iliad, in the aftermath of the sack of Troy. It’s a powerful story about womanhood, freedom, and intersectionality as she navigates her strange standing as both a captive and a wife, as the camp is filled with newly enslaved women who were once her friends.
13. Endling, by Maria Reva (2025 🇨🇦)
Maria Reva was halfway through writing a cheeky novel about endangered snails and sex tourism in Ukraine, when the real world came crashing down on it in the form of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. What she ended up producing was a fascinating, formally inventive, and at times autofictional work that somehow manages to avoid being pretentious and is instead dazzling and incredibly readable.
12. Leonard and Hungry Paul, by Rónán Hession (2019)
This is an absolutely delightful, big hug of a novel. It proudly upholds the dignity and meaning of quiet lives in a world whose narratives are dominated by go-getters and attention-seekers, while also not being afraid to poke a little good natured fun at them in the process. It takes some readers a while to get into, but is well worth the initial effort.
11. Buckeye, by Patrick Ryan (2025)
It’s practically impossible at this point for a book that is telling the ‘Story of America’ in the 20th Century to stand out, but somehow this does. It follows two families, connected and divided by shared secrets, across four decades in a small Ohio city. While not exactly inventive or unique, it is impeccable, and I fell in love with all of its complex characters.
10. Take Two, by Danielle Hawkins (2024)
A rom-com in my top ten? Absolutely. It’s a story of a woman who reconnects with the family of an ex when the family patriarch is diagnosed with terminal illness. While it deals honestly with a lot of serious issues, the prose is so buoyant, and all the (admittedly flawed) characters so lovely, that I barely even noticed the heavy content. And the the narrative voice is intelligent, relatable, and legitimately funny. All in all, this was un-put-downable.
9. The Remembered Soldier, by Anjet Daanje (2019, transl. 2025)
This piece of literary fiction has a compelling premise: in the aftermath of the First World War, a former soldier experiencing severe amnesia and PTSD struggles to recover his memories after a woman identifies him as her husband. It is a stunning, deeply moving literary love story that will reward patient readers. I say patient because it’s well over 500 pages long, and it employs long, run-on sentences and paragraphs that turn off a lot of readers. But the pay-off is beyond worth any annoyance.
8. The Unseen World, by Liz Moore (2016)
This backlist gem flew under the radar for me and most readers until it surfaced after Moore’s breakout his The God of the Woods last Summer. But this far exceeds its more famous younger sibling. Set in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1980s, it follows a teenager as she tries to put the pieces of her father’s mysterious life together as he recedes into early-onset dementia. It’s well-written, with wonderfully-crafted characters, a compelling mystery, and a lot of heart.
7. The Tiger and the Cosmonaut, by Eddy Boudel Tan (2025 🇨🇦)
It’s rare to see genre fiction, like this mystery, on one of the major awards lists, but this is more than deserving of its place on the Giller Prize short list this year. (If it had been up to me, it would have won — and it was a very strong competition this year!) It follows a a man who has to return to his hometown on BC’s Sunshine Coast when his father disappears in shockingly similar circumstances to his brother’s disappearance years before. Not only is it a taut and effective mystery, but it also deals really well with themes of race, queerness, family, and the question of whether change is possible. It’s absolutely excellent.
6. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, by Kiran Desai (2025)
In this rather intimate story about two families straddling India and the United States, Desai somehow manages to explain all of the hopes, dreams, and divisions of our present troubled century. This is postcolonial literature at its absolute finest, from an author who shows a profound understanding of the complexities and hypocrisies of both India and the West.
5. The Voyage Home, by Pat Barker (2024)
In a landscape overstuffed with retellings, once again Pat Barker elevates the genre to its full potential in this concluding volume in her Trojan Women series. While it was at first jarring to have a different point-of-view character from the first two books, it was worth it to see the prophetess Cassandra’s story brought to its satisfying, sad, and fated end. There’s a reason why these stories have survived for thousands of years; they reflect incredible psychological depth and complexity, and I’m grateful for Pat Barker for going above and beyond in shining a new light on them.
4. Seascraper, by Benjamin Wood (2025)
This year’s Booker longlist was largely comprised of flashy and ambitious books, but this story about a young shrimper in post-War England sleepwalking through life under the weight of family legacy was a refreshingly and effectively unpretentious story. Gorgeously written, stunningly atmospheric, tautly plotted, and packing a big punch, I loved this book and was very disappointed when it didn’t make the shortlist.
3. The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker (2018)
This introductory book in Barker’s Women of Troy series essentially tells the story of The Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, the woman at the centre of the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon. I loved the way she balances Achilles’s and Patroclus’s reputations as sympathetic characters with the reality that they were still men who enslaved women for their pleasure and glory. Briseis herself is depicted wonderfully as an intelligent woman determined to survive at all costs, even if it means making unexpected compromises along the way. It’s a very special book.
As much as I loved all the books listed above, this year was a clear two-horse race for my top read:
2. Heart the Lover, by Lily King (2025)
In the past, Lily King novels have fallen into the ‘liked but didn’t love’ category for me. But this story about the long reach of college-age relationships ended that pattern with a bang. This is writerly, insightful, and deeply moving, with complex characters and relationships. There are definitely big emotions here, but for me at least, they felt earned and not manipulative. And, while the focus of the story is clearly on the relationships, I also enjoyed how King described higher education and her inclusion of some gorgeous Paris writing.
1. Ordinary Saints, by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin (2025)
I have no words to adequately describe how much I loved this book about an Irish lesbian living in London who faces an overdue reckoning with her history, homeland, and family when she finds out her parents are campaigning to have her late brother canonized as a Saint. The long shadow of Roman Catholicism over Irish history and culture is of course common fare in Irish literature today, but never have I seen it handled with as much sensitivity and care as it is here. From the opening line I knew I was in safe hands, and not only did this balance between conflicting worldviews never come crashing down, but it never even wobbled. Unforgettable, raw, honest, and gracious, it is not only my top read of 2025, but the one book I know will find a place towards the top of my favourite books of all time.
Nonfiction
10. Pale Rider, by Laura Spinney (2017)
A book written for the centenary of the Spanish Flu pandemic, it was remarkably prescient and I was shocked it wasn’t written in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
9. How We Learn to Be Brave, by Mariann Edgar Budde (2023)
An Episcopalian bishop ministering in Washington, DC during the volatile Summer of 2020 (to say nothing of January 2025) explores the big and small things we can do to show up when circumstances demand it. She discusses bravery not as a trait discovered in the moment but as a practice, something to be trained, built up, and made resilient. Powerful, timely, and important.
8. Everything Is Tuberculosis, by John Green (2025)
A popular-level take on the history, science, and increasingly sociology, of humanity’s deadliest disease, from one of the notoriously delightful, whip-smart, gracious, and deeply curious Green brothers.
7. An African History of Africa, by Zeinab Badawi (2024)
A book that delivers on its simple but revolutionary premise: a one-volume history of Africa written from an African perspective. While it’s impossible to do justice to vast swaths of geography and history in a single volume, it’s hard to imagine a better survey than this.
6. Proto, by Laura Spinney (2025)
This book offers a fresh look at the latest evidence — archaeological, linguistic, and now genetic — about the history of the Indo-European languages and the people who have spoken them. I appreciated that Spinney gave space to non-Western voices and dissenting opinions, and the measured and responsible way she delivered the evidence.
5. It’s Easier Than You Think, by Sylvia Boorstein (1995)
A simple, no-nonsense introduction to Buddhism from a famed American teacher, this is high on wisdom and low on jargon.
4. After 1177 BC, by Eric Cline (2024)
I am a big fan of Cline’s book 1177 BC, which documented the disappearance within a single generation of a centuries-old network of civilizations across the Aegean and SWANA regions. This book is both his attempt at looking at how these civilizations recovered in the centuries that followed, and a response to some of his more vocal critics. I was particularly fascinated by his analysis of the evidence through the lens of resilience theory. If you’re someone who doesn’t appreciate ‘broad strokes’ history surveys, this probably won’t be for you, but I found this to be excellent, and with just the right amount of academic humility.
3. Between Two Rivers, by Moudhy Al-Rashid (2025)
A study of the history of Mesopotamia through a series of artifacts found in what has been called the world’s oldest museum, in this concise volume, the author has managed to do the impossible: cover thousands of years of culture and history in a way that is as accessible and interesting as it is responsible and informed.
2. Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, by Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea (2024)
One of our greatest living actors reflects on her career and Shakespeare’s plays. Even as someone who is more a respecter of Shakespeare than a lover, this was absolutely fascinating. This is so delightful and off-the-cuff; honest and profound thoughts from someone who claims she doesn’t think deeply about Shakespeare. Not only is this supremely entertaining, but it’s also a gift to future generations.
1. Things in Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li (2025)
An insightful, intellectual, literary, and unflinching memoir, from an absolute genius mind, about life after losing two children to suicide. The obvious content warnings apply here, but if this is at all a book you think you might be able to handle, please do so.
Matthew Root 