The Best of 2025
Well, my best. Your mileage etc…
This year I finally got back into the groove. I read 112 books, amounting to just under 11.4 million words.
Of those 112 books, two made up around 10% of my reading (based on word count)1. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young, which took six months to finish and clocked in at just under 700,000 words, is by far the longest thing I’ve ever read. Tom’s Crossing wasn’t far behind (around 530,000 words).
Including the back end of last year, I read 66 books that were published in 2025. I consider that a large number compared to most literary-minded Substackers who, having given up on contemporary fiction, read very little published in the current year. It’s Middlemarch or bust. That’s fine. The fact is, my four favourite novels this year—Pavane by Keith Roberts, The Lowlife by Alexander Baron, The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, and The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin—weren’t written this century. (And I haven’t even mentioned Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, Angel by Elizabeth Taylor, or The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner, which would beat out 98% of the 2025 novels I read.)
But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t good shit published this year (despite the moaning on this platform). So, here are my top 15 novels of 2025, published in 2025.
A Granite Silence by Nina Allan. This is a remarkable novel that no one on this site is talking about (except for Blair at @theupstairswindow, whom I immediately subscribed to based on the single fact that he wrote about this astonishing book). Rather than bitch about the Ocean Vuongs of this world, read this fucking novel. If you hate it, fine. But if you’re serious about narrative form, about the line between fiction and creative nonfiction, then I think you’ll adore it as much as I did.
Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski. Fuck it. I stand by my guns. I love this book, even if others are taking the piss out of it. It took me back to reading Stephen King’s The Stand, one of my cherished experiences as a teen. But if choosing this as my second pick means you can’t take me or this list seriously anymore, well, it’s been nice knowing you.
When There Are Wolves Again by E. J. Swift. The best climate fiction novel I read this year (Landfall by James Bradley isn’t far behind). Like Stephen Markley’s The Deluge, it strives for realism—what the world might actually be like in five decades’ time. And I think it hits that middle ground between hope and misery.
Flesh by David Szalay. The Booker winner and the only out-and-out literary novel on my list.2 It’s gotten some heat since it was announced as the winner, but I loved the spareness, the lack of interiority.
Colourfields by Paul Kincaid. My only non-fiction selection. It’s a collection of Paul’s reviews and essays about the science fiction field. It’s some of the smartest, clearest-eyed writing I read all year—that it’s about the genre(s) I love is only a bonus.
Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel. A surrealist take on affordability and the housing crisis in New York that features a woman living in a shoe. It’s very funny, very strange, and very moving. All the things I love in fiction. Also, I’m sure Zoran would approve.
Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest by Nick Mamatas. Nick’s take on the Bard’s play is inventive, funny, and—well—playful. Because it came out from a small press, it probably hasn’t received the recognition it deserves, but fuck me… this is good, entertaining shit. Don’t let it pass you by.
Waterblack by Alex Pheby. This would be higher, but it’s the third book in a trilogy. It’s a stupendously good third book, but I’d rather you go and hunt down the first—Mordew. This is epic fantasy at its most subversive.
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken. My only translated book on this list—though it was a good year for translated fiction (I say more on this in my Locus Year in Review, which will be out in February). The Wax Child is about 17th-century Danish witch trials, told from the perspective of the titular doll (shaped from beeswax). Probably the best-written book on this list.
We Live Here Now by C. D. Rose. Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize, which it very much deserved. It ticks all my surrealist, absurdist boxes. I’ve been meaning to catch up with Rose’s back catalogue, and I’ll try to do so in 2026.
Major Arcana by John Pistelli. I only read one Substack Summer novel3, and it was this one. It’s digressive, challenging, and compassionate. A beautiful novel that embraces creativity and acknowledges that living in this time, despite all the advances we enjoy, is not easy. Just a terrific book.
Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman. Far-future New York. Revolution. The trans experience. Found families. This is the kind of science fiction novel that does what literary fiction strives to do—but does it better.
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh. It’s a magic school novel, but this time told from the perspective of a teacher. It has demons and shit, but the best bits involve the day-to-day effort of keeping a school—secular or magical—running.
Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine by Kristina Ten. My favourite collection of the year. Genuinely creepy, but also smart and thoughtful. It’s very rare to find a creepypasta story that also engages with the immigrant experience.
Slow Gods by Claire North. A wild, ambitious space opera involving AI-like gods and horrific shit living in hyperspace (or, as it’s referred to, “the dark”). And it’s a standalone novel!
That’s my top 15, but there’s at least another 15 I could have added. All of them will feature in my Locus Year in Review essay that will be out in February.
In the meantime, what are you waiting for, read one of these books!
Yes, I use an online word counter to gauge the length of books.
Exactly! I can hear you say. Literary fiction is shit—so shit you could only find space for one book in your top 15. OK. Fine. Stop shouting. The thing is, I hate the demarcation between literary and genre fiction. It’s all fiction, and the best of it—even the ones with spaceships and ray guns—deals with the same concerns as literary novels: how we live in the current moment. But, yes, fair enough. It was a poor year for purely realist fiction (based on what I read).
I was going to read more Substack Summer novels, but it quickly went from a fun idea to a political ideology—a thumb in the eye of traditional publishers. It was less interesting at that point.