Gayle’s Books of the Year 2025
Selected by the Bookshop
This has been a brilliant year for fiction, with extraordinary debuts like Michael Amherst’s The Boyhood of Cain and Kate Riley’s Ruth, as well as new works by bona fide legends like Claire-Louise Bennett and Wendy Erskine, but my pick of the bunch for 2025 is Harriet Armstrong’s To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, an almost unbearably accurate trip inside the spiralling mind of a young woman experiencing the exhilaration and anxiety of first love – funny, tender and, at times, excruciating, I can’t wait to see what Armstrong does next.
From the publisher:
In her final year of a degree in psychology, and struggling to relate to the world around her and find her place within it, a young woman drifts from lectures on gifts, vision, suicide, the history of global warming, and study groups…
From the publisher:
The things that hold life in place have been lifted off and put away. Uprooted by circumstance from city to deep countryside, a woman lives in temporary limbo, visited by memories of all she’s left behind. The most insistent are those…
From the publisher:
In this mesmerizing and profound novel, the arc of a woman’s life in a devout, insular community challenges our deepest assumptions about what infuses life with meaning.Ruth is raised in a snow globe of Christian communism, a world…
From the publisher:
The darkly funny, and gripping debut novel from a literary star: three women from very different families are brought together when their sons are accused of assaulting a young woman whose social standing they see as far below their…
From the publisher:
A poignant debut novel about a boy on the precipice of adulthood, struggling to understand how he might give and deserve love.Danny's family live in a large house close to the school where his father is headmaster. At school, his father's…
From the publisher:
A novel exploring a relationship between a son and his father as he descends into dementia. Told through a striking combination of text and image, Klaces’ distilled novel explores the stories we tell about our lives, the limits of…
From the publisher:
Translated from French by Jordan StumpA voice-driven, penetrating novel of the exploitation and alienation of the working class.In one strand, a young family bumps and scrapes through life. The hapless father balances demanding factory…
From the publisher:
From a new voice in Welsh literature, an atmospheric and poignant story of a relationship between two small-town Valleys men during the late 1980s.When two quiet men form a tentative connection neither knows where it might lead. M has…
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