Books of the Year 2025 ✨
It's the most wonderful list of the year: bookier than the Booker! More indie than your fave band! It's 75% indie publishers, 30% non-fiction, 25% translation, 20% poetry & 100% Burley Fisher.
So say hello to the Burley Fisher Books of the Year as selected by our biggest, bookiest team ever: Cat, Elena, Emz, Enya, Forest, Lu, Sam & So.
Our overall Book of the Year is a deep, dark wintry novel of witness and renewal rooted in the natural world…
Book of the Year
Rowe Irvin, Life Cycle of a Moth, Canongate
A stirring, folkloric meditation on care and harm, I haven’t been moved so much by a novel — haunting and thrillingly alive, Life Cycle of a Moth explores both the tenderness and ferocity of maternal love, asking what we might find ourselves capable of — and willing to sacrifice — in order to shelter those we hold close to us. Life Cycle of a Moth follows a child without a name, referred to as Daughter, and her mother, or Myma, who live isolated in a cabin in the woods. Outside of the woods, as far as Daughter is aware, there is only ‘rot’. She has everything she needs inside their forest, in Myma, their inventions of games they call ‘this-and-that’, their rituals and their collection of canned puddings which can only be eaten with ceremony. But then a ‘rotter’ – a human-like figure with a torso that gapes from behind like a hollow tree trunk – crosses into their forest.
The subtlety and detail with which Rowe invents the mannerisms of Myma and Daughter – the occult and ritual of their lives – is sublime. Daughter’s feral character is richly imagined, down to the way that her view of the world is built into her grammar. She takes the names of forest fragments that call to her, each name suiting her evolving stages, like a moth that was first a pupae. The power of words to make a person and a world is sensitively explored, and this endeavour is Irvin’s central success.
Fiction
Sulaiman Addonia, The Seers, prototype
Elena says… ‘My mother gave birth to me in Keren, but I rebirthed myself in London that spring night as I topped Bina-Balozi on a bench in Fitzroy Square.’ Hannah’s narration moves in-between her lust for her date, ‘O. BB.’ on a rainy night in London, her arrival in the UK as a young asylum seeker, her life with her illiterate book-collecting father in Eritrea, and her mother’s passionate diary entries about another man. Sulaiman Addonia fills the limbo of the obscured asylum process with punching life.
Harriet Armstrong, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, Les Fugitives
Cat says… A young woman goes to university, studies psychology and gets a crush. This sounds quite ordinary, however this book is very strange! It is voice-led and the voice is so funny, unusual and ultimately very sympathetic.
Najwa Bin Shatwan, translated by Sawad Hussain, Catalogue of a Private Life, Dedalus
Elena says… Not from this year but very good. Najwa Bin Shatwan pumps life into characters that this century has dehumanised to kill and forget. These funny would-be-slapstick-if-they-weren’t-nightmarishly-real vignettes of downtrodden lives in Libya are stunning. When the neighbours’ daughter’s lover falls through the skylight of a regimented female-dominated household in the patriarch’s absence, the internalised violence of the military state is domesticised and simultaneously unravelled…
Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland (I & II) and Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (III), On the Calculation of Volume I, II & III, Faber & Faber
Lu says… On the Calculation of Volume imagines a woman, Tara Selter, attempting and sculpting a life inside an infinitely repeating November 18th. Initially striking a resemblance in storyline to Groundhog Day, Balle takes the proposition in a profoundly different direction. Tara herself has become unmoored in time, travelling and waking in new places. Just as her mind and memory may evolve from day to day, changes might accumulate in the rest of her body too. Injuries – like her burn – persist, healing normally over time. She ages. Most striking, there is an exception to the daily resetting of the world around her – if she consumes something, it is gone forever. This phenomenon leads Tara to frequently contemplate her own monstrosity, a capacity for devouring the world around her.
Prudence Bussey-Chamberlin, Bone Horn, Cipher
So says… If you’re not so into an angel on your tree, how about topping it with Alice B. Toklas’s secret horn? Prudence Bussey-Chamberlin’s heroine is juggling grief and childcare, and has decided that being a PI is less precarious than being a humanities academic. But when a case arrives that’s right in her Modernist wheelhouse (plus unlimited expenses and sex gossip), she jumps at the chance, and onto the Eurostar for a rummage around the lesbian Left Bank of our fantasies. The quest for a lesbian horn will lead her into many libraries, and also bedrooms, in this brilliantly queer take on the private dick. Bone Horn is due cult classic status, so jump on it now.
Inger Christensen, translated by Denise Newman, Natalja’s Stories, Penguin
Forest says… Inger Christensen is a remarkable Danish writer, often famed for her poetry collection Alphabet. Another firm favourite of mine from this year is her collection of essays The Condition of Secrecy. Any and all of these are worth your time and attention. There is such mastery of the technical potential of language in her work. How the mind makes sense of language. This is very much the case in Natalja’s Stories. This book takes the Didion quote “we are the stories we tell ourselves” as dictum. Christensen builds the house for us to enter in these stories and once we are inside pulls the walls down around us. The book is a tour de force in fiction writing as a technology.
Daphne Du Maurier, Don't Look Now & Other Stories, Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, Virago
Emz says… 2024 was my Thomas Bernhard year; this year it’s Daphne Du Maurier. I started a lot of books this year and quit them early and spent a lot of time trying to get motivated to read more. Luckily it’s literally impossible to put a Daphne Du Maurier story down without finishing it. Sometimes you just need a cold hard classic. Treat yourself. She’s got a mad ability to create mystery and suspense. Her stories chance upon uncanny doubles and doppelgangers and transplant the reader into beautiful and threatening landscapes. Don’t Look Now & Other Stories is the perfect Christmas read – it’s all about people who go on holiday or travel for a work trip and become obsessed with the mysteries that they encounter in unfamiliar places.
Jackie Ess, Darryl, Divided
Enya says… Jackie Ess’ novel Darryl is hilarious and bizarre, one of my favourite reads of this year. Set in the bohemian town of Eugene, Oregon, this novel follows Darryl, a man whose identity is firmly based around the fact that other men fuck his wife while he watches. Darryl has very little else to do, living comfortably of an inheritance (which the people around him seem to abuse), other than to fixate upon his own desires, his identity as a man, and upon his existence in general. He flits across different states and identities – sexual states, drug induced states, meditative states – and overly identifies with them in a state of magical thinking as quickly as he abandons them. Although often a depiction of a rather sad man, he can be strangely insightful and offer a poignant window into the searching quest of life’s meaning that we all often seek. Would say it’s comparable to My Year of Rest and Relaxation, though much more weird, political and queer.
Samuel Fisher, Migraine, Corsair
Cat says… The third novel from Sam Fisher of Burley Fisher! In dystopian East London the majority of people suffer from migraines, perhaps due to the catastrophic changes in the weather. Ellis has previously been part of a minority of non-migraine sufferers but when we meet him he is going through his first. This sets a quest in motion to get back to his ex-girlfriend, a migraine influencer. Joining him on his journey is another character, Sam who owns a (now trashed) bookshop in Haggerston!
Fanny Howe, London-rose, Divided
Sam says… I’m very late to the work of Fanny Howe, a many-hyphenate American writer who we sadly lost this year, and whose books have been championed by the very excellent Divided Press. In London-rose, a novel published in 2022 but largely written in the 1990s we get a profound meditation on work and suffering which seems, both in its lyrically aphoristic style and its autofictional content, to prefigure a lot of what drives fiction making today. It’s full of arresting sentences and stays with you long after you close it.
Han Kang, translated by e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah-Morris, We Do Not Part, Hamish Hamilton
So says… Snow, trees, families and memories in old photographs and remembered recipes: We Do Not Part is a devastating and all-consuming immersion in the Jeju uprising and its brutal suppression by Korean government forces, and in the small acts of caring resistance by generations of women in one family. The book is an intimate conversation between two documentary-making colleagues, which feels reflected in the translation collaboration between e. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah-Morris who move brilliantly between historical registers and local dialects, giving English-language readers a sense of the tensions and inheritances within this multi-generational history of a marginalised community. A tender, stringent contemplation of what it takes to have connection and commitment in the face of political violence, and why it’s all we have.
Ágota Kristóf, translated by Chris Andrews, I Don’t Care, Penguin
Lu says… I was drawn to I Don’t Care for the manner in which Kristóf examines small moments minutely, or tell a person’s whole life in a handful of words - everyday examinations of relationships and family, to fantastical, allegorical passages. Despite these variations, they are clearly united by voice and style — expertly translated by Chris Andrews, they have brevity, simplicity, irony, humour and strangeness. In ‘The Canal,’ a dying man experiences dreams and nightmares. He searches for his son, his street, his house, seeing “indigo mountains hung with a necklace of lights.” He’s lost and then found, stalked by a puma. ‘A Northbound Train,’ begins with the stark image of a statue at an abandoned train station then spirals into the story of an old man who deserted and lost his family. In these short fictions, Kristóf’s words flash visions of life simultaneously emotionless and excruciating. Painful though they are, they keep her alive, and I felt so in reading this, leaving the book with a renewed vigour towards witnessing and writing.
Orlaine McDonald, No Small Thing, Profile
Cat says… Out in paperback this year, No Small Thing is a very moving debut. Three generations of women end up living in the same flat. This is more out of desperation than choice, when Mickey and her young daughter, Summer, have to move in with Mickey’s mother, Livia, whom they have long been estranged from. They live together for a year and from the beginning we know their time together will end in tragedy. How that unfolds is played out through the eyes of each of the characters from Livia’s long dead Mother and also from Earl, the man who lives above them, benevolently observing them as he waters his plants and looks after his cat.
Ben Pester, The Expansion Project, Granta
Sam says… The Expansion Project is a slippery jewel of a novel that refracts received notions on work and family to ask: at what point do we realise we have stepped out of the life we thought we had? It casts light on the fog of corporate language which makes the world unrecognisable, and which wraps itself around our frailties until we also cannot recognise ourselves. This is a luminous and startling novel – the juries of the Goldsmith’s and Nero prizes clearly agree!
Roy Claire Potter, The Wastes, BookWorks
Cat says… After the death of her mother the character in The Wastes tells the story of her past in fragments and non-chronological reflections. At one point while being unemployed she sneaks into a housemate's bed and sleeps there while she is at work. There is something very queer and subversive about this although there’s no overt suggestion of sex in the retelling of the scene. This book also has a strong connection to place, the north of England is prominent. One of the most memorable episodes is when the character works in a strip bar in Manchester and the title itself represents a strip of countryside in the South Pennines that the protagonist, in her grief, chooses to visit.
Alan Warner, Morvern Callar, Vintage
Enya says… Okay so this book isn’t from this year, in fact it’s from 1995 but I have been hand-selling this to so many people this year and now I’m shouting about it on social media… you know, I’ve gifted five copies of it this year. Possibly my new fave book! The novel is narrated glacially and dissociatively by Morvern, a young and uninspired woman working in a supermarket in a port town whose (strange) boyfriend has just killed himself. Punctuated throughout with the references to songs she plays from his old mixtapes. Movern doesn’t tell anyone, she sends the book he’s written to a publisher and uses the cash to go drinking and clubbing in Spain. A trippy, dissociative, and existential read which is strangely beautiful and intimate.
Non-Fiction
Onyeka Igwe, June Givanni: The Making of a Pan-African Cinema Archive, Lawrence & Wishart
So says… Onyeka Igwe’s filmmaking frequently works with community archives, delving into documents and objects to stage speculative dialogues. Her first book brings her artistic practice to a wide readership, through her conversations with legendary BAFTA Award-winning film curator and programmer June Givanni. This gorgeous book is a labour of love, the story of an intergenerational friendship, a previously untold account of the impact of global Black film in Britain and of a Black British curator in global cinema, a how-to for keeping and holding a community archive, and a feminist oral history of radical care. One for all creative spirits and community-makers who love a deep sense of time and new ways of seeing.
Elias Jahshan, ed., This Queer Arab Family, SAQI
I keep coming back to this moving collection of queer stories in and connected to the Arab world because it revels in the absurd contradictions between expectation/norms/ideology and lived experiences. I loved learning about Beirut’s Club Arak party collective, the politics of adoption customs in Sudan, the pressures of procreation rooted in idiomatic Arabic dialects and alternative futurities of familial/societal organisation. Through a belly-dancing robot, a letter to a baby and an extralegal Hajji’s account, Elias Jahshan’s second anthology of queer Arab writings seriously and playfully subverts today’s reductive and divisive identity politics.
Emily LaBarge, Dog Days, Peninsula
Lu says… Emily LaBarge writes with precision and through an intimate lens that is at times painful to read and as a reader also feels like an invitation for self-reflexivity and embodying her questioning; Dog Days considers why we tell stories the way we do, how we frame memory – how one remembers a memory – and how we might tell events and their feelings otherwise. Combining memoir and essay, cultural criticism and literary experiment – LaBarge is a wonderful reader as well as writer, interlacing references and responses to literary contemporaries in an erudite manner – it begins with a personal trauma but looks outwards as much as inwards for answers. This work powerfully presents the murky areas where language stammers, time loops, and the body remembers what the mind can’t.
So Mayer, Bad Language, Peninsula
Sam says… This is the second book that I have published with So and it’s a book that is so rich with ideas and innovative ways of speaking that it’s hard to gloss except with the simple exhortation: READ IT! It is a manifesto and a glossary. It’s an essay and a song. It’s perhaps easier to describe the book by what it DOES: which is to make visible the often submerged structures of power underpinning language – how we use it, how it is used against us – in order to offer some way out. We all need a bit of what So’s serving, trust me!
Francis McKee, How to Know What's Really Happening, Kayfa-Ta
Forest says… This short but brilliant essay by Irish writer Francis McKee asks the question of how we are to understand our present reality given the overwhelming amount of information we are dealing with at any given moment. The cure according to Mckee it seems is an artful arranging of evermore information and the development of an introspective understanding of who is the consumer. “We have reached a point where what is really happening no longer concerns the outer world. It’s now the inner world, the weather in our head, that we must learn to navigate.”
Liz Pelly, Mood Machine, Hodder & Stoughton
Enya says… If you haven’t had enough reason to delete Spotify this year then music journalist Liz Pelly’s book will finally do the job. It’s an extremely well researched and depressing read on the shady dealings between streaming apps and major labels, the proliferation of AI music (and investment of AI music by such platforms), union busting, and investment in war. More than a call to delete Spotify, Pelly’s book calls into question our relationship with music consumption as a whole. It demonstrates that Spotify does not care about music exploration, creativity and genuine discovery but is a model solely based on profit with the aim for passive music to be played out in the background 24/7. See this book as a call to arms to engage with music like you do books, not just clicking passively onto things which match your ‘mood’ but by actively searching for sounds that alter your mood, and challenge your tastes! There’s so much out there!
Will Rees, Hypochondria, Coach House
Forest says… Hypochondria as explored by Rees is a philosophical predicament. The book examines a five year period in this writer's life when he is plagued by mysterious physical symptoms which elude diagnosis. This space of doubt is explored in such a beautiful way examining sources from both literature, medicine and philosophy. How do we name a sensation in our body? Why does the act of doing so bring us solace? Who gets to classify illness and why? It is rich in Cartesian wondering. The poet Anne Carson in a recent interview spoke of the famous quote from René Descartes: “Cogito, er sum” I think therefore I am. Carson highlights the usual omission of the full quote which is “Dubito, Cogito, er sum” I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. This space of doubt is such a slippery aspect of being that we all experience. This book is so rewarding to read and illuminates what it means to be human.
Sarah Schulman, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, Peninsula
So says… Sarah Schulman has been rocking the foundations of how we read, think and love since she published The Sophie Horowitz Story in 1984. The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity is filled with riveting accounts of forty years on the queer, feminist, anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian front lines as an activist, artist and teacher. Schulman writes from the dual fire of solidarity: its incendiary potential and the chance of getting burned. She addresses that risk through the potential of true dialogue and listening, of sitting with genuine disagreement while being completely true to her ethics. As open about the experiences that shaped her as about the commitments that emerge from that shaping, this is a fantastic and necessary book.
Akshi Singh, In Defence of Leisure, Johnathan Cape
Forest says… Akshi Singh is a psychoanalyst and writer based in London and Glasgow. This is such a gentle and deeply consoling read. Over the course of ten years Akshi discovers the work of British psychoanalyst Marion Milner. Through the lens of Milner’s work she endeavours to make sense of her past and her journey through the loss of her brother, her reckoning with her gender and sexuality, an experience of love. Definitely one of my favourite reads of this year and a debut that leaves me looking forward to whatever comes next from this writer.
Neige Sinno, translated by Natasha Lehrer, Sad Tiger, 7 Stories Press
Forest says… This book is an account of the sexual abuse of Neige Sinno by her stepfather. When I saw Sinno in conversation with Lauren Elkin at the Institut Français early in the year the power of her presence was truly remarkable. She said at one point in the talk: ”the monster was not what happened to me, the monster was that I might not be able to tell the story.” The fact that she does so in such a sober and direct way is truly an incredible feat of memoir writing. This book is a quiet revolution and one I think everyone must read.
Skye Arundhati Thomas, ed., Palestine is everywhere, Silver Press/TBA21
Cat says… A collection of essays, poetry and art, including testimony directly from Gazans, which powerfully call for Palestinian liberation. This book is guided by the words of contributor Mohammed Mhawkish who told the editors to, “Speak to Gaza, not just about Gaza.” I was particularly fascinated by the political depth of the Letters on Palestine which Alaa Abd El-Fattah, the British-Egyptian political activist, wrote while imprisoned in Egypt. I also found Nahil Mohana’s diaries from Gaza very useful in describing the banal inconveniences as well as the horror of the siege on Gaza. At one point instant coffee costs $107 and Mohana splits the cost of a jar with some friends and then divides it out between them with a spoon. When she gets home she finds that she has been sent two jars from her relatives in the South of Gaza and didn’t need to waste her money.
Poetry
CAConrad, Advanced Elvis Course, Peninsula
Emz says… In a series of playful short pieces, CAConrad takes us on a journey through Memphis to trace the holy ghost of Elvis, stopping on the way to speak to fellow disciples. CA's treatise on the cult of Elvis is wacky, whimsical and a joy to read!
Bhanu Kapil and Blue Pieta, Autobiography of a Performance: Scores, Essays and Reflections, The87Press
Lu says… This hybrid collection studies performance as a place both unknown and emergent, the rough sketch that's always incomplete, carried over to the next performance, text and choreography as a breathing entity. As the blurb reads, “Pieta and Kapil decompress an interoceptive approach to poetry, memory and ritual awareness: scenes that can’t be written, but only staged.”
Oisín Roberts, Close to God, Burley Fisher Community Riso Press
Sam says… This beautiful, beloved thing is a double first: the first published work by writer Oisín Roberts and the first original work published by the Burley Fisher Community Riso Press. There’s no way to feel closer to a writer’s work than to spend two days physically compiling their pages! Winding a meandering spiral through their thinking about their emergent transness, Close to God is a tissue of interactions with their close friends and their lovers: finding ways through, together. In their inimical voice, which leaps off the page, Oisín has written a piece finally poised between discovery and recovery. WATCH THIS SPACE!!
Diane Seuss, Modern Poetry, Fitzcarraldo
Sam says… A lot of conversations I have with people at the bookshop about poetry hinge on the balance between feeling and ideas. Not enough of one… too much of the other. I think what disguises Seuss’s work is how she strikes the balance: in this book of poems, which is also a kind of essay on craft, the work is always both warm and wry: full of heart and spryly cerebral. Frank:sonnets, also published this year by Fitzcarraldo, is also full of gems.
Dorothy Spencers, See What Life’s Like IV, ctlly.cc
Enya says… Dorothy’s poems have always felt deeply life affirming and this is the case with her fourth collection (though her third is yet to be published due to a police raid!). Realist poems laced with melancholy and the harsh realities of life: addiction, affairs, heartbreak. But also teeming with a love of life: childbirth, fishing and looking at the flowers! Tender and fierce. Published by 10 foot’s legendary small press @ctlly.cc
Joelle Taylor, Maryville, Bloomsbury
So says… Maryville is a time-travelling dyke bar and an experiment in poetic forms, including the form of a TV script in which, Taylor told DIVA magazine, ‘I want the readers to be holding the camera’. A vivid portrait of a gentrifying city that pushes out the communities that make it live (‘SOHO WATCHES LIKE A TOURIST INSTAGRAMMING APOCALYPSE) and of its griefs in the wake of violence (‘After the red turns to blue … / after officers arrest the air’), Maryville is a book to carry in your back pocket.
Children's Books
Isol, translated by Lawrence Schimel, Loose Threads: A Picture Book, Enchanted Lion
So says… This picture book brings together imagination, craft, storytelling and belonging in the most playful and profound way that will delight readers of all ages. Leilah is a dreamy kid who is always losing her things because she’s so busy looking at the world of her village – and at her grandmother’s embroidery. Having seen the other side of her grandma’s beautiful tatreez, she decides that her lost possessions are in the Other Side, the underside where the wild things are, and off she goes to find them. This is a book of gentle genius for reading together or alone, tracing the patterns that make up our lives.
Burley Fisher Bestsellers
And for the first time, we're also giving you a glimpse of our bestsellers, with our top-selling 21 titles of 2025, featuring a great selection that includes fiction in translation, queer writers, prize-winners, classics, creative writing books & poetry!
- Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes, Fitzcarraldo
- Migraine by Samuel Fisher, Corsair
- On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland, Faber & Faber
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Vintage
- Love in Exile by Shon Faye, Allen Lane
- To Rest Our Minds and Bodies by Harriet Armstrong, Les Fugitives
- All Fours by Miranda July, Canongate
- The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, Penguin
- Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter, Particular
- Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin, Silver
- The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, Profile
- Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, And Other Stories
- Stag Dance by Torrey Peters, Serpent’s Tail
- Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Fitzcarraldo
- Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton, Penguin
- Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors, Fourth Estate
- Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Fourth Estate
- Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, Fourth Estate
- Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, Penguin
- Adam by Gboyega Odubanjo, Faber & Faber
- Hypochondria by Will Rees, Coach House