Best books of 2025, by Hannah Kent, Arundhati Roy, Charlotte McConaghy and more

Welcome to ABC Arts' much-anticipated wrap of the best books of 2025.

Our literary critics have done the near impossible work of choosing their favourite books of the year and are itching to share their picks with you.

On the list are a much-vaunted novel that was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize; an inventive Groundhog Day-esque work sure to attain cult classic-status by Danish writer Solvej Balle; and a raw and generous memoir by literary heavyweight Arundhati Roy, who lays bare her complicated relationship with her formidable mother.

You'll also find a memoir by Australian author Hannah Kent describing in fascinating detail daily life in Iceland and revealing the story behind her acclaimed debut novel, Burial Rites, and a subversive collection of — very — short fiction by an up-and-coming Melbourne wordsmith.

A warning: your #tbr list is about to get much longer.

• Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
• Tenderfoot by Toni Jordan
• Flashlight by Susan Choi
• Plastic Budgie by Olivia De Zilva
• Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts
• Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
• Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje
• On the Calculation of Volume l by Solvej Balle
• Fire Exit by Morgan Talty
• The Salt Stones by Helen Whybrow
• Immaculate Conception by Ling Ling Huang
• Always Home, Always Homesick: A Memoir by Hannah Kent
• Zugzwang by Gabriel Stibio
• Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

Hamish Hamilton

Arundhati Roy's mother spent decades declaring she was about to die: with dramatic gasps and flourishes, grand gestures and the repeated claim that she was not appreciated anyway. But, reading her daughter's memoir, it seemed more likely that she would simply explode one day in a cloud of bitterness and rage.

Despite the years of false alarms and the exhortations to her daughter to "Get out of my house. Get out of my car. Get out of my life", Roy — who won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her debut novel The God of Small Things — did not dare write about her mother until after she had died.

How could she dare, when this martinet had both shaped and repelled her? Loved and feared, all at once?

Even so, this beautifully written memoir is about more than a mother and daughter. It's the story of a girl and then a woman finding her words and her resistance, her career as an architect and then scriptwriter, novelist and activist; finding her way out from the motherhouse, with occasional moments of return. It's exhilarating and warm, full of passion and mistakes, generosity and insight, with plenty of inward swerves into her own "nonsense" as she calls it.

— Kate Evans

• Listen to ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf review Mother Mary Comes to Me

Tenderfoot by Toni Jordan

Hachette Australia

Toni Jordan's eighth novel is her most personal yet — and very possibly her best.

Drawing closely on Jordan's own childhood, Tenderfoot takes us to 70s Brisbane, where bookish 12-year-old Andie Tanner dreams of being a greyhound trainer, just like her dad. When her parents split up and her dad moves out, Andie is left with her volatile mum and the one remaining greyhound that lives under the house.

Things are hard at school, too. In the brutal way of schoolyard children, Andie's friends have inexplicably turned against her. Andie's resigned acceptance of her new outcast status is heartbreaking. When it comes to the cruelty of childhood, Jordan is unsentimental. There's no misty-eyed nostalgia here.

The book is narrated by Andie as an adult: a woman who has made her own mistakes and can now see her parents for what they were — young, and confused. "You realise that inside you and everyone you know," she tells us, "is a child — fallible and wounded, and wrong about so many things."

It's this emotional truth at the heart of Tenderfoot that sets it apart. This is a writer at the top of her game, telling a story that only she can tell.

— Claire Nichols

Flashlight by Susan Choi

Vintage

While there was a lot to love about the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize, Flesh by David Szalay, ultimately, I was more transfixed by fellow shortlistee, American author Susan Choi's Flashlight. The combination of flawed but intriguing characters set against the geopolitics of North Korean history was engrossing.

Its opening is also incredibly compelling: a young girl, Louisa, has washed up on the beach in Japan with no memory of what's happened to her. She had been walking by the ocean with her father, Serk (an ethnically Korean, culturally Japanese American immigrant), and wakes splayed on the beach with sand in her mouth and her father gone.

We follow Louisa and her mother, Anne, as they return to the US and build a life without Serk. Anne is also dealing with a troubling illness and grows more abrasive towards Louisa, who in turn acts out and is hard to love. The two become mirrors of the other's disappointment.

The narrative that unfurls is a slow-burn unravelling of the central mystery: the fate of Serk, who is always present in his absence. It's an unforgettable ensemble of characters whose loneliness and outsider status are contrasted by moments of love and affection.

Like Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (a 2024 Booker Prize shortlistee), Flashlight is described as a thriller but its thriller qualities are equally matched by its astute observations of human frailty.

— Sarah L'Estrange

Plastic Budgie by Olivia De Zilva

Pink Shorts Press

Adelaide author Olivia De Zilva's debut novel is one of the most exciting I have read in some time.

Through a series of family vignettes — each seemingly funnier and more piquant than the last — De Zilva describes a coming-of-age that becomes a haunting, even tormented meditation upon the impossibility of connection. Even, and perhaps especially, with oneself.

At first, I was worried this was a too-familiar story of migrant/third culture kid cliches. But De Zilva takes the material of familial and generational and cultural entanglements and weaves something funny and brutal and tender and lovely.

There's a sass and a sardonic tone here that's equal parts Nora Ephron and Lynne Tillman. De Zilva has the native talent of the true writer: an eye for when the comedy writes itself. At first it's funny. Then it's increasingly disquieting, a scalpel concealed in a juicy apple.

Published by Pink Shorts Press, who are quickly establishing themselves as a truly exciting new publisher, I'm glad there are novels like De Zilva's in the world. Fear and loathing and loneliness have never been this much fun.

— Declan Fry

Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts

Ultimo Press

In Elegy, Southwest, Madeleine Watts's second novel — after the Miles Franklin-shortlisted The Inland Sea — Aussie expat Eloise travels across America with her husband Lewis, tracing the contours of the Colorado River. She is on a "pilgrimage", studying the river's "imminent loss", the result of decades of over-extraction.

Distracted by the possibility she may be pregnant, she is caught between two places: a landscape punished by human greed and natural disaster (the radio updates the couple on bushfires raging in California), and her own body.

Meanwhile, Lewis is unravelling, wracked with grief over the recent death of his mother. Eloise tries to speak to him, to make wry observations about what they see on their travels, but his coping mechanisms keep her at a distance.

Written in second person, the book is addressed to him; she is looking back at the road trip from the future, trying to understand why she now lives alone. This remove makes the lyrical sentences, details and musings feel real — not scratchings in a diary but the product of years of rumination.

Elegy, Southwest coheres into an examination of how the threat of climate collapse infuses our psyches, while at the same time being a stunning mediation on love — or perhaps loneliness within love: "[I was] a ghost watching myself walk through the motions of marriage", Eloise reflects.

— Hannah Story

• Listen to Madeleine Watts on ABC Radio National's The Book Show

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Penguin

Wild Dark Shore, by Australian author Charlotte McConaghy, begins with a woman, barely living, washed ashore on a sub-Antarctic island in a ferocious storm. Her name is Rowan, and her dramatic arrival is a mystery: The island is too remote for tourists, the nearest land is thousands of kilometres away and the ocean is inhospitably cold and wild.

She's rescued by the family who live in the nearby lighthouse: Dominic, the island's caretaker, and his three children, Raff, Fen and Orly. Once a base for 19th-century sealers, Shearwater Island in recent years has been home to a scientific station and seed vault, but the changing weather and rising ocean have made life on the island too precarious. The scientists have left, and, after eight years on the island, Dom and his family are due to leave, too.

But there's a problem: the radios are down, and the storm knocked out the island's power. Dom and his kids are tasked with salvaging as many seed samples as they can before the cavernous vault slowly fills with water.

And then there's Rowan, who remains close-lipped about just how she ended up on the island. It's clear that Dom, too, has his own secrets. Despite this atmosphere of distrust, Rowan is quickly drawn into the family's universe, forming meaningful connections with Dom and each of his children.

Wild Dark Shore is a story of grief and love; the plot is pacy and the descriptions of the island and its wildlife spectacular. The result is a deeply atmospheric and affecting novel that will have your heart thumping at the end. It's also a clarion call warning us of what we stand to lose in the climate catastrophe.

— Nicola Heath

Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje

Daunt Books

Slanting Towards the Sea is a rich and intoxicating reflection on what it means to love and desire as a woman in modern Croatia.

This is the meandering, intoxicating and decades-long love story of Ivona and Vlaho. In the present, Ivona is long divorced from her ex-husband Vlaho, but still inextricably linked to both him and his generous new wife Marina. However, when a new man enters Ivona's life, she is forced to grapple with her own needs and desires, up-ending her fragile dynamic with Vlaho.

Ivona is back in her childhood home, looking after her aging father and reflecting on how family and responsibility change the path of our lives. She reconsiders her relationship with her ex-husband and despite laying out every reason why they don't fit together, it becomes evident that their pull to each other is undeniable and all-consuming.

The prose in this novel is truly mesmerising: You feel the salt of the ocean on your skin and the sting of the sun in the olive grove. Everything is rich and luscious and dripping in subtext.

Hilje has written an immersive and devastating debut and I am already wondering — and dreaming — about what will come next.

— Rosie Ofori Ward

On the Calculation of Volume l by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland

Faber

What were you doing on November 18? Now, imagine living that day over and over and over (and over) again.

This is the scenario in Danish writer Solvej Balle's seven-volume series of novels. Tara wakes up, and it's always the 18th of November. No, it's not the same as the film Groundhog Day, although there is a time loop involved. Tara can leave (unlike Bill Murray's character in the film), but she has to be careful where she goes and what she does. If she checks into a hotel, for example, she needs to confirm the room was empty the night before (think about it).

It takes her, and us, a while to work out the rules of this new way of existing. What does it mean for her body, for food, for objects she's holding or wearing or that are in proximity to her? What does it mean for her relationship to her husband, to love, to friends?

What does it mean when time moves forward for everyone else but she is somehow consuming the world afresh every day, but unable to progress? Does this make her an anomaly, or a monster?

This delicious, small novel is utterly absorbing, clever, fresh, inventive and endlessly surprising. How can it possibly fill new volumes, with new twists? What else can she do?

— Kate Evans

Fire Exit by Morgan Talty

Scribe Publications

I read Fire Exit at the start of 2025, and I'm still unable to shake it off.

Morgan Talty is an American writer and a member of the Penobscot Indian Nation. His debut novel is about Charles, a white man who grew up in the Penobscot reservation in Maine (his stepfather was a member of the tribe), but now lives alone on the other side of the river, looking back at the place he used to call home.

Charles is a tricky character, prickly and isolated. But as we meet him, things are starting to change. We learn that years ago, Charles secretly fathered a daughter who lives on the reservation. From his home across the river he is able to watch her come and go, and as we meet him, he decides he can't keep the secret any longer. He wants his daughter to finally know the truth.

Meanwhile, Charles's own mother is unwell, and it's time for him to step up and help her, even if he'd rather do anything else.

Fire Exit asks big questions about blood, loyalty and what makes a family. It's bold, challenging and incredibly moving. I'll be returning to it for years to come.

— Claire Nichols

• Listen to Morgan Talty on ABC Radio National's The Book Show

The Salt Stones by Helen Whybrow

Milkweed Editions

A pastoral memoir in the vein of The Shepherd's Life by British farmer James Rebanks, The Salt Stones accounts for a year on the Vermont farm where Helen Whybrow lives with her husband, Peter, and tends a flock of hardy Icelandic sheep. The Salt Stones is a paean to slowing down, observing the world around us more closely, and re-engaging with nature's rhythms and traditional knowledge.

Deeply connected with the land, Whybrow makes the case that traditional forms of farming are part of the solution to the climate crisis. For centuries farmers acted as stewards, she argues, living in a close symbiosis with the land that has been disrupted by the introduction of industrial agriculture. "The way we farm places us on a spectrum from poisoning and depleting the land to being a partner in its restoration and resilience," she writes.

Now, as the caretaker of her little farm, Whybrow observes the changes wrought by the climate crisis. Each year, her apple trees blossom earlier, and she worries the "symphony of spring" is a little quieter.

She observes cycles of birth and death on the farm and in her own life, too, as her daughter, Wren (whose beautiful illustrations appear in the book) blooms into adulthood and her aging mother slowly succumbs to dementia.

Whybrow was a writer and editor before she was a sheep farmer, and it shows in the book's many literary references and her wonderfully poetic prose. It's writing that compels you to go outdoors immediately.

— Nicola Heath

Immaculate Conception by Ling Ling Huang

Canelo

This is a wild fever dream of a book. Immaculate Conception is a genre-bending piece of fiction about the clash between technology and the art world and the intensity of friendship between women.

Enka and Mathilde meet in art school and this book follows their intimate yet toxic relationship through to adulthood. Both are vying for power in their relationship and success in the ever-shrinking art world. Set in the near future, the rise of technology has decimated the ability for humans to make unique and innovative art.

With this second novel, Ling Ling Huang has truly carved out her niche — one part science fiction, one part literary fiction and a whole lot of feminism. Following her sensational debut, Natural Beauty, Immaculate Conception unpacks how technology is taking the place of genuine human connection, and what happens when that technology is placed in the wrong hands.

Huang has created a vivid world with compelling characters. The descriptions of a flamboyant yet clinical art world and strange laboratories with translucent brains are transfixing. However, the heart of this book is Enka and Mathilde's mutual obsession; their love for each other is dangerous and vast. All their thoughts and feelings are so true to life, Huang illuminating how messy, confusing and familiar humanity will remain, despite our ever-changing world.

— Rosie Ofori Ward

Always Home, Always Homesick: A Memoir by Hannah Kent

Picador

How did a 20-something Australian writer come to write a novel about the last woman executed in Iceland that went on to become an international bestseller? And what, then, was her relationship to this cold dramatic landscape and language of her imagination? What ideas of home might be posited between the dark and subterranean traditional houses of early 19th-century Iceland and the contemporary Adelaide Hills?

All these questions and more Hannah Kent explores in a thoughtful, elegant memoir that takes apart the writing of her 2013 novel Burial Rites, exploring its origin story alongside broader questions of belonging, friendship, place, love, family, motherhood and exhaustion.

Kent travelled to Iceland on a Rotary Exchange when she was 17, seeking adventure. Her descriptions of the trip are a mixture of enormously challenging situations, loneliness and deep resilience, combined with real warmth and generosity. You both ache and admire her as she learns a new language, deals with the unfamiliar climate, food and customs, and is transformed by all of it.

But this memoir is not a simple travelogue. It moves in and out of memory and the present, grappling with research and history, creativity and writing, while laying herself and her novel bare for us in an act of quiet and joyous reflection.

— Kate Evans

Zugzwang by Gabriel Stibio

By Third Party

The nightmare of our AI-generated doom-scroll present is scrunched into a ball and transformed into something glorious in Zugzwang.

Originally published in 2024, Zugzwang had a small print-run of 75 copies. (It swiftly sold out.)

Call it ahead of its time, then: 2025 sees the first reprint of Stibio's collection of fiendish short fictions. Using combinations of fonts and images, Stibio and designer Dan Go create cliche-baiting absurdities and fever dreams in Stage Fright; update Aesop's Fables for a world where "the commons" no longer feel quite so common; and, in Plato's Mom's Cave (the American spelling is one of the book's more incongruous aspects), turn banal chatroom conversation into an opportunity for near-biblical levels of revelation.

Zugzwang is funny, mordant and deeply attuned to the disquieting aspects of the contemporary world. Come for the absurdity, stay for the horror.

— Declan Fry

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche

4th Estate

Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche is as close as a writer gets to being a pop star; her words were even sampled in Beyoncé's track, '***Flawless', which means there were high expectations for her fourth novel, Dream Count. Happily, it's a worthy successor to her 2013 novel Americanah, exploring similar terrain of women's desire, friendship, race and the African diaspora.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America who is suddenly grounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. The story opens with her recollecting her life so far and her experience of (not) finding love, setting the tone of the novel. On the issue of marriage, she is caught in a bind between her family's expectations that she settle down and start a family and her desire for a different kind of life. "I did not want what I wanted to want," she reflects.

After Chia, we meet the other major characters: her best friend Zikora, who's only ever wanted a child but whose dreams are shattered when she's betrayed by her boyfriend, and her cousin Omelogor, a character we shouldn't like — she's a corrupt banker who's stealing from clients — but her boldness is infectious.

The heart of the book is the story of Kadiatou, Chia's housekeeper, whose biography is based on real-life events (which you can read about in the author's note). We discover her backstory growing up impoverished in Guinea and the sacrifices she made to travel and work in America. I did not want this narrative thread to end, and feel the whole book could have been written from her perspective. But despite this misgiving, Dream Count is still one of my favourite books of the year because of the verve and unapologetic nature of all the characters.

— Sarah L'Estrange

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