Books of the Year 2025: Part Three

In contrast to 2024’s damp squib, this year’s summer seemed to stretch from April to October. A great one for reading as well as sun, too, beginning with three very different favourites in quick succession in July.

Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper spans a single day which sees Thomas Flett lifted out of his hardscrabble life for a few brief hours. Heading back to the shack he shares with his mother once he’s sold the day’s shellfish catch, he finds her with an American man who has a proposition for him. Edgar is a movie director, intent on filming a novel for which Thomas’s stretch of beach offers the perfect location and prepared to pay handsomely for his help. Wood’s descriptions of the bleak landscape and the difficulties Thomas endures are vividly cinematic. He and his mother lead a hand-to-mouth life with little hope of change, but he dreams of becoming a musician. Things may not quite turn out the way he expected but there’s hope for Thomas at the end of this atmospheric, dreamlike novella. I was delighted when this one caught the eye of the Booker judges but dismayed not to see it on their shortlist.

I wasn’t expecting much from Alexander Starritt’s Drayton and Mackenzie but I found it gripping. Opening in the early 2000s, it follows two very different men. Driven and intensely competitive, even with himself, James is the affable, indolent Roland’s antithesis. He’s a rising star with McKinsey’s consultancy, eyes set on becoming their youngest partner; Roland joins him, getting in by the skin of his teeth. When the 2008 crash hits, they’re sent off to Aberdeen to prepare employees for redundancy in the hard-hit oil and gas industry by the end of which they’ve formed a friendship that underpins the rest of their lives, and a business partnership in which one complements the other. Starritt’s novel is unusual in its theme of enduring male friendship and its setting in the business world. The latter might sound dull, but I found this story of ambition, determination and invention quite riveting.

July’s third favourite was Mai Ishizawa’s prize-winning debut, The Place of Shells, set during the pandemic and narrated by an unnamed academic from Tōhoku now living in Germany. Our narrator walks through Göttingen’s deserted streets to meet her friend’s train, wondering whether he will go back to Tōhoku for the festival of Obon when the dead return to their families. Nomiya was washed away during a devastating tsunami, but his body has never returned to land. Ishizawa’s novel is a beautiful meditation on trauma, grief and memory. I found it very moving, its final passages offering hope through acceptance and acknowledgement of the way in which trauma changes us in body and mind.

Just one standout for August: Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott’s Dusk which follows Iris and Floyd, the children of notorious drunkards. With no work on the horizon, Iris suggests they head to the highlands after reports of a puma killing sheep and now humans. Travelling through a starkly beautiful landscape, they find a tavern, oddly enclosed with the bones of what might be a whale from when the plateau and mountains were submerged. Iris finds herself smitten with one of the hunters with whom she and Floyd reluctantly decide to combine forces. Their quest ends in a way neither could ever have imagined. I’ve been a fan of Arnott’s fiction since the publication of Flames which made it on to my 2018 books of the year list, despite my initial reservations, as did Limberlost in 2022.

Two September favourites, beginning with Andrew Porter’s The Imagined Life which sees a middle-aged man, carrying the burden of his father’s disappearance since he was twelve, determined to get to the bottom of what happened to this vibrant, volatile man. Steven remembers his parents’ poolside parties in the early ’80s, usually culminating in films projected onto the cabana house wall. In the summer of 1983, one such party proved pivotal when a young visiting academic turns up, charming many including Steven’s father. The evening ends in his father’s disgrace although twelve-year-old Steven can’t fathom why. The promise of tenure recedes as his father moves into the cabana house, ostensibly to finish his book, visited by his lover, and increasingly manic. Steven is an engaging narrator who drew me into this absorbing, compassionate novel about love, loss and trauma.

My last choice for 2025’s third quarter is Patrick Ryan’s debut novel, Buckeye, which follows two families, linked by a devastating secret, over four decades beginning in the 1940s. Cal was born with a disability, enduring the usual cruelties dished out by schoolchildren. Becky had also been the subject of derision thanks to her claims to hear the dead. No earth-shattering bolt of lightning makes these two fall for each other but their friendship leads to marriage, and a son. On VE day, a beautiful redhead walks into the family hardware store asking Cal for a radio. They listen to the news together, Margaret so delighted that she kisses him. Not long after returning from the war, Felix greets news of Margaret’s pregnancy with the hope of the family life he’s buried so much to attain. Often doorstoppers make me feel desperate to cut swathes from them, but Ryan’s novel kept me engrossed throughout.

The year’s final quarter ranges from a difficult-to-categorise title from an author I’d never read before to a novel bordering on SF/Fantasy, a step or two outside my usual reading. More about that next week. Meanwhile, if you missed the first two parts and would like to catch up, they’re here and here.