Books of the Year 2025: Part Two

By / Random thoughts / / 19 Comments

April marks the real start of spring here in the UK although it appears on my horizon when the herons start doing a bit of DIY on their nests which I always stop to watch on one of my regular walks. This year, I found myself packing for summer for our Ghent break in late April.

Cover image for Back in the Dday by Oliver LovrenskiJust three standouts for this quarter, beginning with a particularly impressive debut. Set in Oslo, Oliver Lovrenski’s Back in the Day follows four bright, disadvantaged boys through their school days onto the streets and into a life that will likely lead to an early death. By fifteen they’re carrying knives, dealing drugs and sampling the merchandise. Lovrenski tells the boys’ stories through Ivor, whose Croatian background he shares, delivering his narrative in brief vibrant fragments written in lower case with little punctuation and in a slang that takes some getting used to, but persistence pays off. It’s a tough but rewarding, intensely moving read. Kudos to Nichola Smalley for a fine translation which can’t have been easy. Cover image for Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh

Very different from Lovrenski’s novel, John Patrick McHugh’s Fun and Games is also about male friendship, following seventeen-year-old John and his footballing mates through the summer of 2009, all four determined to play for their club in the Championship. John spends much of his time consumed with social anxiety, his thoughts fully taken up with himself – his prospects with the team and the woman he works alongside in his summer job, what his friends think of him, how horrible his body is in comparison with theirs – leaving little room for anyone else. As the summer wears on, he’s faced with a few home truths, even managing to grow up a little. A funny, poignant, coming-of-age story which smartly nails late adolescence with all its excruciating discomforts, and the ending is a masterstroke.

July’s favourite was Wendy Esrkine’s debut novel The Benefactors for which I had high hopes, raised by her superb short Cover image for The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine story collection, Dance Move. Boogie had been only eighteen when their rackety mother left her two daughters with him but proved himself up to the task of raising them both, never distinguishing between Misty and his biological child. Misty works in a classy hotel, harbouring a fancy for Chris the son of one of the city’s richest men. When he invites her to a party in an abandoned house, it ends badly for her, the machinery of privilege and influence swinging into action after she reports the rape to the police. Erskine threads short paragraphs of observations through her narrative, some from bit players in Misty’s story, others apparently random often slotting into the story later, which feels a little disjointed at first, but it adds depth to this richly textured, thoughtful novel. I was amazed not to see this one on the Booker longlist.

We’re almost through with summer with no sign of rain raising drought concerns, although it was hard not to hope the weather would hold. Several treats in early autumn to come, a couple that took me by surprise and one Booker longlisted title mystifyingly omitted from the shortlist. In the meantime, if you missed the first part of my books of the year and would like to catch up, it’s here.

Discover more from A Life in Books

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

19 thoughts on “Books of the Year 2025: Part Two”

Leave a comment ...

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.