10 New Fiction Books You Need to Read in 2025
Make new fiction your alternative to doomscrolling with these expansive winter reads.
Last we checked, celebs like Jacob Elordi and Joseph Quinn were still mooching around with books in their back pockets, so it’s safe to say reading fiction out-and-about is still a flex.
Or you can take the old-fashioned approach and stay cosy reading at home this winter until there's a chance to casually wedge your literary judgements into conversation at other people’s homes.
Just paraphrase these tidy reviews of ten of the most exciting reads for the start of 2025 to sound suitably middle and/or high-brow. You’ve got low-brow covered, right?
1. Picks & Shovels
(Cory Doctorow)
Picks & Shovels reads like a 1980s Silicon Valley startup myth meets spy thriller. ‘Forensic accountant’ Martin Hench falls in love with both computers and girls, drops out of MIT and gets all mixed up in a bizarre war over desktop PCs, dot matrix printers and floppy disks.
Cory Doctorow writes about tech both old and new, and first came up with the term “enshittification” to describe how so much of the modern internet has decayed to the point of being almost unusable. Here, as well as making a fictionalised case study of a group of stone-cold enshittifiers, he adds everything from punk and feminism to organised religion into the heady stew of his ‘80s San Francisco. This is an origin story for the lead character but you don’t need to have read the whole series. You’ll race through it.
2. Perfection
(Vincenzo Latronico)
Perfection is a riot—if you’re a hipster who’s into self flagellation. Set mostly in Berlin, it follows couple Anna and Tom through sublets, sex parties, social media and serif fonts. And if you’re working from home, staring at a monstera plant and thinking you need to pick up heirloom tomatoes for dinner right now, you will feel a little bit too seen by this 120 pager.
Italian writer Latronico, with the help of his translator Sophie Hughes, doesn’t just get the little details and ‘differences’ in aesthetics nailed-on, he also captures the self-delusions, disappointments and anxieties of city-dwelling millennial ‘creatives’ so precisely it ends up being really quite devastating. A must-read modern classic.
3. The Garden
(Nick Newman)
Nick Newman is the pseudonym of children’s author Nicholas Bowling and there’s a gothic fable-like quality to this story set in an unknown time and place. We meet two elderly sisters, Evelyn and Lily, living in the kitchen and garden of a stately home by themselves while ‘monsters’ lurk out in the wasteland beyond. An unexpected visitor disrupts the sisters’ well-honed habits of farming, beekeeping, cooking and mending but The Garden remains all the more potent for how little we see and hear from the world outside the stone walls.
One for fans of Shirley Jackson with a climate dystopia spin that deepens the troubled psyches of the secluded sisters.
4. We Do Not Part
(Han Kang)
South Korean author Han Kang is best known for her novel The Vegetarian and the fact she won no less than the Nobel Prize in Literature last year. We Do Not Part is a dual portrait of two isolated friends Kyungha and Inseon, a mood piece full of dread and an investigation of family tragedy and history.
Set between a heatwave in the city of Seoul and snowstorms in the forests of Jeju Island, Kang writes with extreme clarity and focus, inspecting and re-inspecting characters, images and atmospheres within a dream logic that weaves in and out of consciousness. Translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, this is a story that will seep under your skin.
5. Killing Time
(Alan Bennett)
A 100-and-odd page novella from 90-year-old Alan Bennett that’s over almost as soon as it’s begun, you might have missed Killing Time at the end of 2024. But it’s worth seeking out as Bennett can achieve in a line or two what most writers spend pages and pages trying to describe.
What appears to be an everyday slice-of-life tale about a semi-posh council care home named Hill Topp House—which, gloriously, looks down on another care home, Low Moor, in all senses of the word—turns into a very wry, very dry account of how the residents and staff fare through the Covid years and what’s left from the lives they’ve lived. A right treat.
6. Twist
(Colum McCann)
Twist has everything you could want from a winter read: it’s epic and ambitious in its scope and framing and it’s emotionally generous and honest when it comes to its characters.
Through the eyes of McCann’s Irish writer-narrator Anthony Fennell, we follow one John Conway out to sea, setting off from modern-day Cape Town. Now, Conway is technically ‘chief of mission’ of the Georges Lecointe, an underwater cable repair vessel, so he’s not strictly a captain but he’s something of an Ahab type and, to complicate matters, his partner Zanele Ombassa is acting in a play thousands of miles away in London.
Alongside the portrait of Conway, who is a character for the ages, this weeks-long adventure gives McCann the canvas to combine the personal and the geo-political, as he considers the poetry and technology of how our digital messages to each other travel along ocean floors. Beautiful stuff.
7. Under the Eye of the Big Bird
(Hiromi Kawakami)
Hiromi Kawakami’s fourteen interconnected speculative stories that make up Under the Eye of the Big Bird move backwards and forwards in time and it’s not clear where the world we’re living in fits in – if it does at all. The overarching theme is that humanity is slowly but surely becoming extinct so anything goes when it comes to potential solutions.
The Japanese author of 2001’s Strange Weather in Tokyo, translated here by Asa Yoneda, uses a detached, distant voice as she roves between viewpoints and experiments, some familiar—mutants, clones, AI—and some really fun, inventive ideas that I won’t spoil here. A dose of existential melancholy with just a tiny glob of hope.
8. The Book of George
(Kate Greathead)
The Book of George is an enjoyable American One Day meets classic Nick Hornby with a dash of Fleishman Is In Trouble. If that means nothing to you, let’s put it another way: this is the story of the life of an Average Joe everyman named George with very specific opinions on certain things (wedding toasts, rich people’s flats, short stories) and a passivity bordering on self-sabotage when it comes to others (what to get his girlfriend Jenny for Christmas, what to do with his life).
Divided into chapters based on George’s age, starting at 12-18 and finishing around the late 30’s mark, Kate Greathead’s book riffs on all the major events of the past twenty years or so without feeling too Forrest Gump-like as her characters grow up and fail to grow up in various ways.
9. Mothers and Sons
(Adam Haslett)
American author Adam Haslett’s story of a mother and son, Ann and Peter, who barely see each another, has one of the most moving and well earned endings of any novel you’ll read this year. Haslett requires your patience as he digs beneath the surface of the two lives: Peter, a 40-year-old, kind-of-single lawyer who lives alone in Brooklyn, working overtime on asylum cases and Ann, a retired priest who has set up an idyllic, feminist retreat in the Vermont countryside with two other women.
Mothers and Sons is first-class literary fiction about listening and telling, what’s not said and what’s not heard and the emotional chaos of shame, grief and family secrets. You might need a lie down afterwards.
10. Greatest of all Time
(Alex Allison)
The teenage narrator of Greatest of all Time isn’t the GOAT himself – instead he’s a home-grown English footballer who has stayed loyal to his Northern town and team. He finds himself switching between starting Premier League matches and sitting on the bench all because French-Rwandan player Samson Kabarebe has just swooped in and stolen his shirt number.
This is AFC Wimbledon fan Alex Allison’s second novel and it looks at queer lust, sex, stealth and confusion, in and out of the locker room, capturing the embarrassingly all-consuming experience of having a crush in your teens. There’s some lovely bittersweet scenes throughout including what it’s like playing FIFA as yourself, hiring your Dad as your manager and having a truly terrible time in the VIP section of the club.
