By Tessa Whitehouse, Queen Mary University of London; Inés Gregori Labarta, Lancaster University; James Miller, Kingston University; Jenni Ramone, Nottingham Trent University; Leigh Wilson, University of Westminster; Prathiksha Betala, Leeds Beckett University, and Roberta Garrett, University of East London
Reading is very subjective, but one thing most book lovers can agree on is that 2025 was a notable year for fresh, inventive, affecting storytelling. Books translated from their original language are proving increasingly popular as readers seek out global perspectives beyond their own, as evidenced in this year’s International Booker win, Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, which is included here.
We also bring you six other novels our academic experts have chosen as their favourites this year. From a Mrs. Dalloway for the service economy, to a dreamlike encounter between people across time, place and mortality, do our academic picks chime with yours?
“In PICK A COLOUR, a former boxer-turned-manicurist spends an ostensibly ordinary summer day at her salon, quietly navigating the tension between her outward anonymity and her sharp, deeply intelligent, inner life. In this exquisite novel, intelligence isn’t inherited through… pic.twitter.com/mIPdYo7dFV
— Giller Prize (@GillerPrize) November 16, 2025
Pick A Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa
This slender little novel is both a reverie and a dash of icy water to the face that will make you think twice about tuning out from your surroundings next time you get a mani-pedi. We follow the owner of a low-price nail bar through a workday from turning on the fluorescent lights to pulling down the metal shutter.
In this Mrs. Dalloway for the service economy, the painful intersections of the personal and the political are inescapable for the “Susans” (the name each employee must adopt), but as invisible as the workers themselves to many of their customers.
Slight in length, light in touch, full of humour, and closely observed, Pick A Colour can be read in a single, intense afternoon. But the troubling thoughts it raises through its memorable characters linger long after your Christmas nail polish has all chipped away.
Tessa Whitehouse is reader in English and director of Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
Perfection is a curious sort of novel. There is no dialogue and almost no conflict between the two central characters, Anna and Tom, digital nomads who spend their days in Berlin designing websites and always appear together, almost like a single entity.
In a sequence of beautifully written, perfectly observed chapters, Latronico itemises and describes their apartment, their social media habits, their limited perspective on Berlin, their sex life, their futile attempts at meaningful political activism, their growing disillusionment and desire for relocation—the repetitive consumption and socially structured habits of a globalised lifestyle built around image and taste.
The result is a remarkably astute and compelling novel—social realism at its sharpest—as Latronico nails the manners of the millennial generation and that brief period of optimism, from 2006 to 2016, when we felt digital media might make a positive difference and lifestyle choices seemed imbued with an optimistic ethical resonance—soon shown to be hollow.
James Miller is a senior lecturer in creative writing and English literature.
Old Soul by Susan Barker
At first, Barker’s novel seems a gorgeously written adaptation of one of my favourite gothic tropes: the vampire. The story opens with two strangers, Jake and Mariko, who meet at Osaka airport. They have both lost loved ones in strange and brutal circumstances but in common, each of the deceased encountered a mysterious, dark-haired woman just before their deaths. A woman who came looking for Mariko, and then disappeared.
As the plot advances, Barker takes familiar tropes and themes in unexpected directions, turning this novel into an unforgettable tale of cosmic horror. There is the terrifying lore of “the Tyrant”, different timelines and settings from Wales to New Mexico, not to mention a cast of unreliable narrators who become more vibrant, twisted and compelling as the novel advances. Ultimately, this is a story about our societal obsession with becoming famous and being seen—Barker’s novel goes a step further and asks: who gets to witness? Who gets to record? And for what purpose?
Inés Gregori Labarta is a lecturer in creative writing.
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett
There is no shortage of contemporary novels with first-person narrators who are women, often writers, struggling to keep themselves together in the face of late capitalism, the internet and the patriarchy. Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is narrated by a woman, a writer, but beyond that, all similarities to other works in this category disappear.
The narrator’s interior world is made up of thoughts about and responses to others—her friend and ex-lover Xavier, her old schoolteacher with whom she had a relationship as a teenager, and another old schoolteacher who has recently emailed her.
It is a novel of extraordinary noticing, but it is a noticing that has such rhythm and intensity that it enters your very bones as you read. It is as unrepeatable as a dream, and like a dream stays with you way beyond the ability of words to account for it.
Leigh Wilson is a professor of English literature.
We Do Not Part by Han Kang
The English translation of We Do Not Part followed Han Kang’s 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her earlier Greek Lessons (2011, translated into English 2023) considered loss of sight and speech through the arresting metaphor of burial in snow.
We Do Not Part reconsiders this metaphor, employing the destructive and creative force of a snowstorm to convey the danger of lost histories. Kyungha reluctantly agrees to house sit and look after the much-loved pet bird of her sick friend, Inseon, and travels in snow and darkness to reach her rural cabin.
The novel is at once a dreamlike encounter between people across time, place, and mortality; a recollection of the women’s friendship and childhoods; a personal history of the impact of the 1948-49 Jeju massacre (an intense period of anti-communist violence and suppression that resulted in thousands of deaths); and a portrait of the rural South Korean landscape in bleak winter. The prose is crisp and poetic, the dialogue sparse, and the protagonist introspective and self-questioning. An intelligent, graceful, bruising novel and an encounter with the rural and the local.
Jenni Ramone is an associate professor of postcolonial and global literatures.
We Do Not Part by Han Kang
The English translation of We Do Not Part followed Han Kang’s 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her earlier Greek Lessons (2011, translated into English 2023) considered loss of sight and speech through the arresting metaphor of burial in snow.
We Do Not Part reconsiders this metaphor, employing the destructive and creative force of a snowstorm to convey the danger of lost histories. Kyungha reluctantly agrees to house sit and look after the much-loved pet bird of her sick friend, Inseon, and travels in snow and darkness to reach her rural cabin.
The novel is at once a dreamlike encounter between people across time, place, and mortality; a recollection of the women’s friendship and childhoods; a personal history of the impact of the 1948-49 Jeju massacre (an intense period of anti-communist violence and suppression that resulted in thousands of deaths); and a portrait of the rural South Korean landscape in bleak winter. The prose is crisp and poetic, the dialogue sparse, and the protagonist introspective and self-questioning. An intelligent, graceful, bruising novel and an encounter with the rural and the local.
Jenni Ramone is an associate professor of postcolonial and global literatures.
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq
Delicately woven over a period of 33 years, this collection of 12 short stories comes from the heart of the Muslim community in southern India. Rendered nearly invisible in the nation’s literary imagination despite its substantial presence, Heart Lamp offers a necessary intervention into the silences of Indian Muslim women’s interior lives.
It maps the emotional landscapes and the intricate layers of marginalization through caste, class and gender expectations embracing the politics of location. Mushtaq, an activist, inevitably represents Karnataka’s “Bandaya Sahitya” (Rebel Literature) movement, rooted in anti-caste, feminist and secular traditions.
The stories juxtapose modern India’s patriarchal structures with the obscured lives of women through literal and metaphorical veils where pain, suffering, injustice are critiqued through razor sharp realism mingled with sentimentality and humour. Deepa Bhasthi’s translation performs its own quiet rebellion, refusing to italicise Kannada words or append footnotes.
Prathiksha Betala is a PhD researcher in contemporary feminist dystopian fiction.
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Tessa Whitehouse, Reader in 18th-century Literature and Director of Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature, Queen Mary University of London; Inés Gregori Labarta, Lecturer in Creative Writing, Lancaster University; James Miller, Senior Lecturer, School of Creative and Cultural Industries, Kingston University; Jenni Ramone, Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures, Nottingham Trent University; Leigh Wilson, Professor of English Literature, University of Westminster; Prathiksha Betala, PhD Researcher in Feminist Futurities, Leeds Beckett University, and Roberta Garrett, Senior Lecturer in Literature and Cultural Studies, University of East London. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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