My top book choices of 2025 reflect my constant focus on story. I seek titles that stir my imagination or teach me something new. Although my go-to can often be soft crime I am forever on the lookout for challenging non-fiction. Women heroes, characters and writers always feature highly in my picks – maybe it’s just a worldview of which I am familiar! Enjoy.
- Kassabova, Kapka (2024) Anima: A Wild Pastoral. In this final book in her Balkan quartet Kassabova travels with some of the last European pastoralists in southwestern Bulgaria. A beautiful testimony. January 2025 Picks.
- Harvey, Samantha (2023) Orbital. Life aboard the International Space Station while monitoring the wondrous Earth below is the premise of Harvey’s no-plot 2024 Booker Prize winning novel. A lyrical and immersive tale. July 2025 Picks
- Trevelyan, Jennifer (2025) A Beautiful Family. A family and their precocious ten-year-old spend the summer holidays on a beach in this unputdownable dark domestic thriller. August-September 2025 Picks.
- Purnell, Sonia (2024) Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue. A rich biography of an unsung power player of the twentieth-century who operated at the centre of politics across two continents. April 2025 Picks.
- Wynn-Williams, Sarah (2025) Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work. This memoir is a strong indictment of the callous approach taken to build the tech giant that is Facebook, now Meta. October 2025 Picks.
- Hochschild, Airlie Russell (2024) Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right. An insightful exploration of the pride-shame paradox in the Appalachian town of Pikeville, eastern Kentucky; the whitest and second poorest congressional district in the US – Trump territory. August-September 2025 Picks.
- Tyler, Anne (2025) Three Days in June. A hopeful and touching story, told over three days, as Gail navigates her daughter’s wedding and come to terms with the possibility of being jobless and hosting unwelcome guests. March 2025 Picks.
- Yeo, Sophie (2024) Nature’s Ghosts: The World We Lost And How To Bring It Back. A provocative examination of landscapes of the past, our many failed attempts to control nature and the need to reintroduce old diversity. March 2025 Picks.
- Malinowski, Stephan (2025) The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: A History of Collaboration. A forensic work of historical recovery that analyses the behaviour of a self-serving royal family who found their place in an alliance with Nazism following WWI. December 2025 Picks.
- Moore, Liz (2024) The God of the Woods. An intense literary mystery about two siblings who went missing in the same Adirondack mountain wilderness, years apart. November 2025 Picks.
7:30 Bookclub 