John Banville
If you think the rise of the far right in the United States is a new phenomenon, then Buckley by Sam Tanenhaus will make you think again. This masterly biography of William F Buckley jnr (1925-2008) traces the history of the American conservative movement over the past hundred years. Buckley was a journalist and television presenter of great skill and charm, who supported and promoted arch-conservatives such as Senator Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet. He would have deplored Donald Trump as a vainglorious bully, but would have backed him and his policies without stint. Read Buckley and shiver.
John Banville’s latest novel is Venetian Vespers
Sebastian Barry
I’ve been working all year so I haven’t been able to catch up with so many enticing new novels. But the one I did read because I am a constant fan of many years’ standing was The Bureau by Eoin McNamee. This is a well-nigh perfect book. McNamee’s sentences have always been meticulous and miraculous, and this novel is the full flower of his genius. It is a story so bitter you had better have sweet tea to hand as you are going through. The courage required to write like this is Somme-like, and the ability to carry it off rarer than a flawless diamond.
Sebastian Barry is a former Laureate of Irish Fiction.
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John Boyne
The Season by Helen Garner was a highlight of 2025. The great Australian writer attended her teenage grandson’s every training session and football match across a year, writing about the experience with love, humour, and passion. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count reminded me how novels can offer insights into worlds outside our own. This story of four women of Nigerian descent living in America resonated with me for its heartfelt depiction of friendship, loss and isolation. The most powerful Irish novel was Roisín O’Donnell’s Nesting, a scorching indictment of both toxic masculinity and Ireland’s housing crisis.
John Boyne’s The Elements won both the Prix Femina Étranger and the Prix du Roman FNAC in France in 2025
Declan Burke
Brian McGilloway’s masterful The One You Least Suspect centres on a woman blackmailed by the Special Branch into informing against ex-paramilitaries running Derry’s illegal drug trade. Elizabeth Alker’s Everything We Do Is Music is a brilliantly detailed account of the origins of pop music in 20th century classical music. Lucy Lapinksa’s novel Some Body Like Me addresses the AI hysteria from the perspective of a sentient machine. Theo Dorgan’s novel Camarade explores a life dedicated to “permanent resistance” as an ageing Irishman writes his memoir while living in self-exile in Paris.
Declan Burke is an author and critic.
Lucy Caldwell
I loved Wendy Erskine’s The Benefactors – brimming over with the glorious, complex humanity of its city. Liadan Ní Chuinn’s debut collection of stories Every One Still Here has a raw power entirely its own. There’s such interesting writing coming from China at the moment – I was struck by Shuang Xuetao’s Hunter, translated by Jeremy Tiang. I hope it doesn’t seem like cheating to mention Ann Morgan’s Relearning to Read, as I wrote the foreword, but I did so only because it deserves a place on every reader’s shelf. My overall book of the year? Helen Garner’s collected diaries, How to End a Story. I read them compulsively, cover to cover like a psychological thriller – this testament to what it means for a woman to write, to make art, not just amid but from the quotidian, the domestic, the most intimate chambers of experience. An extraordinary work.
Lucy Caldwell’s new story collection, Devotions, is out next April
Fintan O’Toole
Two amazing windfalls of essays from two of our finest novelists. Anne Enright’s collection Attention gathers some of the best of her nonfiction writings, which have the same sharp vision, wonderfully wry tone and controlled passion as her novels. Whether dealing with her own life, with the strange complexity of Alice Munro, or with public issues, Enright’s beautifully-wrought prose fizzes with intelligence and insight. Colm Tóibín’s Ship in Full Sail brings together his marvellous formal lectures as Laureate for Irish Fiction with the looser, delightfully discursive blogs he published as part of the same gig, mapping encounters with works of poetry, music and visual art and with places and people. And two Irish hauntings of Italian cities: John Banville’s deliciously sinister Venetian Vespers and Joseph O’Connor’s tremendous and terrifying The Ghosts of Rome.
Fintan O’Toole is an author, critic and Irish Times columnist
Jan Carson
I absolutely adored Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection which casts an acidic and oftentimes hilarious eye over digital nomad culture in postmillennial Berlin. Read and squirm. Luke Kennard’s The Book of Jonah was my standout poetry read of the year. A playful, absurd and frequently profound reimaging of the Old Testament story, this is the sort of collection where you discover a fresh bullet of truth with every reread. However, Death of an Ordinary Man, Sarah Perry’s account of caring for her father-in-law during his final days, is undoubtedly my book of 2025. Humane, holy and utterly life affirming. It deserves to be an instant classic.
Jan Carson’s new novel Few and Far Between is out next April.
Brian Cliff
A dark year’s been a rich one for crime writing full of anger, grief, and – absent justice – vengeance. Keith Rosson’s thrilling Coffin Moon puts vampires into a gritty 1970s revenge thriller. The Good Liar, Denise Mina’s sly tale of power’s inner circles, gleams with angry wit. Megan Abbott’s El Dorado Drive is intoxicating contemporary noir about suburban Detroit women in a pyramid scheme. John Connolly’s latest Parker novel, The Children of Eve, has that remarkable series in peak form. Sara Gran’s heartbreaking collection Little Mysteries – bold, profane, funny, clever – is unlike anything else this year.
Brian Cliff is a critic
Edel Coffey
I loved Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye and Elaine Feeney’s Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way, two incredibly moving novels about women. Andrea Mara’s It Should Have Been You is a perfect puzzle of a page-turner. I only wish I hadn’t already read it so I could enjoy it over Christmas. My favourite romance this year was Anna Carey’s Dublin-based Our Song – warm and swoony, yet grounded in reality. And finally, Still, Julia Kelly’s memoir about the death of her mother, was my favourite non-fiction book this year.
Edel Coffey’s latest book is In Her Place
Michael Cronin
Eimear McBride’s The City Changes Its Face is a gripping account of a couple dealing with past traumas and present dilemmas told in McBride’s arrestingly distinctive prose. David Park’s Ghost Wedding narrates the stories of two Ulster couples, a century apart, whose lives are linked to an artificial lake on the grounds of a Big House. A richly resonant and deeply humane novel that is memorable in every respect. Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night, published in a new, complete translation by Antonia Lloyd, Jones is vintage Tokarczuk. A deft, poetic, moving description of the life of a woman living in the haunted, rural borderlands between Poland and the Czech Republic.
Michael Cronin is an academic and a critic
Helen Cullen
Our island once again offered an embarrassment of literary riches this year – my choices for 2025 are born of Irish sea, soil and stone. Elaine Feeney’s Let Me Go Mad in my Own Way is a true gift to Irish literature as her work has the power to articulate, with such great empathy, the truths of our country that were drowned in cultural silence. Hugo Hamilton’s Conversation with the Sea also has a powerful sensitivity that surfaces the depths of human consciousness with clear-eyed precision.
Helen Cullen’s most recent novel is The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually
Naoise Dolan
Heaven Looks Like Us, edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi, is an anthology of Palestinian poems in English and translation. Jehan Bseiso’s Prayer compels: “When the boot is on the neck. Hold us./When the headlines forget. Find us.” I also enjoyed Darach Ó Scolaí’s Bódléar, a playful Irish-language novel about 19th-century Munster and the region’s poets’ affinity with France. And Sadhbh Devlin’s An Fia sa Choill reimagines Fianna mythology; it’s intended for children but of interest to anyone after its historical achievement of making an Irish Book Awards shortlist outside the Irish-language category.
Naoise Dolan is a novelist from Dublin
Emma Donoghue
The book that’s lingering in my head, as this apocalyptic year winds down, is Ukrainian-Canadian Maria Reva’s Endling, which pulls off the trick of being a witty satire, a meta-fiction about how to write about your country and planet in crisis, and a deeply moving war story, all at the same time. On the other side of the Atlantic, Gethan Dick’s Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night manages to tell a plausible story about how the world might end that is also a hilarious, engrossing adventure.
Emma Donoghue’s latest book, a finalist for Canada’s top fiction prize, the Giller, is The Paris Express
Ruby Eastwood
To Rest Our Minds and Bodies by Harriet Armstrong follows a university student through the confusion, ecstasy and awkward comedy of first love. The writing is sharp and sensory, full of small, charged vignettes. Armstrong’s voice is funny and totally charming, naive but never jejune; she catches emotion in its shifting forms. Better known for his visual art, Ed Atkins brings the same layered, unsettling sensibility to Flower. It’s very stream of consciousness, and reads like a diary: self-excoriating, wickedly funny and sometimes searingly beautiful. Hugo Hamilton’s Conversation with the Sea unfolds on the west coast of Ireland, where a man returns after a lifetime in Berlin to sift through his past. The prose is clear and atmospheric. Not much happens, but the psychological drama is totally engrossing. Hamilton writes with great restraint and trust in the reader’s intelligence.
Ruby Eastwood is an arts journalist.
Wendy Erskine
Emma Warren’s Up the Youth Club: Illuminating a Hidden History is a meticulous and fascinating consideration of youth spaces in all their forms. In times of increasing atomisation, its celebration of connection and community felt important. Wolf Moon: A Woman’s Journey Into the Night is exactly as its title suggests, an exploration of the nocturnal, be it mysterious, quotidian or thrilling. Arifa Akbar writes with such elegance and poise. Another night book that I loved was Berghain Nights by Liam Cagney. It’s about all sorts of things: childhood in Donegal, the history of techno and Berlin clubs. I found it a really interesting book, an engaging trip with a companiable narrator.
Wendy Erskine’s latest book is The Benefactors (Sceptre)
Diarmaid Ferriter
David Szalay’s Flesh is oddly absorbing given that its central character, István, moving between Hungary and Britian, says very little and is not given to any kind of emotional soul searching. But his experiences and taciturnity are deployed to craft an alluring novel about masculinity, violence, sex, class, money, migration and power. Joseph O’Connor’s The Ghosts of Rome brings us to the heart of Rome under Nazi control and graceful resistance; it is wonderfully atmospheric. Nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? documents the desperate calamity that has afflicted rivers but also reminds us “given a chance, they heal themselves with remarkable speed. Their life pours back.”
Diarmaid Ferriter’s The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020 is out now in paperback
Daniel Geary
Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right offers a riveting account of the trajectory of key neoliberal intellectuals who, after the Cold War, came to believe in fixed biological hierarchies of gender and race. This history helps explain the seemingly contradictory fusion of libertarianism and ethnonationalism in the contemporary right. Evan Osnos’s wonderfully titled The Have and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultra-Rich examines the extreme concentration of wealth that marks the contemporary US. An entertaining writer with an eye for the ridiculous detail, Osnos illuminates the current misrule of American oligarchs.
Daniel Geary is Mark Pigott Professor in US History at Trinity College Dublin
Kevin Gildea
The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies is a brilliant examination of the world through systems and cybernetics. Capitlalism and its Critics by John Cassidy is an epic overview of capitalism, from the East India Company to now. Through economists and thinkers it explores and exposes the neoliberalism that rules today. Compelling ideas enlivened with colourful biography. Everything Will Swallow You by Tom Cox is a richly textured, magical book about time, love and the relationships that warm us in this flicker in eternity we call life. Warm, funny, inventive.
Kevin Gildea is a comedian and a writer.
Sarah Gilmartin
Flesh by David Szalay was a great choice for this year’s Booker Prize: tense, spare and wonderfully unsettling. I also loved Good and Evil, six new stories from the Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin. In a very strong year for Irish debuts, Gráinne O’Hare’s Thirst Trap, Liadan Ní Chuinn’s Every One Still Here and Aisling Rawle’s The Compound were standouts; from our established authors, The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor and Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney were both deeply immersive reads. Finally, for an absolute banker of a gift for book lovers this Christmas, Attention, a collection of Anne Enright’s non-fiction, is predictably brilliant.
Sarah Gilmartin’s new novel Little Vanities will be published next May
Sinéad Gleeson
I read a lot of excellent essays and non-fiction: this year: Pathemata, Maggie Nelson’s exploration of a mysterious facial pain, Yiyun Li’s devastating Things In Nature Merely Grow about grief and writing after the suicide of her two sons; Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies (swimming, art and competitiveness) and Ed Atkin’s wonderful off-kilter ruminations in Flower. In fiction, Wendy Erskine’s polyphonic The Benefactors, Elaine Feeney’s Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way and David Park’s Ghost Wedding all left a mark. I’m a judge for the Nero Book Awards and the shortlist is well worth your time: Seascraper by Ben Woods, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s Cursed Sisters, The Two Roberts by Damian Barr and Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know.
Sinéad Gleeson’s latest book is Hagstone.
Claire Hennessy
Some YA standouts from Irish writers this year: Skipshock, Caroline O’Donoghue’s smart, romantic adventure through time zones; Gráinne O’Brien’s Solo, a verse novel account of finding your way back to music after heartbreak; and Songs for Ghosts, Clara Kumagai’s thoughtful retelling of Madama Butterfly. From further afield, the dystopian settings of Neal Shusterman’s All Better Now (positing a new kind of pandemic) and Suzanne Collins’s Sunrise on the Reaping (depicting Haymitch Abernathy’s time in the Hunger Games) invite reflection on our own world, without sacrificing a gripping story, while Nathanael Lessore’s What Happens Online tackles contemporary concerns with pleasing humour.
Claire Hennessy’s latest book is In The Movie Of Her Life
Rónán Hession
My book of the year is the superb Old Kiln by Jia Pingwa (translators James Trapp, Olivia Milburn, Christopher Payne) about the disastrous Chinese Cultural Revolution. I loved the first three volumes of the time-loop septology On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle (translators Barbara Haveland, Sophie Hersi Smith, Jennifer Russell). In Farthest Seas by Lalla Romano (translator Brian Robert Moore) lingered long in my mind. My poetry choice is Your Glass Head Against The Brick Parade of Now Whats by Sam Pink. My favourite Irish novel was The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth by Adrian Duncan.
Rónán Hession’s latest novel is Ghost Mountain
Sara Keating
Laureate na nÓg Patricia Forde, collaborating with illustrator Sarah Warburton, provided a picture-book highlight for 2025 with Letters to a Monster (3+) in which a young girl wields her pen as a sword against the terrifying beast living under her bed. Forde also shared her storytelling secrets in Making It Up As You Go Along (8+), a primer full of prompts, with doodles and textual design from Mary Murphy suggesting all sorts of tricks for experimenting with form. Murphy’s Let’s Be Earthlings (2+), meanwhile, illustrated a master at work, while Wildful by Kengo Kurimoto (6+), an almost wordless novel about nature, embodied storytelling in its simplest iteration.
Sara Keating is an arts journalist.
Mia Levitin
On the heels of her Baillie Gifford Prize-winning diaries, How to End a Story, Helen Garner’s The Mushroom Tapes, co-written with Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, is a riveting true-crime conversation about the trial of Erin Patterson, convicted of murdering her in-laws with death caps baked into a beef Wellington. Continuing in the vein of The Examined Life, psyhchoanalyst Stephen Grosz’s Love’s Labour uses case studies from his practice to consider themes around relationships. Barabara Demick’s Daughters of the Bamboo Grove, about twins separated by China’s one-child policy and the rise in international adoption, is a sobering reminder of what can happen when governments meddle in reproductive rights.
Mia Levitin is a book critic.
Andrew Lynch
Oscar Wilde once declared that he had worked on a poem all morning and removed a comma, then laboured throughout the afternoon and put it back again. Merlin Holland must have taken the same care over After Oscar, a panoramic study of his grandfather’s posthumous rehabilitation that he began 25 years ago. It’s an exceptionally rich, moving and melancholy tribute. For some lighter reading at Christmas, Bookish by the proudly introverted Guardian journalist Lucy Mangan is a warm, witty memoir that aims to prove an old Morrissey lyric: “There’s more to life than books, you know – but not much more.”
Andrew Lynch is a critic, subeditor and proofreader
Elizabeth Mannion
Additions to Jane Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan series and Val McDermid’s Karen Pirie series were highlights of 2025. Casey’s The Secret Room and McDermid’s Silent Bones are tightly plotted procedurals, showcasing two authors at the top of their game. Rachel Donohue’s The Glass House and Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Benbecula continue to linger with me for their quiet, elegant writing. The humour and poignancy with which the women in Laura Lippman’s Murder Takes a Vacation and Samantha Downing’s Too Old for This take advantage of the invisibility that comes with being a certain age lingers too: these are wonderfully murderous reads.
Elizabeth Mannion is a book critic
Sarah Moss
It seems to have been a good year for memoir. I bought Helen Garner’s journals, How to End a Story, thinking I’d dip in and then found myself reading compulsively for three days and wanting everyone else to read them so we could talk. I always love Yiyun Li’s writing but I was a little scared to read Things in Nature Merely Grow, her memoir of losing both sons to suicide. The fear was misplaced; she writes with a steady gaze and a flame-forged commitment to art. Continuing the seasonal sober theme, Miriam Toews’s A Truce that is not Peace is a beautiful, funny and sad book about maturity and grief and writing.
Sarah Moss’s latest novel is Ripeness.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
Gráinne Hurley’s Gratefully and Affectionately: Mary Lavin and The New Yorker is a captivating account of Mary Lavin’s relationship with the famous magazine. I loved Ian McEwan’s latest, What We Can Know, which tackles the danger of climate change in an original way. Many other superb books came my way this year, such as Celia De Fréine’s Even Still, the first collection of short stories in English from this prolific bilingual writer, and Áine Ní Ghlinn’s Dánta Idir Shean agus Nua: New and Selected Poems, with wonderful English translations by Theo Dorgan.
Éilís Ni Dhuibhne is the current Laureate of Irish Fiction
Liz Nugent
The Death of Us by Abigail Dean explores the aftermath of trauma for a couple when one is subjected to the worst kind of violence. But it beautifully demonstrates how they navigate their way back to each other when the perpetrator is still out there. Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell is a fictional account of living in emergency accommodation with two children when you are fleeing an abusive husband who is relentless in pursuit. The writing is sublime. The Secret Room by Jane Casey gave Maeve Kerrigan fans everything we wanted. This locked-room mystery is one of the best I have encountered.
Liz Nugent is the author of Strange Sally Diamond
Joseph O’Connor
The book that’s given me most pleasure this year is Scanty Plot of Ground, the wonderful anthology of sonnets compiled by Paul Muldoon. Like the blues and reggae, the sonnet has rules, but this marvellous collection shows the dexterity, grace and ingenuity with which sonneteers have often stretched them. In a strong year for debut novels, I loved The Kings Head by Kelly Frost. With brilliant essays on subjects from Bob Dylan to Eileen Gray, Irish censuses and Wexford light, Colm Tóibín’s Ship in Full Sail is endlessly fascinating and enjoyable. Patti Smith’s Bread of Angels is a triumph.
Joseph O’Connor’s novel The Ghosts of Rome has won the Irish Book Awards Last Word Listeners’ Choice Award 2025
Declan O’Driscoll
Paul Larkin’s newly published translation of A Fortunate Man by Henrik Pontoppidan was my reading highlight of the year. Centring on a visionary engineer whose calculations provide the only certainty in a life of deep self-questioning, the novel anticipated both the promise and alienation of 20th-century capitalism. A more recently written novel, Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko, superbly translated by Mima Simić, explores how violence is perpetuated through both a family and society. The effectiveness of the novel is enhanced through extended sentences that expire like the exhaled breath of the almost defeated.
Declan O’Driscoll reviews translated fiction for The Irish Times
Kevin Power
A very good year for Irish debuts. Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh (Fourth Estate) makes rich, funny sentences out of the triumphs and agonies of John Masterson as he negotiates adolescence on an island off the coast of Mayo. Thirst Trap by Grainne O’Hare (Picador) does the very same thing for a group of young women turning 30 in contemporary Belfast. But the book of the year is Liadan Ni Chuinn’s Every One Still Here (Stinging Fly Press): short stories of uncanny depth and astonishing richness about the Troubles, their aftermath, love, death, the ordinariness of days – everything.
Kevin Power is an author, academic and critic
John Self
Michael Amherst’s The Boyhood of Cain is a debut but has more confidence and poise than many experienced authors. Its story of a boy navigating life as a headmaster’s son is funny, rigorous and very touching. Helen Garner’s diaries How to End a Story rightly won the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction. They show you all the different things writing can do, often on the same page. And Brian Friel’s Stories of Ireland reminded us that before he was a great playwright, he was a great short story writer. Fans of Frank O’Connor should look no further.
John Self is a book critic
[ Tracing the real people in Brian Friel’s ‘first great Irish play’Opens in new window ]
Catherine Taylor
The Chinese-American author Yiyun Li has transformed the grief of losing both of her sons to suicide into a radical memoir. Things in Nature Merely Grow is both a tribute to and an acceptance of the choices her sons Vincent and James made: unsentimental and radiant. Colwill Brown’s narrated-in-dialect novel We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is set in her native south Yorkshire at the end of the millennium, following a trio of profane and spirited young women as they navigate misogyny, class and deprivation. An astonishing polyphonic debut. I’m hooked on Solvej Balle’s time-loop series On the Calculation of Volume, translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, in which a woman is condemned to lived the same day – November 18th – over and over. Time, mortality, what it means to be human – a masterpiece.
Catherine Taylor is an author and a book critic
[ Solvej Balle: ‘I thought that if I started to write this, I would spoil it’Opens in new window ]
Colm Tóibín
The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis, including many poems that have never been published in a collection before, shows Heaney’s talent as restless and complex as much as his achievement is solid and canonical. The editing, the arrangement of the poems and the notes offer a template for how such a book should be done. Helen Garner’s How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, at 800 pages, is compulsive reading. It is a portrait of a rich writerly sensibility; it is a tale of two cities – Sydney and Melbourne; it is a story of motherhood; it is a searing account of the break-up of Garner’s marriage to the novelist Murray Bail. What emerges most strongly and brilliantly is Garner as a born noticer, someone on whom nothing is lost.
Colm Tóibín’s most recent book, Ship in Full Sail, is published by the Gallery Press
Frank Wynne
“I am a child shaped of beeswax … the size of a human forearm,” so begins the narrator of Olga Ravn’s novella The Wax Child, which viscerally reimagines the story of Christenze Kruckow, a Danish noblewoman executed for witchcraft in 1621. But this is not a historical novel: Ravn weaves letters, court transcripts and spell together with the unearthly voice of her narrator to create a disturbing and unsettling prose poem, an incantation that explores womanhood, motherhood and bodily autonomy. Martin Aitken’s mesmerising, exquisitely precise translation is, literally, breathtaking. To be read in one sitting, on a dark winter’s night.
Frank Wynne is a translator and a book critic
Compiled by Martin Doyle
