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Book Box | My best fiction of 2025
Dear Reader,
The leaves of the cherry tree outside my window are turning golden yellow. The long monsoon grass has been cut, dried and heaped into piles of haystacks - almost ready to be winter fodder for the cows. Autumn has come to Manali.
I am sitting in the verandah, with a cup of coffee and the sun on my face and thinking about this years reading - 90 books so far, not counting the 10 odd books I DNFed (Did Not Finish).
At the start of the year, I resolved to read older books and to re-read favourites, instead of chasing every shiny new release. I'm glad I did. Re-reading has been amazingly pleasurable. It's astonishing how the same book can change shape depending on where you are in life. You read The God of Small Things in your twenties and it's Ammu and Velutha's love story that grips you. Years later, it's the twins' fractured childhood that won't let you go.
Here then is my list of the top fiction I've read this year.
1. How to read a Book by Monica Wood - This story of a book club inside a prison is a cosy confirmation of what I've always believed: that books can change lives. It reminds me of being six years old and first stepping into the make-believe world of The Enchanted Wood by Enid Blyton.
2. A Town Like Solace by Mary Lawson - This mystery set in northern Canada is full of small-town landscapes and wholesome routines like libraries and home made ice cream. Perfect if you like Frederik Backman
3. The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard : An English family holidays in their country house in the 1940s, in a mix of Gerald Durrell's exuberance and Downton Abbey's pomp and intrigue. And if you enjoy it you have four sequels waiting for you!
4.The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş - A quiet, luminous novel about an immigrant couple in a city that feels like Paris. Nothing much “happens,” and yet everything does: belonging, daily rituals, and friendship. Thank you to Obama's book list for introducing me to this gem in translation from Turkish.
The Eyes and the Impossible by Dave Eggers - Ethan Hawke narrates this heartwarming tale of a free dog in a Golden Gate Park like setting, surrounded by gulls, bison, raccoons, and the wilderness. His rendition makes it irresistible.
Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris - Rachel Atkins tells the story of the artist Zora in this unforgettable war novel. Its vivid and gripping and brings the siege of Sarajevo to life - its fear, hunger, and also its surprising hopefulness.
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen - To mark Austen's 250th year, I listened to Kate Winslet bring Elinor and Marianne to life. This time, what struck me most wasn't the romance but the economics: how precarious women's livelihoods were, and how central money is to Austen's plots.
These are the books that challenged my thinking and stayed in my head long after I turned the final page.
Riot by Shashi Tharoor - An experimental novel about the death of an American woman in small-town India. Part satire, part tragedy, it uses shifting voices and documents to unspool the anatomy of a riot. I was hooked to this relatively unknown gem of a novel by its unusual form and its wit.
Audition by Katie Kitamura - A taut, fragmented novella about an actor, her husband, and a young man who may or may not be their son. Its structure is daring, its prose spare and yet rich with the reverberations of multiple meanings. Set in New York, this Booker-shortlisted novella is the final part of a loosely connected trilogy, each standing wholly on its own as well.
The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict - Vivid historical fiction about Mileva Marić, Einstein's brilliant first wife, who studied physics alongside him and whose work was overshadowed. Based partly on their letters, it paints Einstein in an unflattering light capturing the struggles of a gifted woman in a male dominated world.
The Queen of the Tambourine by Jane Gardam - An intriguing novel by a much loved writer who passed away earlier this year, this book shook me up. It features the lonely middle-aged Eliza Peabody, who treats us to deliciously snarky accounts about her neighbourhood. Even though she is a notoriously unreliable narrator. The book is told in letters, and manages to be both hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time.
This year I've been irrestibly drawn to speculative fiction that asks urgent questions about technology, humanity, and structures of power. Here are my top five reads in this section.
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor - A clever puzzle of a novel, weaving an AI-driven mystery with the story of a book within a book. Set across the US, Nigeria and the multiverse, it made me think hard about what authorship means in our age of large language models.
Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao - The second book of the Iron Widow trilogy is slower than the first, but its exploration of misogyny, power, and rebellion in China - set against the backdrop of space warfare-is well worth the read.
Machines like Me by Ian McEwan - A human couple in alternate-universe London take in Adam, an AI companion. Programmed to do no harm, Adam still manages to upend their lives. A 2019 publication, it's a book everybody should read in this age of AI companions and lover apps.
Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress - First published in 1991, this novella imagines a future where children are genetically engineered not to need sleep. The result is a society split between the sleepless and the rest. Thirty years later, the questions this prizewinning novella raises about privilege and productivity, and being human, feel eerily timely.
Each to Each by Seanan Mcguire – A short story from the Women Destroy Science Fiction! 2014 anthology, in which women are genetically engineered into mermaid-soldiers for undersea colonisation. Decisions are made by men; women bear the consequences. It's speculative, yes, but also familiar.
What about you dear Reader ? As the season turns and this year winds down, which books have been your favourites- comforting you, provoking you and surprising you?
(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya's Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal.)
Source: HindustanTimes
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