FICTION

There aren't many giants of 20th-century literature still writing, but 2025 saw the first novel in 12 years from American great Thomas Pynchon, now in his late 80s: Shadow Ticket is a typically larky prohibition-era whodunnit, set against rising nazism and making sprawling connections with the spectre of fascism today.

- Justine Jordan

Other elder statesmen publishing this year included Salman Rushdie with The Eleventh Hour a playful quintet of mortality-soaked short stories and his first fiction since the 2022 assault that blinded him in his right eye; while Ian McEwan was also considering endings and legacy in What We Can Know, in which a 22nd-century literature scholar looks back, from the other side of apocalypse, on a close-knit group of (mostly) fictional literary lions from our own era. In a time of climate terror, the novel is both a fascinating wrangle with the limits of what humans are able to care about and a poignant love letter to the vanishing past.

But perhaps the most eagerly awaited return this year was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose first novel in more than a decade, Dream Count, follows the lives of four interconnected women between Nigeria and the US. Taking in love, motherhood and female solidarity as well as privilege, inequality and sexual violence, it's a rich compendium of women's experience.

Two of the year's biggest novels - in all senses - were even longer in the writing. Kiran Desai took 20 years over her epic The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, following two globe-trotting Indians whose meddling families try to bring them together, and then keep them apart. It's a vast canvas worked with precision. Also two decades in the making, Sarah Hall's Helm - the story of a Cumbrian wind, from the formation of Earth up to the present - is a colossal achievement. The cast of characters includes not only the mercurial wind itself, but neolithic shamans, medieval zealots, Victorian meteorologists and modern-day scientists.