Top reads of 2025

Our annual selection of the 100 most outstanding titles of the year, chosen by books editor Mark Broatch and Listener contributors.

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FICTION

1985 by Dominic Hoey (Penguin)

Raw, real, sometimes funny, an ultimately hopeful tale of a spacies-loving Auckland boy growing up in a dysfunctional family.

AIR by John Boyne (Doubleday)

Taut, compelling final novel in the Irish writer's interlinked Elements series; this book, in which a psychologist is flying with his teenage son from Sydney to Dublin to confront the past, is more reflective.

THE BOOK OF RECORDS by Madeleine Thien

(Granta)

Deeply human and inventive speculative story of Lina and her father who arrive in a kind of temporal limbo and embark on a series of escapes and reveries.

THE BOOK OF GUILT by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press)

In an atmospheric, compelling alternative Britain of 1979, identical triplet brothers live in a special house in the forest, as the reality of their lives is slowly, suspensefully revealed.

DREAM COUNT by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate)

Adichie's long-awaited new novel, which tracks the intersecting lives of four quite different women and is centred on a Nigerian writer living in America, is richly written and fully imagined.

FLASHLIGHT by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape)