David Szalay and Kiran Desai top books of the year lists

David Szalay, Flesh (Jonathan Cape)

David Szalay’s Booker Prize-winning novel Flesh was one of two books to triumph in this year’s round-ups. The author’s lauded depiction of one man’s life as he moves from Hungary to London was declared “a stunning portrayal of modern masculinity” by the Times. The Observer found it “thrillingly addictive” while the Economist called it a “deceptively complex novel which finds original ways to explore masculinity, intimacy, class and power struggles”.

Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hamish Hamilton)

The second book topping this year’s round-ups is The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai’s decades-spanning tale of love and loss. It was heralded as a “rich, bustling, old-fashioned epic” by the New York Times and a “beautiful and often hilarious satire of youth, artistic ambition and the immigrant dream” by the Telegraph. The New Statesman found it to be “an exploration of the shadow-lines of the migrant experience crafted in a mélange of realism, surrealism, comedy and mysticism”.

Helen Garner, How to End a Story (W&N)

Helen Garner’s Baillie Gifford Prize-winning How to End a Story, the first collection of diaries to ever win the non-fiction award, was praised for its “flinty brilliance” by the New Statesman. Garner’s book was also anointed the Times Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year and hailed by critics at the Irish Times as a “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”.

Daniel Kehlmann, Ross Benjamin (trans), The Director (riverrun)

The “endlessly inventive” (the Observer), Daniel Kehlmann nears the top of the books of the year mentions with The Director, a fictional account of the life of German director GW Pabst, who inadvertently made wartime films for the Nazis. The New York Times called The Director “supple, horrifying and mordantly droll”, while the Telegraph stated that the novel is proof of Kehlmann’s “mastery of the historical form”.

Suzanne O’Sullivan, The Age of Diagnosis: How the Overdiagnosis Epidemic Is Making Us Sick (Hodder Press)

“Thank god” for The Age of Diagnosis, said the New Statesman. Neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan’s “unnerving and sometimes controversial book” (the Times) made an impact in this year’s round-ups. The book “courageously questions medicine’s well-intentioned enthusiasm for attaching labels… to aspects of the human condition”, wrote the Guardian, and “examines a subtle but crucial shift in the ways we see sickness and health”, noted the Observer. “Brave, provocative and humane,” said the Financial Times.

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know (Jonathan Cape)

Despite having the “dullest title of any novel published this year”, according to Andrew Marr, writing for the New Statesman, the “prose is blissfully good” in Ian McEwan’s dystopian novel, What We Can Know, in which an academic attempts to trace a lost poem. “A fascinating wrangle with the limits of what humans are able to care about,” stated the Guardian, while the Times called it one of McEwan’s “strangest and most chilling [works] yet… It all adds up to a meditation on past, present and future that feels like his most richly layered work in years”.

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Han Kang, e yaewon (trans), Paige Aniyah Morris (trans), We Do Not Part (Hamish Hamilton)

From the 2024 Nobel Laureate comes We Do Not Part, a novel Han Kang originally published in Korean in 2021. Now translated into English, it has been met with delight from critics. The novel was selected as one of TIME’s Must-Read Books of 2025. The review called it “haunting”, Stylist dubbed it “atmospheric”, while the New York Times found it a “shimmering…chilling reminder of the terrible invisibility of people and events that are removed from us in space and time”. 

Margaret Atwood, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (Chatto & Windus)

From a “feminist of the first rank”, according to TIME, cultural giant Margaret Atwood’s memoir “crackles with droll asides and sudden observations of the human condition”. The New York Times said that Book of Lives “tracks both the profound experiences and lighter moments that have informed her writing”. A “fat and satisfying book”, declared the Observer and, although a touch on the nose, “very Atwoody”, said the Times.

Lily King, Heart the Lover (Canongate)

Heart the Lover, Lily King’s svelte but impactful love story that follows a trio of friends at three inflection points in their lives, was a hit with critics. An “intensely brainy, tightly observed love story”, wrote the Guardian; a novel with a “sharp intellectual current running beneath it”, said the Times; “a true tearjerker – wistful, melancholy,” stated TIME. King told The Bookseller: “It is a book about love and is a big, fat love story. It’s a love story from beginning to end.” 

Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work (Macmillan)

Macmillan announced Sarah Wynn-Williams’ insider account of Meta only one week before publication. Wynn-Willams may not be able to promote the book, following a US emergency arbitrator rule, but this has not stopped critics highlighting Careless People in their books of the year round-ups. “Damning and intensely readable,” said the Financial Times, while TIME declared it a “bombshell book”.