Books of the Year: Reading at the End of the World
2025 was a strong year for books, particularly for writers circling the same big questions from different angles: reality and unreality, social collapse, the exhaustion of modern life, and the return of authoritarian politics in new guises.
What follows isn’t a neat or balanced list. It’s a personal one — fiction, non-fiction, poetry and graphic novels — united less by genre than by mood.
Fiction
Perfection
— Vincenzo Latronico
(with Things — Georges Perec)*
Originally published in Italian in 2022, Perfection finally appeared in English this year. A Spanish couple move to Berlin and assemble a meticulously curated life — aesthetically flawless, emotionally hollow.
Having lived in Spain as a Brit, I found it achingly accurate. The quiet desperation of expatriate life, the sense of performing success rather than living it, is perfectly captured.
The book is consciously in dialogue with Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the 1960s, and the two are best read together. Different eras, same anxiety: consumption as meaning, style as substitute for substance.
I’m sure the characters’ end-of-year reading lists were even more immaculately curated than mine.
Vanishing World
— Sayaka Murata
Under the Eye of the Big Bird
— Hiromi Kawakami
While Britain ties itself in knots over immigration and social change, Japan is further down the road. Its birthrate has collapsed; without immigration, the population is shrinking.
These two speculative novels explore futures in which sex and reproduction have largely been abandoned, and society muddles through the consequences. They’re not dystopias in the conventional sense — more unsettling for how calm, pragmatic and emotionally flat they are.
Quiet, strange, and disturbing.
Nova Scotia House
— Charlie Porter
Charlie Porter’s debut novel explores love, sex and friendship in the London gay scene just before it was devastated by AIDS.
Porter was once the Guardian’s menswear correspondent. I used to send him deliberately strange reader questions — I suspect I was his only regular contributor. In return, he once fixed me up with a pair of Margaret Howell linen trousers. This feels relevant.
The novel is tender, funny, and quietly devastating. A memorial without sentimentality.
The Silver Book
— Olivia Laing
A young British artist begins an uneasy affair with an Italian costume designer working for Fellini and Pasolini, including on Salò. The shadow of the Salò Republic — the brief fascist regime in the dying days of WWII — looms over the novel.
As dark forces once again push Italy, and much of the West, to the far right, the book feels sharply timely. Stylish, cool, brief — and unsettling.
Jesus Christ Kinski
— Ben Myers
Klaus Kinski has a breakdown. Ben Myers struggles through lockdown.
Somehow this pairing works.
(Also: his mum taught me maths. I feel this should be on the record.)
There Is No Antimemetics Division
— qntm
One of the strangest and most frightening sci-fi novels I’ve read in years.
An antimeme is something with self-censoring properties: once you perceive it, you forget it. Some are harmless. Others feed on your memories — the things that make you you — and you never even realise anything has gone missing.
And they’re not just feeding. They’re spreading.
Deeply unsettling, and far too relevant.
The Expansion Project
— Ben Pester
A softer, but no less mind-bending, piece of speculative fiction.
Bring Your Daughter to Work Day at the Capmeadow Business Park goes wrong when a child disappears. The company is undergoing a mysterious “expansion project”, the nature of which is never explained.
Corporate language as cosmic horror.
Rejection
— Tony Tulathimutte
The most frustrating book of the year.
The opening story, The Feminist, has been a classic since it circulated online in 2019: a man whose performative feminism collapses into misogyny. Unfortunately, the rest of the book is populated by similarly unlovable characters, making it feel like a slog rather than a challenge.
Poetry and Graphic Novels
Best poetry: The Age of Olive Trees — Haia Mohammed
A short collection written during the Israeli assault on Gaza. As Mohammed writes, the people of Gaza write poems that defy death.
Best graphic novel: The Department of Truth, Volumes 5 & 6
An ongoing series about conspiracy theories becoming real — and the shadowy government department tasked with containing them.
Essential reading in a world where many people have not only abandoned the distinction between truth and lies, reality and fantasy, but increasingly demand that the rest of us live inside their fantasies too.
Non-Fiction
Goliath’s Collapse
— Luke Kemp
An epic study of societal collapse from the Bronze Age to the modern world, told through case studies of powerful regimes that unravelled.
With today’s superpowers visibly wobbling, it feels grimly timely.
When the Clock Broke
— John Ganz
A history of the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of Trumpism, tracing how con men, conspiracists and culture warriors declared war on liberal elites and globalism.
One of the clearest explanations of how paranoid politics went mainstream.
Alt-Reich
— Nafeez Ahmed
An unsettling account of the global networks — financiers, lobbyists, journalists, tech billionaires — that turned Trump into a focal point for a new authoritarian movement.
One detail stands out: when UKIP was founded, much of its early funding came from figures with close links to British intelligence. Norman Tebbit publicly identified two former intelligence operatives involved in coups in South America who went on to help build UKIP and Nigel Farage’s career.
Given the overlaps between Leave, Cambridge Analytica and the security services, it’s a reminder that Reform — UKIP’s latest skin — has always been an establishment project.
The Wizard of the Kremlin
— Giuliano da Empoli
(with Homo Zapiens — Viktor Pelevin)*
Technically fiction, but as close to reality as it gets.
Da Empoli’s novel charts the rise of Putin through the fixers, strategists and manipulators who constructed his regime. Pelevin’s Homo Zapiens tells a parallel story about the manufacture of unreality through media.
Pelevin was once one of Russia’s great satirists. Lately, he seems to have been absorbed into the world he once skewered. Homo Zapiens remains his best.
Wizard of the Kremlin will be at the cinemas next year. And yes that is Jude Law as Putin
Reading in Unreality
A pattern runs through all of this.
These books are obsessed with collapse, simulation, conspiracy, authoritarianism, and the slow erosion of shared reality. They feel less like warnings than field reports.
They are unafraid of being complex, which is essential in a world where most people only think in 140 characters.
That doesn’t make them depressing. Quite the opposite. They are attempts to understand the moment we’re in — and understanding, however grim, still beats sleepwalking.