As we approach the end of 2025, we’re looking back at the things that have brought us immense comfort during the year.
For the team at Northern Soul, books were once again a source of great joy, and we spent a lot of time with our noses buried in brilliant books. So, we asked our writers and lots of lovely literary folk for their Best Reads of 2025. Some of these books were new publications, some were titles waiting patiently on our shelves, and some were old favourites. It’s an eclectic list and one that we hope will inspire you.
Helen Nugent, Editor of Northern Soul
This year, I finally finished a book that I’ve been reading for the past decade. While my powers of concentration have waned as I’ve got older, even I would be hard-pressed to explain how it took ten years to get through a mere 164 pages. But The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell is unlike anything I’ve ever read or am likely to read again.
Lauded on publication as a work of genius, this thoroughly inventive and infuriating book is comprised entirely of questions. Every single sentence is a question. This may seem preposterous and exhausting (both reasonable conclusions), but it works. I mean, it really works. To be honest, given the energy fizzing on every page, I’m surprised it hasn’t spontaneously combusted on my bookshelf. At first, the stream of consciousness seems disjointed, lurching from subject to subject with no rhyme nor reason. But it quickly becomes apparent that there is a method to the madness, with thoughts expanding effortlessly, and recurring themes and threads picked up time and again. Powell oscillates from the philosophical to the mundane without taking a breath; the only pauses in the book are the reader’s own, each question leading inexorably to introspection and reflection. And there is humour, lots of humour, punctuated by uncomfortable truths. Consider these excerpts:
‘Are you comforted by the assertion that there are yet people on Earth who know what they are doing? Or, like me, do you subscribe to the notion that people who knew what they were doing began to die off about 1945 and are now on the brink of extinction?…Do you feel no better, better, or inordinately better after you polish something?…Is it correct to say that an orange is eponymous? Why is a banana yellow and not banana?’
Do you want to read Powell’s book? If so, maybe also consider another of my favourite reads from 2025, The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. Inspired by Williams’ discovery that the original editors of the Oxford English Dictionary deliberately overlooked the word ‘bondmaid’ (a girl bound to serve without wages), Williams embarked on a fictionalised account of the words that male editors and lexicographers dismissed and discarded when compiling the dictionary. In equal parts an excoriating treatise on the disdain afforded to female and working-class vocabulary and a celebration of the enchantment of language, I felt moved, inspired, and furious – and what more can you ask from literature?
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Ellen Beardmore, Northern Soul writer and freelance writer
Starting a year with a cracker of a book always feels serendipitous. Penance by Eliza Clark was the first novel I read in 2025. It certainly set the standard. This gripping book is written as a journalist’s account of events leading up to the grisly murder of a 16-year-old girl in a northern seaside town (Clark is from Newcastle). Told through interviews, darkly satirical crime podcast excerpts, and the reporter’s research perspective, this disturbing story feels gut-churningly real.
Meanwhile, Ultra Women: The Trailblazers Defying Sexism in Sport, is 100 per cent true. It’s the first in-depth investigation into the unexplored history of female endurance. There are plenty of eye-opening statistics and scientific evidence on how women can endure more than men in ultra sports. But it’s the inspirational stories of record-breaking, taboo-smashing women through history which bring these facts vividly to life. Northern co-authors Lily Canter and Emma Wilkinson overcame their own struggles to find a publisher willing to take a chance on a book about female sport. Thankfully, they persisted. I said ‘wow’ out loud multiple times while reading this – and defy anyone not to.
Globally, 2025 has, at times, felt like a dystopian nightmare. And I write that as a fan of dystopian fiction. So The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird, written before Covid, was a fitting read. The plot skates close to the pandemic. A mystery virus is killing only men, and humanity is under threat. What happens to the army when there are almost no soldiers? How can humankind’s future be secured without biological reproduction? And who will cash in on the first women-only dating app as society moves on? The questions raised by this captivating thriller will live rent-free in my head for a long time.
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Amy Stone, Northern Soul’s Sheffield Correspondent and author
2025 is probably the least productive year in terms of writing that I’ve had since, um, primary school. Yes, that sounds about right. I’m trying not to feel bad about this, and one thing that has really helped me to forgive myself is Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott. This New York Times bestseller hasn’t been out of print since it was published in 1994. Writers reading this will be gobsmacked to learn that it’s taken me so many years and agonised manuscripts to discover this staple, this essential, this turn-to-in-your-shittest-moments guide. Better late than never though, right? I started with the intention of adding a Post-it bookmark every time Bird by Bird offered a gem of wisdom – something I should print out and stick on the wall, set as a reminder on my phone, maybe get tattooed inside my eyelids – that kind of thing. It quickly had so many bookmarks that it resembled a Post-it Kerplunk, so I gave up. But I know that I will read this book many times over. It’s hilarious, profoundly moving, and uncompromisingly practical. The combination is, to me at any rate, unique, and earns Bird by Bird a place in my best reads ever, let alone 2025. 
My best fiction read this year is indisputably Bog People: A Working-Class Anthology of Folk Horror. You can read my review of this magnificent collection here. Published in October, I was chuffed to see the book’s brilliant reception. So many books, particularly ones that champion the cause of a marginalised, minority voice, don’t receive the kind of widespread recognition they deserve. To see Bog People make Book of the Day in The Guardian, therefore, felt like the kind of mainstream hit that takes it out of the niche and into the popular conscience. And before you wrinkle your nose in disgust at the prospect of something being mainstream and commercial, consider that the world of publishing is brutal, incredibly elitist, and inaccessible to many people. Working-class writers actually being able to write for a living feels like a total pipedream right now, so I hope that this anthology takes us a step closer to that dream, breaking new ground, and continuing the work of the Peasants’ Revolt. Buy it, read it, share it.
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Damon Fairclough, freelance writer
When it comes to the roll call of our literary greats, Keith Waterhouse doesn’t get his due. His reputation as a Fleet Street giant was well earned at the typewriter and the bottle, but his contribution to the disposable world of newsprint and its drinking culture clouds the memory, at least a little, of his longer-lasting published works.
So even though I love his magnificent Billy Liar, I approached There is a Happy Land, his 1957 novel, with heart a-flutter. Having plucked it from the shelf in a Hebden Bridge junk shop, it took just half a page to realise I’d found a fictional evocation of the pre-war North that was right up my cobbled street. Seen through the eyes of a ten-year-old at the back end of the 1930s, it conjures up the moment-by-moment pleasure, pain and puzzlement of emerging into a world run by adults. It may be set 30 years before I was born, but the head-spinning swirl of hilarity, confusion and stomach-clenching dread is exactly as I remember it from my own pre-teen days, and there are few writers to match Waterhouse when it comes to capturing the way kids talk.
Three decades after the events of There is a Happy Land, the Sheffield Playhouse was reaching the end of its life. The beloved rep theatre was about to be replaced by the modernist Crucible’s gleaming thrust stage, but its dynamic final decade was documented by local critic Denys Corrigan and published in a handsome volume called The Stirrings in Sheffield – the name of the Playhouse’s most popular production of the 1960s. For me, the book was a wonderful surprise find on eBay. Printed on luxurious paper clutched tightly between stiff purple boards, it features plenty of photographs, a comprehensive list of productions, and Corrigan’s personal account of the shows that made up each season throughout those last ten years. A large office block now stands on the Playhouse’s old site, but this book is a beautiful relic of the moment on the cusp of the 1970s when the creaky old theatre and its ghosts were about to be swept away. 
Having spent much of this year – and every year – wallowing in the past, I also took the opportunity to read something a little more current, selecting the tightly controlled rage of Jenny Lindsay’s Hounded to bring me up to date. As a poet and arts promoter based in Scotland, Lindsay is well placed to document the poisonous bullying experienced by women in various walks of life – many in the arts – when they stepped up to defend women’s sex-based rights. Hounded does a great job of detailing the harms, both personal and professional, that resulted. Far more than just a collection of heinous incidents, Hounded builds a case against a prevailing orthodoxy that has privileged the nebulous over the material – ‘gender’ over ‘sex’ – while refusing to allow the consequences for women to be debated or discussed. Even as I was reading the book, however, it felt as though the wider world might be waking up to what’s been happening in the shadows, and hopefully Lindsay’s subjects will turn out not to have suffered in vain.
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Rob Martin, journalist, author and Northern Soul writer
When the great Diane Keaton died, I rewatched Annie Hall for the umpteenth time. It’s one of my favourite films and, inspired by that, I picked up Woody Allen’s first novel, published in September. To write your debut novel at 89 is quite something, but, having written and directed 50 films, it’s amazing he found the time at all. What’s with Baum? hardly breaks new ground for Allen other than format – an ageing Jewish New York writer starts to talk to himself to cope with his ever-spiralling family relationships. But it is as witty and entertaining as befits Allen.
I recently went to see Minnie Driver in a play called Every Brilliant Thing. Both she and the play were wonderful so I decided to re-read her autobiography, Managing Expectations. It’s a beautifully written memoir, taking pivotal moments and incidents from Driver’s life that seemed disastrous but, from which, great things came. It’s a lovely and clever way to build a picture of who someone is and remains one of my favourite autobiographers.
Inspired to break out of my autistic tendency to be black and white about things, this year I decided to get my critical thinking principles back up to speed with Gay Shame by Gareth Roberts. Its subtitle reveals its contentious content: The Rise of Gender Ideology and the New Homophobia. Despite its weighty subject matter, this is a witty deep-dive into what the author sees as some of the underlying misogyny among gay men and consequent homophobia around the current ideological mess we find ourselves in. While I don’t agree with the author on various things, that’s the point of reading the book, with enough revealing ideas and moments to make it both a worthwhile exercise and a worthwhile read. I feel better informed, and those critical thinking cogs have had a good dust off.
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Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent at Northern Soul
In a year that has draped the bunting of dystopia from lamppost to lamppost while whistling to the tune of being ‘culturally coherent’, it was a pleasure to revisit Marge Piercy’s classic Woman On The Edge Of Time, not least because the classic science fiction novel posits a utopia premised on better choices. First published in 1978, its prescience is almost preternatural, taking as given a concern for the ecological and an interchangeability of gender, even as it critiques the institutional racism which can still bedevil mental health care, like a Mexican-American One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Almost half a century later, it continues to scintillate.
Nearly as old, but almost as pertinent, is How To Become A Virgin, the adopted Chorlton-ite Quentin Crisp’s second volume of memoirs. Less essential than his first (The Naked Civil Servant) in sustaining his singular voice – one of flamboyant indolence – it nonetheless succeeds in making a case for mutual civility.
Still, if Crisp’s gentility goes unheeded, and Piercy’s utopia fails to coalesce, there is still hope for the future. Given the right conditions, perhaps the octopuses will put aside their regrettable predilection for cannibalism, outlive their spawn, and develop culture. Such is the premise of Ray Nayler’s entertaining The Mountain In The Sea. It’s one way of putting the worst excesses of our species into perspective. As the Saxe Coburg-Gothas implode, it’s reassuring to believe that the world will be in the safer, more numerous arms of the literally blue-blooded.
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Adam Farrer, author of Cold Fish Soup and Broken Biscuits and Other Male Failures
Robert Hamilton, Northern Soul writer
As 2025 comes to an end, it’s time to look back on the books that gave me sustenance and succour in a challenging year. Annus horribilis just about covers it. I took refuge in books that offered a fantasy existence, away from my own miserable day to day. The writer I took solace in was Graham Greene. His novels provided me with a world in which I could live vicariously within a realistic yet exotic narrative. I could be in Vietnam, Mexico, Haiti, South Africa, or Argentina. I hid from the Tonton Macoute, had an affair with an honorary consul’s wife, drank rum punches, and smoked opium. I lived in and through his books. They helped me to survive until things got better.
Illness blighted my year and recovery was slow. As the months rolled by, one novel followed another. The Heart of the Matter, The Comedians, The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor, The Quiet American, The Power and the Glory. All filled my bedtime routine. Unlike many of Greene’s characters, I had forsworn the demon drink. But I could sup with them and, hell, even remember what I’d read.
Greene’s world is full of disappointment, human frailties, and moral ambiguities. But it always held a promise of redemption. I’m aware of his political issues and his religious foibles but his books are well written, beautifully told, and world-weary. In times of instability and trouble, remember that the grass is always Greene.
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Simon Buckley, artist, Not Quite Light
Sometimes I feel guided by fate to read certain books, as if my choice is made by subconsciously sniffing some distant scent, rather than any considered action. In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster is a case in point.
Not long before Auster died in 2024, I received his most recent novel, Baumgarten, as a birthday present and enjoyed it a lot, so then read two or three more of his books, particularly his most famous work, The New York Trilogy. When I read In the Country of Last Things (first published in 1987), it perfectly matched my mood. I turned the pages while lying on a friend’s sofa in Antwerp, one of my favourite cities, and where I’d escaped for a couple of weeks in the summer to reset my head. It brilliantly tells a dystopian take of a city, never really named, the personality of which is built up by a series of clues and references that allow our imagination to create a place personal to each one of us. Society, perhaps under the weight of capitalist dogma, corruption and authoritarianism, has disintegrated, with strange cults and neighbourhoods vying for survival.
It’s beautifully surreal, and yet very familiar. It felt deeply prescient. As I entered the last few pages, the Hotspur Press building in Manchester caught fire. As I sat with the book on my knee, I watched video of the flames shooting skywards among the modern, nearby towers. It felt like an illustration from this brilliant novel.
Meanwhile, I read Edna O’Brien as a teenager and loved her books. I was prompted to revisit The Country Girls trilogy after seeing the documentary made on her life, Blue Road, which I found deeply powerful. The three stories, which cover her life from adolescence to early middle age, caused huge controversy at the time, upsetting the powerful Catholic establishment in Ireland. Indeed, the books are infected with ongoing sadness and disappointment as the main characters, Cait and Baba, navigate their lives in a misogynistic world. O’Brien writes with such strength and beauty that I found myself reading the whole set in a short time. 
I have another book chosen by scent. Prior to a trip to Antwerp, I spotted Austerlitz in a second-hand shop. Not realising it began in Antwerp, I bought it. W. G. Sebald plays constantly in the twilight between fact and fiction, meaning that you never know the truth. His style is plain yet mesmerising. The tragedies of 20th century European history are laid bare in this astonishing story.
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Eileen Jones, author and journalist
This year, I’m re-reading an old favourite, Robert Neill’s Gothic and romanticised account of the Lancashire Witches, Mist over Pendle. This is an area of Lancashire I know and love, and you can tell that the author loved it too, with intimate details about the landscape, the many sides to that brooding hill, and its watercourses.
It’s about literary persona, too. I wanted to be Margery Whitaker, cantering over to Rough Lee in a gown of orange tawny, and rescuing recusant priests from a terrible fate. She’s a pre-feminist tomboy, refusing to ride side-saddle but drooling over silk and taffeta for a dress for a Christmas party at an old and draughty house. Here there is richness in every sentence, characters moulded by their rugged home territory, along with the morbid fear of so-called witches who roamed the Pendle countryside. Not Disney versions with big hats and broomsticks, but poor, ill-educated women. It’s a book that’s fallen out of fashion and favour, but it can still capture the soul of a northern landscape, and a northern melodrama.
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Danny Moran, journalist
If the truth be known, I read Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art by Camille Paglia most years. A piece of writing of arrogant brilliance, it calls to mind the likes of Guy Debord and Friedrich Nietzsche, the kind of provocateurs who revelled in the idea of their own infamy while packing the rare chops to back it up.
‘In the beginning was nature,’ she sets off, correcting the Book of Genesis. ‘Art is form struggling to wake from the nightmare of nature,’ Paglia concludes, 57 pages later, and I could read that sentence over and again, though it has many siblings. What smoulders in between is the opening chapter of her magnum opus, Sexual Personae: Art & Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, the tract which detonated across the liberal media on publication in 1991. Penguin was certainly onto something in repackaging it as a standalone piece: 15,000 words of psychosexual napalm strafed across the western cultural fairy tale as she sees it.
Along with krautrock, stone circles and space academy, the-rock-star-as-shaman has been an enduring theme for Julian Cope, a mind trooper sufficiently committed enough to the cause to be relied on to turn up in Ramsbottom dressed to break on through to the other side. His 2014 novel One Three One brings out several such hobby cars for a spin as speeding singer Rock Section retraces his route along Sardinia’s unbending main Highway 131 in a bid to come to terms with the events of the Italia 90 World Cup, when he and fellow fans were kidnapped and tortured by Dutch ultras. 
A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel it says on the tin, and the Teardrop Explodes man doesn’t disappoint when it comes to the literary acid show, as Rock crosses thresholds at megalithic sites to spiral backwards in time and place to an ancient fiefdom at Derbyshire’s Mam Tor, where the fields ripple with potent ephedra and the group finds common cause behind the fate of a ball. You can see what he’s done there, right? A suitably breakneck narrative strewn with cultural satire and gross-out farce, and a mirror slyly held to our petrochemical world where we are still to outgrow our tribalism and excavate our psychoactivity, still to unlearn what the Romans really did to us.
“Dull, Duller, Dulles,” Winston Churchill quipped after an encounter with CIA director Allen Dulles, who steered the organisation from the early Eisenhower years into the mayhem of the 1960s. That there was a coup d’état in America at his bequest is becoming increasingly evident from the declassified record; David Talbot’s book, The Devil’s Chessboard, sets out the prologue to the killing of Camelot in meticulous human terms. Worthy of a decade’s Pulitzer Prizes, it preps you too for Jefferson Morley’s book about Dulles’ lieutenant, James Jesus Angleton: two men who must be understood in order to get under the skin of the modern world.
