The 2025 Booklist

With all new bonus lists!

I’ve been doing this annual list of my favourite books from the previous year—first on Facebook and more recently on Substack—for a decade or so. And the whole time I have been hiding a shameful secret. I am not the best-read person in my family. I am not even the second-best. Older sister Marie and younger brother Christopher are both more voracious readers than I am.

Come to think of it, when my parents were still alive, I was a lowly fifth-best-read in the family. In her day, my mother could reliably be found in the kitchen with Mozart on the turntable, reading Balzac, Hugo, Hardy, Dickens or Austen. When my dad was in his 90s, I discovered that he kept a list on the backs of envelopes and scraps of notepads documenting every book he had read since he had retired. It was eclectic as you can see. And incredibly (to me anyway) he had a rule of never abandoning a book once he had started. He was allowed to complain but not to stop reading.

A snippet of Dad’s booklist

In an attempt to address my limitations as a reader, this year I asked Marie and Christopher to provide me with a list of their three favourite books from the past year. Why just three, when I get ten or more? Because it’s my Substack!

Christopher leans towards library books and what he finds in used book stores while Marie has book deliveries at the door that come more frequently than the milkman (and yes, because she lives in the UK, she has a milkman).

But first my own favourites. I’ve started with non-fiction, followed by literary fiction, then crime/thrillers.

Non-fiction

Mother Emanuel by Kevin Sack. You may remember the extraordinary grace and forgiveness that many of the surviving congregants of Mother Emanuel church in Charleston, South Carolina extended to Dylann Roof after he murdered nine people in the church in 2015. Sack’s book begins there but then traces back the history of the church through slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement. It does not shy away from the ambiguous role that the church has sometimes played in Black life or the troubled legacy of the shootings at the church. A micro-history that tells us a lot about the larger American tragedy.

The Golden Road by William Dalrymple. The author is a Scottish historian who has spent much of his life in India. In this extremely readable book, he argues that the famous “Silk Road” between China and the West was a nineteenth century coinage that obscured the centrality of India in connecting civilizations. He describes a network of trade, ideas and religion that spread from Ancient Rome through India to China, Korea and Indonesia and persists to the modern day.

1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin. The author is a journalist who covers the markets for the New York Times and CNBC. His account of the 1929 crash bears some resemblance to writers like Erik Larsen and Michael Lewis, telling the story through richly described characters—the moguls of the day as well as the politicians. It is a really enjoyable read and although he doesn't explicitly draw connections to the stock market of 2025, it’s hard to avoid doing it yourself as you read.

The Language Puzzle by Stephen Mithen. This is the best book about language written for the layman since Stephen Pinker’s 1994 The Language Instinct. As it happens, Mithen disagrees fundamentally with the Pinker/Chomsky view of language. This book combines archeology, psychology, physiology and linguistics and begins in the Stone Age with informed speculation about how and when language first emerged. (Also, for those interested in this subject, an honourable mention to Laura Spinney’s book, Proto, which describes for the benefit of the layperson the current research on Proto-Indo-European, the language believed to have been the ancestor of most European languages as well as Persian, Sanskrit and others.)

Miracles and Wonders by Elaine Pagels. This book is a brisk, readable introduction to the historical mystery of Jesus. Pagels is a renowned Biblical scholar and examines the so-called Gnostic Gospels (of which she is one of the original scholars) as well as the canonical gospels and other sources. I found her last chapter on contemporary Christianity less compelling than the rest of the book.

Literary Fiction

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry. A retired Irish cop with memory issues grapples with the joy and suffering of his life—and a mystery gradually emerges. This short book is a compelling read.

There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak. This is a sprawling epic ranging from ancient Assyria to nineteenth century London and Constantinople and contemporary Turkey and Iraq. It is a tour de force by this Turkish-British novelist. She has apparently published more than 20 books, but she is new to me.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Like a lot of people, I read the Pulitzer-prize winning Demon Copperhead when it came out a couple of years ago. This 2013 book was also nominated for the prize. It tells the story of a dysfunctional family of a southern American missionary in Africa, exclusively through the eyes of the women in his family—his wife and daughters. Maybe a little less socially relevant than Demon, which is set in the southern states during the opioid crisis, but connects to themes of colonialism, religion and the perspectives of women.

French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. I re-read this 1969 novel (which generated the 1981 film with Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons) while visiting my sister in Lyme Regis, where the novel is set and Fowles spent much of his life. I wondered whether the book, which combines a Victorian style of language with some post-modern playfulness with narrative, would stand up. It does. It is remarkable treatment of science, religion, eroticism, love and social and sexual manners. A great novel.

Thriller Corner

The Siege, by Ben Macintyre. I listened to this as an audio book as I drove across Northern Ontario on my way from Ottawa to Winnipeg. This is the true story of the raid by the British SAS on the Iranian embassy in London, where gunmen had taken hostages in 1980. Like all of Macintyre’s books, it is every bit as pulsating as any fictional thriller.

Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway. This is styled a “A John le Carré Novel,” though le Carré died in 2020 and the book is written by his son. That seems like a recipe for disappointment. But if you didn't know this wasn't from the pen of le Carré himself, I doubt that you’d guess. This addition to the George Smiley canon inserts itself into a gap in the original le Carré’s novels, which are silent about the years immediately after the disaster recounted in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. There are a couple of slightly inelegant explanatory passages not worthy of le Carré’s best work. But if you are a le Carré fan, you should read this.

The Slow Horses Series by Mick Herron. I’ve now caught up with the TV series and raced ahead a couple of books. The comparisons between Herron’s books and le Carré’s are overdrawn. Le Carré at his best rose above his genre. Herron’s books inhabit a similar universe and are both suspenseful and hilarious. But they do not aspire to much more. Still they are as much fun to read as the TV series is to watch.

The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau by Graeme Macrae Burnet. A previous book of Burnet’s, His Bloody Project, was on one of my earlier lists (and was a Booker nominee). If you enjoy a mystery written with a literary sensibility, this might be for you. A psychological thriller with an unreliable narrator.

Marie’s List

Marie is a former BBC journalist who retrained as a psychotherapist. She is an author of both fiction and non-fiction. One of her two master’s degrees is in creative writing. She has a doctorate in psychotherapy.

Marie says the criterion to make her list was “which books stay with me long after I’ve read them.” The assignment, as I said above, was to submit three books, but disappointingly, she’s included four, the first two fiction and the other two non-fiction.

The River is Waiting by Wally Lamb. Lamb’s books are generally set within the same community in New England. For years he’s taught creative writing at a local prison. Like his other novels, I Know This Much Is True and The Hour I First Believed, his protagonist is forced to confront his past and take responsibility for his own actions. Both heartbreaking and uplifting, in my opinion this novel is one of his best.

Three Days in June by Anne Tyler. This, like all her novels, is deceptively simple. She brings warmth and humour to everything she writes and never hits a wrong note. A wife and her ex-husband are brought together over the days leading up to their daughter’s wedding, with surprising results.

The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker. Tucker’s uncle was a manual labourer, secretly painting in his ‘spare’ time while living with his mother for most of his life in Warrington, England. Completely shambolic and eccentric, even his closest mates (mostly in the pub) weren’t aware of his compulsion to paint, assuming that his jaunts to the city were to visit prostitutes rather than to visit art galleries. I dare you not to weep at the end of this story.

The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet. The BBC’s Chief International Correspondent (and a Canadian), has spent most of her working life in the Middle East, much of it in Afghanistan. Here she has written a book focusing on the country’s history from the 1960’s to the present day, but through the eyes of the staff working at the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel. This is a big story told through a small but focused lens, and with hardly a journalist in sight; even when mentioning herself she does so primarily in the third person. What I loved about this book is how a war that can sometimes feel quite abstract and distant, was brought so alive through the eyes of the people working in the hotel. This is a respectful and appreciative view of a people forced to re-configure their lives with every change of regime. A country forever at war with itself, the fear of death, limited opportunities and starvation are a constant worry for those who work at the ‘Inter-Con’, many of whom have been there for decades.

Christopher’s List

Christopher lives in Winnipeg, where he is rector of St.Paul’s College at the University of Manitoba. He is a political scientist, pollster and university administrator who has written or edited many books on politics.

How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil. Smil provides in this small volume a scientific understanding of key factors for how the global economy has developed. As reported in Wikipedia: “Included among Smil’s admirers is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who has said: ‘I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie.’ ‘He’s a slayer of bullshit,’ says David Keith, an energy and climate scientist at Harvard University.” My fave take away is that he really hates SUVs.

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton. I read The Age of Innocence when I was 30 and it floored me. I then saw the movie shortly afterwards which was fine but not equal to what had become one of my favourite novels. In rereading it at 65, I renewed my love for the novel, and found a deeper appreciation for Wharton’s timeless skill.

The Honourable John Norquay, Gerald Friesen. This biography is richly researched, and corrects many of our misunderstandings of this premier. Friesen captures what was happening in the early years of Manitoba and how Norquay shrewdly managed a province with multiple internal cultural differences while dealing with Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and a domineering federal government.

Because Christopher presented three books, as assigned, rather than flouting my clear instructions as our sister did, I think he deserves to be rewarded with a mention that he and his co-editor Kelly Saunders have just in the last month released a book called The Keystone Province: Politics and Governance in Manitoba. Get it at good bookstores.

Thanks for reading this year’s list. Be sure to add your own favourites in the comments!