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The best memoirs and biographies of 2025

Anthony Hopkins and Kathy Burke on acting, Jacinda Ardern and Nicola Sturgeon on politics, plus Margaret Atwood on a life well lived

Not all memoirists are keen to share their life stories. For Margaret Atwood, an author who has sold more than 40m books, the idea of writing about herself seemed “Dead boring. Who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper?” Happily, she did it anyway. Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (Chatto & Windus) is a 624-page doorstopper chronicling Atwood’s life and work, and a tremendous showcase for her wisdom and wit. Helen Garner’s similarly chunky, Baillie Gifford prize-winning How to End a Story (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is a diary collection spanning 20 years and provides piquant and puckish snapshots of the author’s life, work and her unravelling marriages. Mixing everyday observation and gossipy asides with profound self-examination, it is spare in style and utterly moreish.

In Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me (Hamish Hamilton) and Jung Chang’s Fly, Wild Swans (William Collins), formidable mothers get top billing. In the former, The God of Small Things author reveals how her mother, whose own father was a violent drunk, stood up to the patriarchy and campaigned for women’s rights, but was cruel to her daughter. Describing her as “my shelter and my storm”, Roy reflects on Mary’s contradictions with candour and compassion. Fly, Wild Swans is the sequel to Chang’s bestselling Wild Swans, picking up where its predecessor left off and reflecting how that book was only made possible by the author’s mother, who shared family stories and kept her London-dwelling daughter apprised of events in China.

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The five best romance books of 2025

A tricky age gap, a dose of wedding day drama, literary love affairs, office rivals and the sexy side of Brexit

Consider Yourself Kissed
Jessica Stanley (Hutchinson Heinmann)
Clever and contemporary, this modern romance between short king single dad Adam and magazine writer Coralie accrues depth as it jumps from initial meet-cute to a decade-long romance, all the while embracing stepmotherhood, work and politics. (You didn’t think you could get Brexit into a romance?) The writing is wonderful, and the book has genuine heft – which might dial back the escapist fun, but it’s no less enjoyable for that.

Problematic Summer Romance
Ali Hazelwood (Sphere)
Hazelwood, a behemoth of current romantic fiction, specialises in funny and sharp hot-nerd affairs. Despite highlighting its own issues in the title, this novel got a rather mixed reception from the more judgmental corners of the internet on account of the age difference between the lovers. The gap between Maya and Conor, her big brother’s best friend, is 15 years – she is 23 to his 38. Depending on your generation and point of view, this is either completely and absolutely fine, or intensely concerning, despite the heroine insisting valiantly on her own agency and a reluctant romantic hero who resists the affair for this very reason. The book itself is typically charming and incredibly enjoyable, full of one-liners and cheek. (Far less controversially, she has followed it up with Mate, about a vampire bride falling in love with a werewolf. Sex with an actual animal is notably less problematic than an age gap in 2025.)

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The best science and nature books of 2025

From the threat of superintelligent AI to the secrets of a longer life; plus the evolution of language and the restless genius of Francis Crick

This felt like the year that AI really arrived. It is on our phones and laptops; it is creeping into digital and corporate infrastructure; it is changing the way we learn, work and create; and the global economy rests on the stratospheric valuations of the corporate giants vying to control it.

But the unchecked rush to go faster and further could extinguish humanity, according to the surprisingly readable and chillingly plausible If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (Bodley Head), by computer scientists Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, which argues against creating superintelligent AI able to cognitively outpace Homo sapiens in all departments. “Even an AI that cares about understanding the universe is likely to annihilate humans as a side-effect,” they write, “because humans are not the most efficient method for producing truths … out of all possible ways to arrange matter.” Not exactly cheery Christmas reading but, as the machines literally calculate our demise, you’ll finally grasp all that tech bro lingo about tokens, weights and maximising preferences.

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The best history and politics books of 2025

The revolutionary spirit in politics and architecture; histories of free speech and civil war; plus how the Tories fell apart and Starmer won

We live in a hyper-political yet curiously unrevolutionary age, one of hashtags rather than barricades. Perhaps that’s why so many writers this year have looked wistfully back to a time when strongly held convictions still made waves in the real world.

In The Revolutionists (Bodley Head), Jason Burke revisits the 1970s, when it seemed the future of the Middle East might end up red instead of green – communist rather than Islamist. It’s a geopolitical period piece: louche men with corduroy jackets and sideburns, women with theories and submachine guns. Many were in it less for the Marxism than for the sheer mayhem. Reading about the hijackings and kidnappings they orchestrated makes today’s orange-paint protests seem quaint by comparison.

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The best graphic novels of 2025

Alison Bechdel and Joe Sacco return; plus Black Country cowboys, vengeful gods and an angling classic reimagined

Many of 2025’s best graphic novels looked to the past with mixed emotions. Growing up in 1970s California, Mimi Pond found the aristocratic Mitfords, born in the early years of the 20th century, compellingly exotic. She shares her lifelong fascination in Do Admit! (Jonathan Cape), a splendid book of geopolitics, jolly hockey sticks and gossipy asides, as the sisters choose between fascism and socialism and help shape attitudes to everything from class to funeral rites.

Pioneering photographer William Henry Jackson captured the old west for posterity, yet the popularity of his images speeded its destruction. Veteran cartoonist Bill Griffith recounts his great-grandfather’s life in Photographic Memory (Abrams), which takes in the civil war, slavery, the obliteration of the Great Plains peoples and the inauguration of the United States national parks, as well as the brutal legwork and dangerous alchemy of 19th-century photography. The narrative sometimes clunks, but the story is so good it’s hard to care.

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The best crime and thrillers of 2025

Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, Belinda Bauer’s obsessive world of bird egg collectors, Uketsu’s innovative Japanese detective mystery – and more

If we get the heroes we deserve, then Jackson Lamb, foul-mouthed and slovenly ringmaster of a circus of failed spies, is truly the man for our times. With Clown Town (Baskerville), the ninth book in Mick Herron’s state-of-the-nation satire/thriller mashup series, hitting the bestseller lists, and the fifth series of the Slow Horses TV adaptation streaming, this has been the author’s year. In the latest outing, Lamb and his stable of “losers, misfits and boozers” are well up to the mark as secrets about an IRA double agent threaten to come to light, exposing the seamier side of state security for a story of loyalty and betrayal.

Complicity and culpability, as well as class and professional ethics, are the subjects of Denise Mina’s The Good Liar (Harvill). When the creator of a revolutionary blood splatter probability scale realises that its flaws may have led to an unsafe conviction, she has to decide what to do about it. Tense and powerful, this is a sobering reminder of how the human element can undermine an apparently objective scientific method. The Confessions by Paul Bradley Carr (Faber) ventures into similar territory to terrifying effect. It takes place in an all-too-plausible future in which the world has become reliant on a decision-making algorithm; things go catastrophically awry when the AI tool begins to feel remorse for some of its decisions, and carnage results.

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What we’re reading: Geoff Dyer, Andrew Michael Hurley, Marcia Hutchinson and Guardian readers on the books they enjoyed in November

Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I finally got round to Thoreau’s Journal. It is determinedly down-to-earth and soaring, lyrical and belligerent, humane and cantankerous. Walt Whitman thought Thoreau suffered from “a very aggravated case of superciliousness”, but as Walt also said (of himself) the Journal of this brooding, solitary figure is great; it “contains multitudes.”

Homework by Geoff Dyer is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson is published by Cassava Republic. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Five of the best translated fiction of 2025

The return of Nobel laureate Han Kang; film-making under the Nazis; stuck in a time loop; Scandinavian thrills; and essential stories from postwar Iraq

We Do Not Part
Han Kang, translated by e yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hamish Hamilton)
The Korean 2024 Nobel laureate combines the strangeness of The Vegetarian and the political history in Human Acts to extraordinary effect in her latest novel. Kyungha, a writer experiencing a health crisis (“I can sense a migraine coming on like ice cracking in the distance”), agrees to look after a hospitalised friend’s pet bird. The friend, Inseon, makes films that expose historical massacres in Korea. At the centre of the book is a mesmerising sequence “between dream and reality” where Kyungha stumbles toward Inseon’s rural home, blinded by snow, then finds herself in ghostly company. As the pace slows, and physical and psychic pain meet, the story only becomes more involving. This might be Han’s best novel yet.

On the Calculation of Volume I and II
Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland (Faber)
“It is the eighteenth of November. I have got used to that thought.” Book dealer Tara Selter is stuck in time, each day a repeat of yesterday. Groundhog Day it ain’t; this is more philosophical than comic – why, she doesn’t even bet on the horses – but it’s equally arresting. Tara slowly begins to understand how she occupies space in the world, and the ways in which we allow our lives to drift. At first she tries to live normally, recreating the sense of seasons passing by travelling to warm and cold cities. By the end of volume two, with five more books to come, we get hints of cracks appearing in the hermetic world – is Balle breaking her own rules? – but it just makes us want to read on further.

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Does ‘laziness’ start in the brain?

Understanding the surprising mechanism behind apathy can help unlock scientific ways to boost your motivation

We all know people with very different levels of motivation. Some will go the extra mile in any endeavour. Others just can’t be bothered to put the effort in. We might think of them as lazy – happiest on the sofa, rather than planning their latest project. What’s behind this variation? Most of us would probably attribute it to a mixture of temperament, circumstances, upbringing or even values.

But research in neuroscience and in patients with brain disorders is challenging these assumptions by revealing the brain mechanisms that underlie motivation. When these systems become dysfunctional, people who were once highly motivated can become pathologically apathetic. Whereas previously they might have been curious, highly engaged and productive – at work, in their social lives and in their creative thinking – they can suddenly seem like the opposite.

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‘I took literary revenge against the people who stole my youth’: Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu

As the first part of his acclaimed Blinding trilogy is released in the UK, the novelist talks about communism, Vladimir Nabokov – and those Nobel rumours

In 2014, when he was travelling around the US on a book tour, Mircea Cărtărescu was able to fulfil the dream of a lifetime: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection. Cărtărescu is a great admirer of the Russian-American author, and shares with him a literary career that bridges the western and eastern cultural spheres – as well as a history of being mooted as the next Nobel literature laureate but never having won it.

Above all, the Romanian poet and novelist shares Nabokov’s fascination with butterflies. As a child, he harboured dreams of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, Cărtărescu was allowed access to Nabokov’s former office and marvelled at specimens the St Petersburg-born author had collected. “His most important scientific work was about butterflies’ sexual organs, and I saw these very tiny vials with them in,” he whispers in awe. “It’s like an image from a poem or a story. It was absolutely fantastic.”

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