What We’re Reading: Spring 2025 Edition

Claire Malcolm

In raw content, Naomi Booth’s propulsive new novel, we follow legal publishing professional Grace as she navigates the birth of her first child and the overwhelming feelings of violence and transgression that accompany her first few months with the baby. She is haunted by growing up in West Yorkshire under the time of the Yorkshire Ripper and the wider culture of misogyny and danger and of the failures and struggles of her own family.

It’s a wild but ultimately hopeful ride through both psychological and emotional territory. Booth’s language of love and despair casts a compelling spell and she plays cleverly with ideas about patterns of thinking. The novel is set in York and the city and rivers come vividly together to frame the novel. A really great novel by a writer fully in control of her powers.

Grace Keane

The relentless early months of 2025 had me in the market for comfort reads. On that basis, I picked up Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld, a book I couldn’t believe I hadn’t already read. It’s a Pride and Prejudice retelling, published in 2016 and set in modern-day Ohio. Sittenfeld is a writer I adore, and whilst this was by no means her best work it was exactly what I needed. Familiar, fun, witty and warm, I consumed it whole on a sleepy Sunday in January.

Now that the promise of spring is in the air, I’m hungry for something weirder. I’m highly anticipating the release of The Unworthy in March, by Argentine author Agustina Bazterrica and translated by Sarah Moses. Her debut, about a cannibalistic dystopia (have you spotted the puns yet) was so understated and taut in its horror that I must know what she’ll do next.

Carys Vickers

It’s rare these days to walk into a bookshop and buy a book that I’ve never heard of, but that’s what I did on a recent trip to Dublin when a well-placed impulse led me to Frances Macken’s debut novel You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here. This coming-of-age story explores toxic female friendships, dreaming big in a small town, and the significance of place while growing up. It is quietly compelling as it deals with dark themes in a gentle yet exposing way, all against a vividly immersive rural Irish setting.

My next read will be a return to the familiar, and to a literary world that shaped me as a reader. Sunrise on the Reaping, the new prequel to Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, is about to come out, and I don’t remember the last time I was this excited for a book release – I’m literally counting down the days.

Margot Miltenberger

I’m currently enjoying Tender at the Bone, a book which was recommended to me by a friend years ago and which I found recently in a small independent bookshop in Oregon. It’s a good foodie memoir of an eccentric childhood, sprinkled with recipes which Reichl has collected along the way. It will make you want to pause what you’re doing and go cook. Reichl is a chef, food writer and editor, and has been the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine. This line in the blurb drew me in: “Food could be a way of making sense of the world. If you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were.”

Next up, I’m looking forward to another memoir by Reichl, Save Me the Plums.

Tess Denman-Cleaver

Francesca Wade’s new biography of Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, gives an intimate and lively portrait of Stein’s personal and social life with her partner Alice Toklas. Wade’s writing is energetic, and is as engaging on the who’s who of the literary elite in early 20th Century Paris as it is on what Stein was doing with the craft of writing. The second half of the book is dedicated to how Toklas promoted and preserved Stein’s legacy posthumously. Is a moving insight into an oft-overlooked character in literary history.

I have been waiting for this book for years. It’s out in May and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys high-brow celeb gossip as well as writers who want to learn about how and why and what Stein was doing with language.

The book I am looking forward to this year is Book Works’ publication of Kathryn Scanlan’s first novel Aug 9–Fog. Scanlan won the Gordon Burn Prize last year with her exhilarating Kick the Latch and I’m excited to read more from this writer.

Hana Sandhu

I’ve just finished Rozie Kelly’s stunning debut novel Kingfisher which follows the story of a young man’s infatuation with a famous, older poet. A darkly compelling exploration of loneliness and romantic love in the contemporary age – I highly recommend!

My current read is perhaps slightly out of step with the season, but I’m still making the case for Jen Calleja’s Goblinhood as a year-round treat. Following these fantastical creatures, Calleja crafts a moreish deep dive into pop culture and a brilliantly original meditation on love, politics, mischief and history.

On the non-fiction side, I’ve been eagerly anticipating Palestinian poet and critic Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal. I’m only a third of a way through, but the clarity and precision of El-Kurd’s criticism and his refusal to comply with the terms of debate – where Palestinians must be ‘perfect victims’ in order to be given the same legal rights and protections as everyone else – has never been more urgent.

Euna Gould

In a bout of patriotism after Han Kang’s recent Nobel Prize in Literature, I started to read The Vegetarian. Seen through male narrators, the leading woman Yeong-hye’s obscure behaviour after abruptly turning vegetarian conceals the visceral images of gore haunting her internally. We see how her new lifestyle is not only an affront to tradition, but to her role as a wife and daughter, and is enough to rouse within her family the deep-seated misogynistic views on marriage and gender roles that still exist in modern Korean society.

I’ve since been drawn to how East Asian women write gender, sex, and the female physical form, within their broader cultural contexts and society’s normalised misogyny. I’m therefore excited to read Butter by Asako Yuzuki next – it also concerns cuisine and women’s gender roles, but in this case home cook / murderer Kajii weaponizes her cooking against men.

Helena Davidson

I’m currently reading Days of Light by Megan Hunter which is a lyrical and reflective novel taking place over the course of six days across six decades, starting at Easter 1939, before the Second World War broke out. The central character Ivy is caught in that in-between time after leaving school and deciding what to do with her life, struggling to live up to the expectations of her bohemian artist family, when a tragedy occurs that shapes their relationships for the rest of her life. Megan Hunter’s writing is so lyrical and spellbinding, often focussing on the beauty of nature, motherhood, and how to find meaning in life. It’s a perfect spring read.

Will Mackie

The Harder I Fight the More I Love You is a memoir by indie music icon Neko Case. I’ve long been entranced by her enigmatic songwriting and searing amethyst-like voice. Songs like ‘Hold On, Hold On’ and ‘I Wish I Was the Moon’ exhibit her ingenious and compelling storytelling – as well as being just staggeringly beautiful. I’ve read an extract from Case’s memoir in the Guardian and I’m looking forward to making my way through her book this spring. The book focuses on growing up in poverty and facing neglect and trauma as a child and teenager, and how her experiences in time were conveyed into art and music. A lot of music biographies are conventional (and pretty dull), but I fully expect Neko’s to be as moving, surprising and extraordinary as albums like her 2002 classic Blacklisted.

Rebecca Wilkie

There are so many books I want to read over the next few months (and so little time to do it!). I just finished Natasha Brown’s latest novella, Universality – a slim book packed with big ideas about capitalism, class and contemporary journalism – and have now started Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel in ten years, Dream Count. It intertwines the lives and experiences of four Nigerian women and was described by one reviewer as a ‘feminist War and Peace’ – I’m already gripped. I’m also enjoying Catherine Airey’s debut novel Confessions, set between Ireland and New York in the wake of 9/11 and can’t wait to see where the author takes me with this engrossing cross-generational and transatlantic tale.