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When it comes to ‘books of the year’ lists, every selection is subjective and the literary landscape is too expansive to be neatly packaged. What follows, then, are 10 works of fiction from 2025 that left a lasting impression. A handful of starting points, in no particular order.
‘The World With its Mouth Open’ by Zahid Rafiq
A collection of short stories set in Srinagar that offers glimpses into the everyday lives of people, from reporters to shopkeepers, shaped by trauma and uneasy memories. The pages are suffused with the ghosts of loss and longing, and the ominous presence of state violence is always around the corner. The open-ended narratives bear the weight of a past that refuses to stay buried, at a time when the “world with its mouth open” is waiting to swallow the fragile.
‘Great Eastern Hotel’ by Ruchir Joshi
A capacious saga of 1940s Calcutta and its environs, in which a storied hotel becomes a metaphor for a city at a moment of historical change. With a cast of revolutionaries, artists, pickpockets, colonial officials and wanderers across social classes, the novel traces love and ambition against the backdrop of World War II, indicators of famine, and the nation’s struggle for independence. The prose is riotously playful, capturing the quirks and ambitions of the city and its inhabitants.
‘Venetian Vespers’ by John Banville
A gripping fin de siècle thriller in which an English writer and his American heiress bride arrive in a murky Venice for a belated honeymoon, only to be pulled into a Gothic mix of deceit and disappearance. Banville’s prose is typically atmospheric, surveying the decaying grandeur of Venice and conveying a sense of dread as reality blurs into menace.
‘The Artist’ by Lucy Steeds
Set in sun-drenched Provence in the 1920s, when a British journalist arrives at a painter’s remote farmhouse to discover a claustrophobic world of light and shadows. As summer deepens, the journalist is drawn further into the painter’s spell and under the gaze of his silent, mysterious niece. The plot slowly uncovers secrets and lies, exploring the nature of power and what it takes for creative urges to survive. It’s a Provencal painting in words that asks: who gets to be seen as an artist, and at what cost?
‘Railsong’ by Rahul Bhattacharya
A character-driven chronicle of one woman’s passage from a railway-colony childhood to a hard-won adulthood. She journeys on the tracks of caste, class, and gender, against an India marked by famine, strikes, repression, communalism, and supposed economic uplift. In this way, her life reflects the changing face of the nation. Bhattacharya’s prose is both lyrical and grounded, intimate and expansive. A novel of displacement, change and forging an identity amidst the clang of locomotives and the promise and peril of progress.
‘Fundamentally’ by Nussaibah Younis
A novel about Islamic State (IS) brides that dares to be funny. It follows the travails of a London-based academic who journeys to Iraq to find herself in a world of confusing refugee camps and misplaced humanitarian zeal. The first-person voice is sharp and sly, skewering international aid and the earnestness of good intentions. It shines a light on NGO-friendly liberal pieties and moral certainties while revealing, beneath the satire, a universal need to belong.
‘The Eleventh Hour’ by Salman Rushdie
A collection of five stories that move between India, England and the United States, circling issues of mortality, memory and the legacies we shape or inherit. Some lean towards the elegiac and the quiet reckonings of late life. Others reprise the modes familiar from Midnight’s Children and Shame. Throughout, there is the presence of Rushdie’s trademark wit. It’s a meditation on endings: of lives, of relationships, of stories, and even of language itself.
‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’ by Kiran Desai
A sprawling, emotionally rich saga that combines the immigrant experience, love, trauma, and even a supernatural thread into a single ambitious narrative. It follows an Indian student in Vermont and a young journalist in New York as they struggle with alienation and the pressures of identity in a foreign land. It contains a lot more than that, though, unfolding across continents, generations, and the lives of several characters as it captures the disquiet of displacement and the weight of family histories.
‘On the Calculation of Volume III’ by Solvej Balle, trs Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
The first part of this Danish time-freezing fable appeared in English in 2024; the second and third followed this year, with four more still to come. The premise is familiar: a woman finds herself living the same day over and over again. The implications, however, are anything but typical. Balle approaches this notion of eternal recurrence by probing questions of identity, relationships, and responsibility. By examining what it means to live when time no longer moves forward, she touches upon subjective experience versus the external world, human agency versus collective responsibility, and isolation versus intimacy. In short, this is no mere rehash of Groundhog Day or Russian Doll.
‘Perspectives’ by Laurent Binet, trs Sam Taylor
Binet’s novel, translated from the French, begins in 1557 Florence when painter Jacopo da Pontormo is discovered dead in a church, stabbed through the heart, as he is finishing a set of frescoes. What follows is a murder mystery narrated through letters exchanged by real and fictional characters including Michelangelo, Cellini, and artist-historian Giorgio Vasari, who manages to sort through the chaff and piece together the truth. Ingenious, witty, and very readable, the novel weaves crime, art, and palace intrigue to show how different perspectives shape both painting and politics.
The writer is based in Mumbai.
English (US) ·