The Skinny's Favourite Books of 2025

The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey

A möbius strip has no beginning and no end; it curls around itself, furling and unfurling forever. So too does Catherine Lacey’s remarkable The Möbius Book: start at one end and it’s a short story about a marriage falling apart, start at the other and it’s a memoir about the aftermath of her own relationship breakdown. Not quite informing each other, the circling halves instead point to the forever evolving and failing nature of narrative, and the impossibility of ever trying to fix any kind of linear meaning onto your life. It’s one of the best books on heartbreak I’ve ever read; it’s also one of the best books on writing I’ve ever read. [Anahit Behrooz]

The Möbius Book is out now with Granta

Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood

Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You is a strange and affecting novel with darkness at its heart. There’s palpable pain which, although well-hidden, permeates throughout. It is also hugely entertaining, a place where high and low culture meet and get on famously. Literary, artful, funny, and emotional, it could be read as stream of consciousness, with these apparently scattergun musings on art in particular an attempt to avoid confronting other, all too real, concerns. Written in an unapologetically self-conscious style which reflects the substance, Patricia Lockwood digs deep into the personal and articulates it with care and compassion. [Alistair Briadwood]

Will There Ever Be Another You is out now with Bloomsbury

Love Languages by James Albon

James Albon's graphic novel, drawn in a style that recalls European bandes dessinées, follows two women muddling through an exchange of languages and hearts in their respective mother tongues of English and Cantonese. Things start to look up for Sarah, a young Brit working a suffocating corporate job in Paris, when she meets Ping, an au pair from Hong Kong. No one is more surprised than Sarah when their friendship quickly develops into something words can’t quite describe. I adored this understated queer romance which is also an ode to language-learning as well as proof of Edinburgh’s thriving comic book scene. [Louis Cammell]

Love Languages is out now with Top Shelf Productions

Fuck Me Judith by Claire Star Finch

The best thing about Fuck Me Judith is not the decidedly smutty sexual exploits of our heroine or that it’s ostensibly Judith Butler fan fiction, or even the delicious critique of a certain Parisian lesbian scene and its famous boat parties. Instead what makes this small book both a raucous and unputdownable read is the perfect depiction of the heartbroken ego. Claire Star Finch elucidates with a sharp satiric edge entanglements of academic celebrity, democratic theory and the everyone-knows-everyone dyke millieu. Our hero wallows, fucks, despairs and fucks more; nothing will get Judith out of her head. [Marguerite Carson]

Fuck Me Judith is out now with After8

Perfect Victims: and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed el-Kurd

Mohammed el-Kurd writes with scrupulousness about the caging of the Palestinian people, and the obfuscation of their clear struggle against genocide and colonisation. El-Kurd refers to this as a Politics of Appeal, a “narrow node of victimhood” to which Palestinians are often herded to find false and restricting refuge. His writing spares no time for vacillation. El-Kurd also saves room for his lyrical prowess and essential footnotes that abandon ‘western’ expectations of the Palestinian to epistemically debate the struggle of his people. In reading Perfect Victims, you forgo the deliberate and reductive treatment of Palestinian as either hero or victim. There is no room for contention, only fact, and el-Kurd commands your willingness to meet the eyes of those who suffer the violent consequences of that deliberacy. [Maria Farsoon]

Perfect Victims is out now with Haymarket Books

Good Girl by Aria Aber

Set in 2000s Berlin, Aria Aber’s Good Girl is a gut-wrenching and nostalgic coming-of-age saga. It follows 19-year-old Nila, the daughter of Afghan migrants, through a destructive relationship and drug-fuelled nights in the city’s underbelly. Aber is a poet. And Good Girl, her first novel, drips with a poet’s affecting prose. Raw and dark in its commentary on capitalism, family expectations and the far right, a softness also threads throughout as we witness our protagonist’s queer awakening and see her fall in love with her art. Good Girl is a dizzying and deeply considered interrogation of migrant identity, inheritance and loss. [Parisa Hashempour]

Good Girl is out now with Bloomsbury

Crossing by Sabrin Hasbun

In the wake of her mother’s death, Sabrin Hasbun turns to memoir to unpack grief both from having lost a parent but also her birthplace of Palestine. What makes Crossing so interesting is that much of the story centres on Anna, Hasbun’s Italian mother, and her journey from a small village in Tuscany to eventually starting a family in historic Palestine with Rami, an artist. By doing so, Hasbun showcases the emotional determination of the Palestinian people through Anna’s eyes, despite the oppressive reality of apartheid and conflict. This is a moving story of love, loss and redemption against unimaginable odds. [Andrés Ordorica]

Crossing is out now with Footnote Press

Sky Daddy by Kate Folk

Kate Folk has followed up her sensational and bizarre short story collection Out There with a debut novel as sincere as it is absurd. Sky Daddy follows Linda, a content moderator who harbours a secret life goal to 'marry' a plane and consummate their love in an explosive and permanent finale. Folk presents a compelling and truly singular protagonist in Linda and her stalwart focus to achieve her ambition. A surprisingly heart-warming and darkly hilarious novel about female ambition, the epidemic of loneliness, and finding authentic connection in contemporary capitalist America. [Katalina Watt]

Sky Daddy is out now with Hodder & Stoughton