So far this year, I’ve been trying to really dig into my taste, read some classics and revisit authors I love. That said, I’m still enjoying picking up new releases and trying different authors. Here’s everything I’ve read so far in 2025.
Go as a River – Shelley Read
Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash lives with her father, brother and uncle on the family peach farm in mid-century Colorado. Her family are difficult and she lives, essentially, as their housemaid. Until she meets Wilson Moon while walking home and falls, instantly, in love.
Their love story is forbidden and brief. I found the build of it jarringly fast and it’s one of the things I didn’t like about the book. I get that they’re teenagers but they barely talk and yet the rest of the book revolves around the pain of Victoria’s heartbreak.
Despite my initial grumbles, it’s a soaring story. Her resilience against the hardship and harshness of both her environment and circumstances is compelling. It also reads like a love letter to the Colorado landscape, with vivid descriptions of the countryside and mountains. Something else that’s explored is the deep love between a mother and child. In having her son Victoria makes a series of sacrifices and we follow the impact of those on her.
Never Let Me Go – Kazou Ishiguro
This has been top of my to read list for a long time. My first introduction to Ishiguro was The Remains of the Day which I read at university, and while a great read it wasn’t my favourite. I later picked up Klara and the Sun and was drawn into the dystopian world, so I’m surprised that it’s taken me this long to get around to Never Let Me Go. It didn’t disappoint.
Deeply dark and disturbing, the story is set in late 1990s dystopian England. Kathy, our narrator, is now thirty and works as a carer. She reflects on her memories of attending boarding school, Hailsham, and her friends Tommy and Ruth. It’s slowly revealed that in this world humans are raised as clones, and kept segregated from society in boarding schools, before they go onto have their organs harvested in young adulthood. The children gradually learn of their fate as they grow up and become carers for others donors, all while awaiting their own call up.
It’s the real emotions that Ishiguro captures in his writing that make this story one that will stay with me for a long time. The tenderness which he details childhood innocence and then slowly robs his characters of it, the hope that Kathy and Tommy carry that their love will save them and the crushing reality of their situation.
As this year is the 20th anniversary of Never Let Me Go, it’s the perfect time to read or re-read.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls – Haruki Murakami
There are two Murakami books on this list. I struggle with him because I love his surreal and dreamlike worlds but he is deeply misogynistic in his writing. I had high hopes for Murakami’s first book in forty years and but, still, there’s a depiction of teenage girl as having a ‘lithe young body’ (this isn’t even the worst description) that just doesn’t sit well with me. So, let’s just leave that as a disclaimer and move on.
Our teenage narrator meets a girl, falls in love and has a slow-burn relationship, that ends abruptly when she disappears. But not before she tells him that if he ever really wants to know her, he’ll have to find her in a walled city that might, or might not, exist.
The concepts were really interesting to me and I liked the strange world, with its formidable gatekeeper and beasts that roam the perimeter of the town. However, the plot quickly derailed, as we’re instead jerked back into reality where our narrator works in a rural library guided by a ghost. While I really enjoyed the first half, I felt completely lost in the second.
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
Another classic that’s long been on my list.
The two-strand plot follows teenage runaway Kafka, who ends up in a remote city Takamatsu where he spends his days hiding out in a library, and the unravelling of an incident where war-time evacuees witnessed something supernatural and blacked out for several hours. All of the children recovered, except one – Nakata – who eventually wakes up having lost all intelligence and able to talk to cats.
As these two characters trajectories progress, it becomes clear that they will collide. There are lots of jumps in time, worlds and dreams overlap (when do they not in Murakami?), there’s a murder and there are lots of untied loose ends. It does lots of things well, the atmosphere and surrealism draws you in and takes you on a relentless journey.
Small Things Like These – Claire Keegan
The shortest book I’ve read this year but one that packs the biggest punch. Small Things Like These follows Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in New Ross, County Wexford. It’s Christmas 1985 and Bill makes a discovery in the convent at the edge of town. The convent, and it’s attached training school and laundry, are known in the town for being home to “common, unmarried girls” and rumours swirl about the conditions in which those women live and work. They rumours confirmed when Bill finds a young woman locked in an outbuilding in filth, starved and crying for her missing baby.
The story exploring the Magdalene laundries where, Keegan details in the afterword, some 30,000 Irish women and girls were incarcerated between the 18th and 20th century, and frames them through the lens of one man and his family. There’s tension as Bill wrestles with his own past and what to do with this information, as well as the impact it will have on their futures. It’s a story that’s tender, uplifting and full of hope.
That’s it for my quarterly round up, I’d love to know what you’re reading. I’m currently reading Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok and I can already tell it’s going to be one of my favourites.
