RCL Books to Look Foward to in 2025
Best Books of 2024 end-of-year lists and Books To Look Forward To in 2025 lists are always intriguing. You can see what you might have missed, and make a note of what you want to look out for. But they are always, of course, highly (and sometimes annoyingly) partial. When not annoying, that partiality can be fun. I loved this LitHub list of the 167 Best Covers of 2024 According to 54 Book Cover Designers. The covers chosen are mostly from US publishers, although there is healthy dose of Scandinavian design in there too. It's great to see what designers value in a book cover. All of the covers here are really inspiring, and I was happy to see designer Gregg Kulick's cover for Holt's North American edition of Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits selected with these comments:
“Hilarious! Brings me joy.”
“This cover could easily have been too silly, but the muted orange, leftward glance, and slightly angry expression create a Goldilocks balance between funny and intriguing.
Glorious Exploits was many people’s ‘Book of the Year’ in 2024, and the love continues to flow in as more readers discover it, and more prize-shortlistings are announced. The paperback edition is published in the UK on 23 January with a major publicity campaign. (As an aside, I loved reading Ferdia’s list of timeless books that have shaped his lifein the Guardian earlier in January.)
So, in the spirit of being partial, here are the books coming up from my authors in the first six months of 2025. My own round-up of the best!
Alongside Ferdia on 23 January, French journalist Clémentine Goldszal’s first book is published by Le Seuil in France. Called Premiers Cris in French, it is going to be published in English by Pushkin Press in 2026 with the title Newborn. I can’t wait to see the French reception for this brilliant piece of writing, which uses Clémentine’s experience of being a fly-on-the-wall in the ICU of the Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris to examine philosophical, psychological and social questions around the unknowability of how a newborn baby experiences the world.
With apology to my husband, Valentine’s Day this year is all about Elly Griffiths and the first book in her new time-travelling-detective series The Frozen People which is published by Quercus in the UK on the preceding day (13 February) – and on 8 July in North America by Pamela Dorman Books (Penguin). I’m always fascinated by the differences between UK and US cover treatments, and here they are stark. Both are completely great in their own way:
Another book much celebrated in the ‘Books of the Year’ roundups was Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time which will definitely flourish again when it comes out in paperback on 6 March. The German edition is published by Fischer Verlag on 23 April. And we’ve just been given an advance peek of this beautiful cover for Czarne’s Polish edition.
March is an extremely exciting month for debuts. I’m going to count Xiaolu Guo’s Call Me Ishmaelle (Chatto & Windus, 20 March) as a kind of debut, even though Xiaolu has written many books, because it is the first of her novels to rewrite a ‘Western’ classic – Moby-Dick. It was announced this week that North American rights have been sold to Grove.
And then there is Charlie Porter’s miraculous first novel Nova Scotia House (Particular Books/Penguin 20 March), which is putting everyone who reads it under its spell, as witnessed by the writers who have said words for its cover.
The author portraits taken by photographer Sarah Lee are similarly spellbinding.
In non-fiction, Leor Zmigrod’s first book The Ideological Brain: A radical science of susceptible minds (coming 20 March from Viking/Penguin UK and 25 March from Holt US) gained deserved recognition from the ‘Books to Look Forward To’ lists, with these mentions:
‘If I had to pick one, Zmigrod’s would be my book to watch out for in 2025.’
Simon Ings, New Scientist
‘Leor Zmigrod’s hotly awaited debut … uses new research to show that polarised thinking isn’t something that just floats through the mind: it changes our entire neural architecture.’
The Telegraph – The best books of 2025
‘… Zmigrod reveals the science behind dogma and shows us how to nurture cognitive flexibility instead.’
Guardian – Brilliant books to read in 2025
I’m accompanying Leor to see her book being printed on 5 February, so stand by for exciting photographs of a printing works (at least exciting for me, the daughter and granddaughter of printers).
You can visit Leor’s brilliant website here.
While Leor looks at how our minds interact with our bodies – the brain of course being biological – Christopher Summerfield describes how human and machine cognition both differ and ressemble each other in his fantastic book These Strange New Minds: How AI learned to talk and what it means, which is published by Viking UK on 6 March and by Viking US in North America on 11 March. Chris has written academic books before, but this is his first book for the general reader and it is essential reading if you want the tools to understand this new era of Large Language Models and possible advances towards Artificial General Intelligence.
Two books that come out in June look at truth, fake news and forgery in eras before AI. No one could pretend to write like Nell Stevens because she is utterly inimitable, as witnessed by her fabulous new novel The Original, which piles on the evidence that Nell is one of the UK’s most exciting young fiction writers. The Original is, as novelist Claire Fuller has described it,
‘A delightful, playful puzzle of a novel, and a brilliant twist on the nineteenth century orphan-makes-good story. The Original asks whether, sometimes, faking it is the right thing to do.’
We are waiting for the UK cover reveal from Scribner who will publish the book on 19 June, but here in the meantime is the brilliant US cover from Norton.
Meanwhile, in non-fiction on fakery, journalist Terry Stiastny has written Believable Lies: The misfits who fought Churchill’s propaganda war – a deeply researched and fascinating account of the women and men recruited to the secret World War II Political Warfare Executive, which was tasked with waging psychological war on the Nazis. While working as a team to create covert propaganda, they also disagreed with each other about the potential ramifications of their ‘fake news’.
Someone so dedicated to telling the truth that he lost his life doing so was Dom Phillips, the writer and journalist I had the honour of representing for his book about the dangerous destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, and what can be done to stop it.
On 5 June 2022, Dom was shot dead while on a research trip for his book. For many of us who knew Dom, it was a dark moment that was hard to know how to come out of. However, the determination of Dom’s family, friends and fellow writers to make sure the manuscript he left incomplete when he died was finished, and published, has been life-affirming.
The book is now at the typesetters and will be published by Bonnier Books UK on 27 May with the title How to Save the Amazon: A journalist’s deadly quest for answers, to mark the third anniversary of Dom’s death. It is such an inspiring text: Dom shows us that even when it seems like there aren’t answers, there are, and there are amazing people who are working hard to find them. Dom’s last social media post was about the beauty of the Amazon - Amazônia sua linda / Amazonia you beauty. I leave you with those words.
