To start the new year, New Yorker writers look back on the latter, sifting through the vast array of books they encountered in 2025 to identify the most prominent events. Here, several authors offer recommendations as part of a series that will continue in the coming weeks. Stay tuned, but in the meantime, if you want to add to your stack of books worth reading, you can always check out the magazine's annual list. best new games of the year.
Seeking attention
Adam Phillips
Over the holidays, I plan to read “Seeking Attention,” in which Phillips, a psychoanalyst who is also an energetic and flexible writer, reclaims central activity as prosocial, meaningful, and valuable. I'll be honest. I don't think I'll like this book very much. I'm ready to shake my fist and scream, “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” But maybe instead I'll discover where I'm wrong, wrong, wrong in seeking attention. In more than twenty powerful, charismatic works, Phillips pondered and reflected on seemingly under-explored aspects of everyday life: “give up“, “skip“, “kiss, tickle and miss” He has a new book coming out in January about gap between desire and reality. When Phillips demands my attention, he gets it.—Katie Waldman
Someone else's child
Alan Hollinghurst
I purchased this copy around the time it came out, in 2011, and left it unread on my shelf for fifteen years. While looking for something to take on a trip last spring, I impulsively grabbed this. The book impressed me. Hollinghurst's novel begins in 1913, when a Cambridge student named George brings his friend Cecil home for the school holidays. Cecil is a smug aristocrat who dreams of becoming a poet; When he leaves, he leaves behind an aroda as a flirtatious gift for his friend's teenage sister, Daphne, although it also seems to hint at a date with George. Then the narrative jumps. We learn that Cecil died young, during the First World War, and was eulogized; that his poems, starting with this ode, are the kind of things that children learn in school; and that Daphne is troubledly married to his brother. The novel continues through three more time jumps, to the near present. Some characters remain in view, while others die or leave. New people appear. Nothing great happens, and yet everything happens; each era becomes its own world, immersed in its own concerns and standing on what came before. I found the novel not just gripping, page after page (Hollinghurst is at his best a writer of human sensitivity and exquisite precision), but also remarkably true to life's experiences across time. For storytelling in the tradition of British realism, the question is how to become an interesting 21st-century novel rather than a costume drama. By the final chapters, Daphne and her contemporaries, now aged, seem to remember less of those days with Cecil than the reader who recently lived through them—an inspired way to evoke the novel's novelty without breaking the realist line. Despite the fact that many questions remain unanswered or for this reason, Hollinghurst's book manages to capture not only the distant perspective, but also the night winds of the whole world.—Nathan Heller
Friday
Michel Tournier
In Friday, French writer Michel Tournier once again dreams of the island life of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Until recently, I had never heard of Friday, originally published (to great success) in 1967. I expected the simple pleasures of a change in perspective. But the book turned out to be much more unpredictable and exciting, as well as so funny, so pathetic. Crusoe develops a legal system, builds the Conservatory of Weights and Measures, and falls in love with a cave. Friday's arrival, relatively later in the book, upsets unexpected elements of Crusoe's order while simultaneously changing and restoring others. The tone of the book changes from philosophical to playful, from despair to sensual, and so on. Tournier does not adhere to certain plot details of the original, especially in the finale. Almost magically, this makes the mirror ideas about isolation, society and nature even more true and true.—Rivka Galchen
Falling up
Richard Rohr
A very dear friend of mine, who worked in construction for decades before becoming a deacon in the Lutheran Church, died last fall from complications from cancer. In the last months of his life, he and I prayed and read poetry together, and he hoped that we could also study the book together. Life and then death got in the way of that plan, but a week before he passed, he gave me a copy of the book he planned for us to read together: Franciscan priest Richard Rohr's Falling Up: Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. I started the book that evening, read Brené Brown's foreword, and then stopped when I came to one of my favorite poems: “When the kingfishers caught fire“, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. There was a huge full moon that night, and as I wrote to my friend about this poem, I wondered if it was the last poem he would ever see. It was. But as the shadows lengthened and the winter deepened, I finally returned to the book. One of my resolutions for the new year is to honor Deacon Mike by having a conversation about spiritual transitions that he hoped we Let's spend it with as many other people as possible.—Casey Sep
Short Lives
Anita Bruckner
One of the great pleasures in life is finding a book by a writer you've never read before, really loving it, and then realizing that you now have a complete collection of that writer's work to enjoy. It happened to me this year with the writer Anita Bruckner, who died in 2016 and whose work I had somehow never encountered before, although I must have spotted her Vintage Contemporaries spines in about a million used bookstores over the years. The novel I started with after finally pulling it off the shelf at one of these stores a few months ago was Brief Lives (1990), which centers on the difficult relationship between a pair of what we might today call frenemies—the domineering Julia and the demure Faye. The story is told in first person, from Faye's point of view. She is married, to her dismay, to Owen, a London lawyer whose law partner, the attentive Charlie, is married to Julia; the situation leads women to a forced, long-standing acquaintance. (“Basically, I found her disturbing and she found me boring,” says Fay.) Nothing particularly extreme happens in the novel, but what Bruckner does beautifully is expose the emotional storms simmering beneath the routine rhythms of what, at first glance, may seem to be a largely boring middle-class, middle-aged reality—the seemingly decent lives of introverted women. In this way she reminded me of her fellow Briton Barbara Pymwhose novels I also came to relatively late and whose works I read to the end almost as soon as I started them. I can't wait to do the same with Bruckner.—Naomi Fry
