I read every day — here are the 8 best books I've read in 2025

I love to read but, with so many different things constantly competing for our time and attention, it’s not always easy to find the time. 

Usually, I’ll end up squeezing in a half hour or so at the very end of the day while lying in bed. Reading is a great way to calm the mind to prepare for sleep and I find it more and more important as a way of switching off the stresses of the day.

Research suggests you are actively improving your health by reading, whether it’s by activating more parts of your brain, or strengthening it and allowing you to process information better in future. Research has also shown reading significantly reduces your stress levels, with blood pressure and heart rate falling after a few minutes of reading.

Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, I firmly believe reading is a constructive way to pass the time, be it learning new things or simply escaping into a new world for a while. And with that in mind, here are the best books I’ve read so far this year. These aren’t books that were published this year (sadly, I’m not a quick enough reader to keep up with the latest books as and when they drop) but that doesn’t mean they’re not well worth your time. You can see the best books I’ve read in the last five years here.  

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If I had to name my current favourite author, it would be Lisa Jewell. Her crime mysteries are irresistible page-turners with great plots that expertly tread the line between believable and otherwise. I’ve never gone through books as quickly as I do hers. The Family Remains is the sequel to The Family Upstairs, the first book of Jewell’s that I read. I went on to read four more back-to-back — you can read which ones here. It scores 3.87 on Goodreads and you can buy The Family Remains on Amazon here or Waterstones here. 

Spoon-Fed explores “the scandalous lack of good science behind many diet plans [and] official recommendations” and comes with the subheading of “why almost everything we’ve been told about food is wrong”. Prof Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London and a co-founder of the science and nutrition firm, Zoe, has become a leading voice on nutrition in recent years.

Each of the chapters in this book deals with a specific topic, for example, whether calorie-counting is an effective way to lose weight, whether coffee is good or bad for you, and whether supplements actually do anything. But one of the most shocking things of all I learned from this book is just how much official government advice on what and how we should eat is so wrong. It scores 4.03 on Goodreads and you can buy Spoon-Fed on Amazon here or Waterstones here. 

Remie Yorke has one shift left at the remote Scottish hotel where she works before it shuts for the winter and she leaves for good. It’s just her and a guest or two left when a storm hits. As snow falls, temperatures plummet and phone lines go down, an injured man stumbles to the door, claiming to be a police officer called Don Gaines. He says he was in a crash on a mountain road in which the only other survivor was the dangerous prisoner he was transporting.

After she lets him in, a second man turns up, also claiming to be PC Don Gaines. It’s a brilliant and spine-tingling premise and the rest of the book delivers on the suspense as Remie tries to work out who is telling the truth — and who isn’t. It scores 3.41 on Goodreads and you can buy The Second Stranger on Amazon here or Waterstones here.

Very little about this book initially appealed to me, given it revolves around the world of video games, a world I am definitely not a part of. But I loved this book, and it’s clear I’m not the only one given it has a rating of 4.12 on Goodreads, who rank it as one of the 10 best books of the decade.

Of course, although the book centres on Sam Mazer and Sadie Green, two gifted creatives and their desire to create a world-beating video game together, it is about far, far more. One of the amazing things about it is just how full of wisdom it is, with just one example being the line “If you’re always aiming for perfection, you won’t make anything at all.” You can buy it on Amazon here or Waterstones here.

Mahmood Mattan was well-known in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay, which in the 1950s was a vibrant, if edgy, community based around the city’s major shipping industry. People from all over the world, including Somali and West Indian sailors, settled there and built families.

Mattan, a British-Somali former seaman and father-of-three with a Welsh wife, was one of them. He was wrongly accused of the murder of shopkeeper Lily Volpert, for which he was also convicted and hanged at Cardiff prison, the last man to be hanged in the city. The facts, the people and the injustice are all real and the repercussions for Mattan’s descendants continue to this day. Nadifa Mohamed’s historical fiction recreates the world with astonishing, heartbreaking skill. You can buy The Fortune Men on Amazon here or at Waterstones here.  

Long Island is the sequel to Brooklyn, which told the story of Eilis Lacey, a young woman who moves from small-town Ireland to New York City alone in the 1950s, her family convinced it’s where a better future lies. Long Island returns to Eilis’ life in 1976 — she is married to an Italian-American plumber, has two children and lives on Long Island.

One day, a man knocks on her door and tells him his own wife is pregnant and Eilis’ husband is the father. Eilis’s response, her decisions about whether to return to Ireland, and what she will do if she does, make for a riveting novel, told with masterful writing. Rated 3.72 on Goodreads, you can buy Long Island on Amazon here or at Waterstones here. 

The Royal Family in Britain today has a God-like status in the minds of many people. In Unruly, David Mitchell (yes, the one from Peep Show and Would I Lie To You?) points out with no hint of subtlety that for the majority of the thousand years and more we have had kings and queens, they have been terrible, narcissistic, violent people with no more ability to run a country than the horses they rode around on. This is a very funny book, albeit about a very serious subject. It’s rated 4.13 on Goodreads and available on Amazon here or at Waterstones here.

An admittedly left-field entry in this list but genuinely the most recent book I finished, Giants in the Earth tells the story of a Norwegian settler family trying to build a new life as pioneers in the fledgling United States’ Dakota territory in the 19th century. The book is fiction but it’s very much grounded in the reality of the men and women who made the astonishingly brave decisions to head westwards into vast plains with only themselves, their children and what they could fit on a rickety wagon.

Once there, they found nothing but grass, plagues of locusts and winter temperatures which could rival Antarctica. How they survived to create the foundations of modern day America is almost a miracle in itself. Giants in the Earth is rated 4.04 on Goodreads. You can buy it on Amazon here and Waterstones here.