first 5 books of 2025
Hello hello, we’re back - in a new year, with a lot of new books on my wishlist to read this year. It all started a very good note with the first five books I read in 2025 - and I thought I’d share a little about each one…
1. Orbital, Samantha Harvey
This book, the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, was truly unique. It follows 6 astronauts/cosmonauts orbiting the Earth in the space station, and their experience looking down on the planet below - their home and a place a familiarity in the infinite unknown universe - with a significant sense of separation. They’ve gained a much greater perspective on humankind’s place in spatial existence, and the incredibly diverse beauty of earth and its continents. It’s an incredibly beautiful expression of the uniqueness and preciousness of our planet, and a reminder that we must look after its natural wonders while we’re here. It’s a book that really makes you think, as a human being in a bubble of human existence. It’s nothing like anything I’ve ever read before.
2. Just Kids, Patti Smith
I felt truly immersed and inspired by this coming-of-age autobiographical story of creative connetion and honing your artistic potential. Smith’s voice stunningly captures on a deep bond between two kindred spirits, grafting in 60s/70s New York to make it as artists, to experimenting and trying new media, ideas and inspiration sources. It’s a tale of immense hardship, sacrifice, ambition, and ‘art as life’. It taught me that it’s perfectly possible to live your life in the pursuit in creating- and if you’re an artist, you’re intrinsically wired to create.
3. Foster, Claire Keegan
A tiny tale of a little girl being looked after for the summer by a childless couple in rural southern Ireland, where she learns about belonging and chosen family. Keegan manages to convey deep emotion in so few words, telling the story through the unnamed child’s innocent yet strikingly perceptive eyes. I’m planning to read Small Things Like These to access more of her magic, after seeing the film last year.
4. Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
An eye-opening story of discovering and struggling with one’s own identity, exploring the rise and fall of David’s affair with Giovanni, a charasmatic barman he meets while travelling in Paris, conveyed with powerful emotional intensity. I can see why this has been on my radar as a vital book to appear on the literary scene back in the 50s.
5. I Who Have Not Known Men, Jaqueline Harpman
What. A. Story. I was fascinated by the dystopian world Harpman creates. Without going into the shocking and frankly, baffling, events that happen later, it begins with 40 women imprisoned in an underground cave with incredibly vague memory of their life before they arrived. We follow the youngest as they begin to challenge their new normality, and wonder what happened to cause their current reality. Without any memories of personal relationships or ‘normal life’, our narrator makes us question what makes us truly human, when everything is stripped away. The world building is so eerie and unsettling, but I couldn’t stay away. Again - I’ve never read anything like it.
Stay tuned for more of my 2025 reads as the year takes hold - I also share my reads on my Instagram (@phoebe__scarlett). Catch you later!
