What a Year of Reading Kept
On memory, and the women a story chooses to keep.
Some of the books that defined my 2025 reading year.
A year of reading leaves a residue. A mother and child separated by war. An Arctic frontier. Two women in Tehran deciding what they owe to tradition. The plots blur, and the questions don't.
Set side by side, these books ask one question across different centuries and continents: what remains of a woman once circumstance has decided first?
The question begins with the terms she is handed.
What Circumstance Decides
In The Lost English Girl, wartime separates mother from child, and identity is rebuilt from what sacrifice leaves behind. The End of Drum-Time sets love and survival on the Arctic frontier, where neither can be pulled from the other. The Women of Tehran holds friendship and rebellion against the weight of tradition, at the scale of two lives. The Spectacular carries similar pressure into the world of entertainment, where ambition and identity must be worked out through artistry and grit.
What Memory Keeps
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue takes memory, desire, and being seen as its subject, and follows a life no one can hold onto. The Nightingale works from the opposite premise: historical fiction keeps what the record lets slip, courage and heartbreak included. The Secret Life of Sunflowers entwines past and present through art, with unusual clarity.
What Language Carries
In We Do Not Part, every sentence is a small work of art, and language becomes the point rather than the vehicle. The Candy House withholds its coherence. The confusion fades, and the thinking stays. The Secret Book of Flora Lea makes storytelling itself the subject, with secrets and sisterhood as its material.
What the Year Left
Isola. Circling the Sun. A Twilight in Paris. A Postcard. A Sting of a Bee. Five novels that reach grief through precision rather than volume.
Not skimmed. Not summarized. Listened to.
Further Reading: On What the Record Leaves Out
These pieces follow the same idea in different forms—that what a life leaves behind depends on who keeps the record.
→ What Five Hispanic Artists Made Visible: The archive as a choice, and everything history left unrecorded.
→ March Book Pick: The Safekeep: Another novel where a house decides which questions a woman is allowed to stop asking.
Emotionally powerful books from 2025 that made the reader cry