The 30 best books of 2025

Barcelona2024 marked the return to the novel for authors like Toni Sala, Miranda July, Melchor Comes, and Vanessa Springora, and produced such compelling memoirs as those by Richard Flanagan, Patti Smith, and Georgi Gospodinov. In the field of poetry, the new books by Sebastià Alzamora and Ramon Boixeda stood out, as did the publication of a new translation of one of the most enigmatic authors of the 19th century: Emily Dickinson. Catalan essay writing demonstrated its continued strength with new works by Marina Garcés, Raül Garrigasait, and Ingrid Guardiola.

THE BEST BIOGRAPHIES AND SELF-LITIGATION

One year after winning the Booker with The refuge of time, Georgy Gospodinov explains the pain of witnessing the end of his father's life in a fragmentary, unpredictable and dreamlike book, which in turn offers a chronicle of the generation of Bulgarian men born at the end of the Second World War.

After The Year of the Monkey and ofSome kids, Patti Smith looks back on her life But, on this occasion, with the intention of telling the whole story, from her childhood in a humble family to her youthful love for Robert Mapplethorpe, through her success as a counterculture icon and the years she lived away from the public eye with her husband, Fred Smith, and her children.

In Heritage, Philip Roth examines the last years of his father's lifeHerman Roth, a Newark Jew, son of immigrants, widower, and retired insurance salesman. The writer remembers him with shamelessness and tenderness, with devotion and horror: it is the exercise of loyalty of a son willing to do what is expected of him and the bewilderment of an increasingly helpless father.

A girl in the city It is the natural continuation of Mercè Ibarz's previous autobiographical books, in which both her rural origins and her relationship with her adopted city, this Barcelona now disrupted and in which it is almost impossible to enjoy a walk, an activity that the author appreciates and has cultivated so much, weigh heavily.

It all started with a visit to the Japanese forced labor camp where his father was imprisoned during World War II, Richard Flanagan not only reconstructs his lifeInstead, it recalls the literary origins of the atomic bomb and denounces the colonial past that wiped out the aborigines of Tasmania while beginning to devastate the nature of the Australian island.

THE BEST POETRY

There are loves capable of shaking the very foundations of those who experience them. thanks to its "bloody, revolutionary and erotic" dimension. So beautiful and tyrannical, with which Blanca Llum Vidal has won the latest Carles Riba prize, delves into a turbulent and difficult season, in which the liberating desire ends up poisoning the voice, as powerful as it is anguished, that conveys the poems.

While alive, Emily Dickinson (Amherst, 1830-1886) only published eleven poemsEven so, although she rarely left her room at home, she sent more than 600 manuscripts of poems to some forty correspondents, an alternative system for disseminating her unique, cryptic, and luminous work. In addition to offering readers all of the author's verse, Jaume Bosquet also includes the "preliminary versions" and a "generous" apparatus of notes in which "references, allusions, and obscure meanings are explained."

Augusta Hall, the first of the two poems, both exciting and moving, which contains the new book by Sebastià Alzamora It proposes a journey into the deaths and ignominy of the Spanish Civil War. In the second, Mother tongue, returns to Mallorca in the mid-1970s based on the portrait of the shoemaker who was the author's mother.

The new book by Ramon Boixeda It is not religious or mystical poetry, but it moves within the coordinates established by the GenesisBetween the apple of original sin and the dust – "Dust you were and to dust you shall return" – of the expulsion from Paradise. It has two clear points of reference: the birth of a daughter and the old age of the poet's father, which lead him to reflect and rethink existentially.

For Paul Celan (Chernivtsi, 1920-Paris, 1970), The poem is a process, a path we follow, in search of realityIf the world is illegible and twofold, Celan, with his work, creates another world, a world of his own with his own language, in search of reality. And his reality, as a Jew, is marked by the death of his father and mother in the extermination camps in 1942. Arnau Pons publishes the fourth volume of Celan's work in Catalan, a project that started in 2012 with From threshold to threshold.

THE BEST ESSAY

In his penultimate posthumous book – the last one has been The caress of details (Empúries, 2025)–, Vicenç Pagès Jordà shows the same sincere and lively interest both for the work of classics such as Joaquim Ruyra and Victor Catalan than through the genre novels of two contemporary authors (science fiction pulp by Sebastià Roig and the thriller (police fiction by Jordi Dausà), and devotes the same laudatory attention to the opulent prose of an Adrià Pujol as to the bare prose of Damià Bardera and the dramatic intensity of Toni Sala.

In his last essay, Ingrid Guardiola reflects, forcefully but without fatalismIt explores how the system of rules, conventions, guidelines, and algorithms determines our behavior and perception. Drawing on a wide range of philosophical and sociological references such as Foucault, Deleuze, Marcuse, and Shoshana Zuboff, it examines the ecosystem of daily and concrete protocols that, in the age of social media, computing, and technology, affect and dominate us.

The memory of the Catalans It explains the main symbols, sites of memory, myths, legends and traditions that form our collective imagination. It also includes very diverse elements that make up the DNA of Catalans, from October 1, 2017 – an event that has already been widely incorporated into the nomenclature of towns and cities – to features of our character, both past and present.

Raül Garrigasait has dedicated The rock and the air In art and religion, two concepts that have shaped civilization for millennia. Through seven totemic and, at the same time, radical figures.Ramon Llull—Ausiàs March, Isabel de Villena, Joan Maragall, Josep Carner, Frederic Mompou and Antoni Tàpies—, Garrigasait traces a path that connects past and present: in his hands, Rereading cultural heritage ends up being an optimal way to give it continuity.

Marina Garcés dedicates her latest essay to friendship, The only form of stable social interaction that is not regulated: it is free, without rules, without roles, between equalsIt depends solely on the will of those who maintain it, on the rituals and habits they create. It is born and dies spontaneously. No two friendships are alike. That's why it's sometimes hard to know who is a friend and who isn't. Friendship has a wonderful element of unease, of desire and promise.

NARRATIVE

Mara Faye Lethem's first novel translated into Catalan It begins with a typical light comedy, full of nervous giggles, mothers in the park, and clueless fathers, but it soon reveals itself as a ferocious satire, a scathing portrait of the fascist trap of perfection. The protagonist, Barbara, pregnant for the second time, is surrounded by impeccable, controlled, efficient mothers; she, however, begins to feel an irresistible urge to kill growing inside her.

Like Franz Kafka, Sara Mesa has also had the experience of working in administration, meaning that He knows what he's talking about when he portrays everyday despair. of the protagonist in her latest novel, Opposition"Is it a blessing or a curse, not having any occupation?" Sara asks herself from the book as she examines a suffocating reality to which she doesn't know if she will end up adapting.

Rebeca has just turned 40 and has moved from Barcelona to Ocata with her partner and children. Despite being in an idyllic place, problems soon knock on her door: her friendship with some mysterious neighbors is the first step in a series of increasingly disturbing discoveries—including suicides, witchcraft, a cult, and a necropolis—all experienced in parallel with the internet. This is the starting point of Roser Cabré-Verdiell's second and powerful novel.

Carlos Fenollosa is one of the young voices of Valencian literature who has been making his way with strength and talent for almost a decade.War, victory, tomorrow –which has appeared on Drassana, a label that four years ago made known Rafa Lahuerta with Norway– It is set during the years of the Republic, the Civil War and exile to tell the life of Jesús Martorell, doctor, witness and survivor who from the Pellissers square in Valencia will travel to Paris, Naples, Dachau and Buenos Aires.

To Simó Diarte, the publicist who stars The man who sold the worldA far-right candidate has robbed him of the ideas to succeed. In a Barcelona sold out to tourism and the massive use of personal data for the benefit of the powerfulMelchor Comes takes this man through political and social chaos in a journey that challenges his morals and portrays a society surrendered to power.

Irene Pujadas proposes a journey into the body to understand the origin of the existential unease of the protagonist in her first novel, The intruderIn the book, Diana embarks on this odyssey through the rooms where the Processing Machinery – and the Great Mixer – is located, the bony region traversed by the spine and the excesses of The Land of Never Ending, with the aim of reaching the core of it all, but without knowing if she will be able to resolve the doubts.

Rita Bullwinkel elevates to the status of heroines some poor girls who, in the hands of any other writer, would be little more than secondary characters. What another writer might have resolved with a sordid, dirty, and dark portrait of unfortunate women who have found an escape in boxing, Flash of light He narrates it as a epic legend, a mythical tale with protagonists who are goddesses and not humans, goddesses who fight for a space in which to exist.

It had been a long time Núria Perpinyà –author of one of the most solid careers in contemporary Catalan literature– thought about the dualism between flesh and mindAnd that's why he ended up choosing an enzyme, Ubis Q10, as the main character of his new novel. It is he who resorts to The invisible body, every corner of womanhood, which inhabits a fascinating epic, written in vibrant Catalan and full of fun moments.

Despite a seemingly innocent story, Jordi Nopca's fableThe film, which stars a family of hedgehogs in a world suspiciously similar to our own, is incredibly cynical. Its portrayal of the young, middle-class family is relentless, because it's set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing society, seemingly doomed to collapse, caught between the rise of the far right, rampant institutional corruption, and a wave of climate change activism that the new government labels as terrorism.

Hans Christian Andersen He took advantage of all the stories that were part of Scandinavian folklore and gave them a lasting form. And he invented many more. Stories that make up the rich heritage of popular memory such as The Little Mermaid, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Snow Queen either The Match Girl They are his work, and now we can read them for the first time translated into Catalan directly from the Danish.

It is undeniable that The Ring of the Nibelung It has a powerful literary quality. Amadeu Fabregat makes the gift of the chest, in a classical, elegant and sober style of writing...to explain the return of a geography professor to his southern city to attend a performance of Wagner's four-part climax and take stock of his life. If he didn't want to go down in history as an author unius libri and to be remembered in literature only for the seventies delirium of Crazy failures set on fireThe Valencian author has achieved it.

The discovery of photos of Grandpa Josef with the swastika drives Vanessa Springora crazyIt comes to her while she's researching her surname after losing her father. Besides discovering her father's ambiguous sexuality and exacerbated mythomania, the author ofConsent He begins a series of trips and archival research in search of the truth about his grandfather Josef in relation to Nazism.

In Joseph and his brothersThomas Mann embarked on a journey to Ancient Egypt to live alongside Jacob, Rachel, Joseph, Esau, Dinah, and the rest of the biblical characters in the tetralogy. The novel, published between 1926 and 1943, transforms 24 chapters of the Genesis a monumental work exceeding 2,000 pages. Coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the German author's birth, Comanegra has taken on the challenge of publishing this pinnacle of world literature.

The action of the Miranda July's fourth novel The story revolves around a dusty roadside motel room on the outskirts of Los Angeles that somehow refracts vital and sexual energy in all directions. It is there that the protagonist, a forty-five-year-old married mother, questions all the assumptions, commonplaces, and certainties that have led her to this point in her life, and from that moment on, everything begins to spiral downward, from her dignity to her sex drive. The author's audacity, humor, intelligence, and sensitivity transform the protagonist's life into a carousel of absurdities and triumphs that propel the reader forward.

In the last eleven years Toni Sala has published three novels which are three ways of approaching life and death. Scenarios The trilogy that began with The boys (2014) and continued with Persecution (2019). Together they also form a portrait of Catalonia during and after the independence process. In Scenarios It tells the story of three injured and disoriented characters: Tomàs Niubó, an actor who suffers an accident on the road near Puigcerdà; Vadó, a fat and lonely man who is the one who finds him, and Olga, a nurse who works in the hospital where the actor will end up.