Christina's Top Reads of 2025

Explore the team’s favourite books of 2025! Choosing three from an entire year is a challenge and more recent reads tend to obscure what you read in February. Still, there are those that stay with you through the months. Why three? Because it's more than one but less than a list. The rules are: they don't need to have been published in 2025, but you need to have read or re-read it this year.

These are Christina's choices!

Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent

In August of this year, I read Hannah Kent's beautiful memoir Always Home, Always Homesick about her connection to Iceland. The memoir also charts the development and writing process of her acclaimed debut novel Burial Rites. This memoir was my first time reading Kent's writing and it made me want to read everything else she's written too - I also read and adored Devotionwhich is extremely lyrical and gorgeous. SUCH GOOD SENTENCES. Always Home, Always Homesick is for anyone who has more than one place where they feel at home.

Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You by Candice Chung

Candice Chung is a BRILLIANT writer, and the structure of this memoir illuminates all the many ways we think, feel, and write about food. The book is about her relationship with her parents, her budding romantic connection with a man called The Geographer, and her connection to food and cooking as a restaurant critic, all brought into sharp focus through the pressure-cooker environment of the pandemic. We are very very lucky to get to welcome Candice to the bookshop for a writing workshop in Feburary 2026!

The Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

August was a good month for me, I think! I also read this book during August, it was our indie press subscription box pick for August. A beautifully crafted gut-punch of a short story collection, Night of the Living Rez follows the story of David as he grows up. The stories, many of which were published as stand-alones in literary magazines and are collected here together, are arranged non-chronologically - David is 12, then he is 28, then he is 17, then he is 9. The stories move closer and closer to the big silence of trauma and loss at the heart of the book. This is a portrait of an Indigenous community, a story of love, pain and serenity, and a tale of friendship and family and caring for others. Absolutely propulsive, I didn't want to put the book down, and I'm in awe at the razor-sharp precision of Talty's writing. This isn't a light read, but it's rewarding, complex and warm.

bonus book Doppelganger by Naomi Klein which I just read (finally)

This was my first Naomi Klein! I thought it was extremely good, and the way it built its argument was very clever, and I spoke to everyone I met since October about this book.