Fantasy, mystery and psychological thriller series dominate book sales, as adult colouring also makes a comeback

Fantasy, mystery and psychological thriller series dominate the UK’s bestsellers list for 2025, topped by Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune. The fifth book in his Thursday Murder Club series secured the top position at 391,429 hardback sales.

Adult colouring also had a resurgence this year: colouring books aimed at all ages made it into the top 20 chart, according to analysis by NielsenIQ BookData.

A knighthood, a lifetime achievement award and a hit theatre production of The Line of Beauty… the author on a year of personal success and political change

If there can be a downside to receiving a lifetime achievement award, it can surely only be the hint of closure it evokes. I put this as tactfully as I can to Alan Hollinghurst, this year’s winner of the David Cohen prize, which has previously recognised the contribution to literature of, among others, VS Naipaul, Doris Lessing and Edna O’Brien. It does have “a certain hint of the obituary about it�, he concedes, laughing. “So I’m very much doing what I can to take it as an incentive rather than a reward.�

But there have been plenty of rewards recently. Hollinghurst was knighted in this year’s New Year honours list, a couple of months after the publication of his novel Our Evenings, the story of actor Dave Win’s journey from boarding school to the end of his life, which received rave reviews. In the Guardian, critic Alexandra Harris announced it his finest novel to date, noting that it “forms a deep pattern of connection with its predecessors, while being an entirely distinct and brimming whole�.

From Emily Henry to Rebecca Yarros and Alison Espach’s The Wedding People – romance has dominated the book charts this year. So why is it still dismissed by critics?

People buy lipstick when the world is falling apart. This genuine economic theory, known as the “lipstick index�, was first noted by Leonard Lauder (son of the more famous Estée). When the world seems very bleak – in the weeks and months after the twin towers fell, for instance, or after the 2008 financial crash – and spending generally goes down, lipstick sales trend strongly upwards.

The psychological truth at the heart of this equation is real: when people have less than they need, they spend more on small, beautiful things. It’s easy, maybe, to dismiss this in the way most feminine-coded things are dismissed: frivolous, wasteful, foolish. But that would be a mistake. A single treasure, bright and gorgeous, is like a talisman; a candle in the night. It is possible, with your small candle, to make your way in the darkness. One delight, against all this. The world crumbles, and lipstick sales go up.

The commercialisation of the cosmos is already underway, and our current laws aren’t fit for purpose

If there is one thing we can rely on in this world, it is human hubris, and space and astronomy are no exception.

The ancients believed that everything revolved around Earth. In the 16th century, Copernicus and his peers overturned that view with the heliocentric model. Since then, telescopes and spacecraft have revealed just how insignificant we are. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, each star a sun like ours, many with planets orbiting them. In 1995, the Hubble space telescope captured its first deep-field image: this showed us that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our known universe, huge wheeling collections of stars dispersed through space.

The romantic proclivities of the Shelleys, a notable corpse and a diner delight – test your knowledge with questions posed by favourite authors

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Successful children’s author denies allegations after he was reportedly accused of harassing junior female staff

David Walliams has been dropped by his publisher after an investigation into allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards young women, the Telegraph has reported.

Walliams, one of Britain’s most successful children’s authors, was reportedly the subject of complaints that he had “harassed� junior female staff at HarperCollins UK, prompting the publisher to decide it would no longer release new titles by the author.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from a festive mystery to a kaleidoscopic ode to the animal kingdom

New novels from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ian McEwan, plus the return of Slow Horses and Margaret Atwood looks back … Guardian critics pick the must-read titles of 2025

The Guardian’s fiction editor picks the best of the year, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count to Thomas Pynchon’s return, David Szalay’s Booker winner and a remarkable collection of short stories.

Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I finally got round to Thoreau’s Journal. It is determinedly down-to-earth and soaring, lyrical and belligerent, humane and cantankerous. Walt Whitman thought Thoreau suffered from “a very aggravated case of superciliousness�, but as Walt also said (of himself) the Journal of this brooding, solitary figure is great; it “contains multitudes.�

Homework by Geoff Dyer is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson is published by Cassava Republic. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Bob and Dick Sherman take centre stage in this well-researched account of how Walt Disney created a classic

Like many kids of the VHS generation, I must have watched my taped-off-the-telly copy of Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) well over 100 times. I probably knew every frame as well as Walt Disney himself, who invested 20 years in bringing it to the screen.

The culmination of his live action achievements, Mary Poppins remained the project Walt was most proud of. A sophisticated, multi-Oscar-winning musical that proved the House of Mouse was about more than just cartoons, its box office success enabled him to expand his Florida ambitions for Disney World resort and shore up the company’s financial future.

A brilliant history of psychiatric ideas suggests we are on the cusp of a transformation in our understanding of severe mental illness

In 1973, an American psychologist called David Rosenhan published the results of a bold experiment. He’d arranged for eight “pseudo-patients� to attend appointments at psychiatric institutions, where they complained to doctors about hearing voices that said “empty�, “hollow� and “thud�. All were admitted, diagnosed with either schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychosis. They immediately stopped displaying any “symptoms� and started saying they felt fine. The first got out after seven days; the last after 52.

Told of these findings, psychiatrists at a major teaching hospital found it hard to believe that they’d make the same mistake, so Rosenhan devised another experiment: over the next three months, he informed them, one or more pseudopatients would go undercover and, at the end, staff would be asked to decide who had been faking it. Of 193 patients admitted, 20% were deemed suspicious. It was then that Rosenhan revealed this had been a ruse as well: no pseudopatients had been sent to the hospital at all. Not only had doctors failed to spot sane people in their midst; they couldn’t reliably recognise the actually insane.

The precarious, cruel but dazzling world of a foundling hospital is brought wonderfully to life by the author of Botticelli’s Secret

Joseph Luzzi, a professor at Bard College in New York, is a Dante scholar whose books argue for the relevance of the great Italian art and literature of the late middle ages and Renaissance to our own times. A great populariser and advocate of the humanities in public life, he has done for Dante what his Bard colleague Daniel Mendelsohn did for Homer in An Odyssey and other books.

This short volume tells the story of the Hospital of the Innocents in Dante’s home town of Florence, a building Luzzi has been fascinated by since encountering it in 1987 on his college year abroad. The Innocenti, as it is known, was the first institution in Europe devoted solely to the care of unwanted children. The first foundling, named Agata because she was left by its gates on Saint Agata’s Day 1445, had been nibbled at by mice.

Correspondence between the Lord of the Flies author and his editor reveals one of the great literary collaborations of the age

When William Golding submitted Lord of the Flies to Faber in 1953 it had already been rejected at least seven times, maybe as many as 20. Charles Monteith could tell from the dog-eared typescript that it had done the rounds, and a reader for Faber called it “absurd and uninteresting … Rubbish and dull. Pointless.� But Monteith, young and new to the job, could see the book’s potential, and suggested ways that Golding – then a Salisbury-based schoolmaster in his early 40s – might improve it. More radically cut and revised than Monteith expected, the novel became a school syllabus classic. Thus began an author-editor friendship that lasted 40 years.

Their early exchanges by post were formal in the extreme: it took two years for Dear Monteith, Dear Golding to become Dear Charles, Dear Bill. But as provincial grammar school boys who both read English at Oxford, the two were attuned to each other. And after the rescue act performed on his first novel, Golding remained humbly grateful for whatever help he could get: “I’m in your hands as usual. I’ve no particular feeling of possession over the book.� Monteith’s touch was gentle for the next few years: enthusiastic, even effusive, he reassured Golding that his drafts of The Inheritors and Free Fall were the finished product. With later novels, such as The Spire and Rites of Passage, editorial feedback was tougher and more extensive. But there were no fallings out. “I’ve always had a feeling of you there, present but not breathing down my neck!� Golding said. He never seriously considered moving to another publishing house.

This resurrected Danish novel about a man who is ‘frozen down’, awaking in an Orwellian dystopia two decades later, is inventive, funny and all too timely

In the Danish author’s uncannily prescient novel, first published in 1969, the year is 1973 and Bruno works as a fiction editor for a popular weekly magazine; his talent for generating story ideas makes him indispensable to his authors. Invited for dinner at the home of one of them, Bruno finds himself seated next to a woman named Jenny, a struggling ballet dancer with a gloomy aspect and no sense of humour. Bruno is drawn to her nonetheless, and finds himself inventing stories about her. The following day, he is admitted to hospital to undergo tests: a small lump on the side of his neck has raised some concerns. Bruno cannot help feeling the two events are somehow connected.

It comes as little surprise to Bruno when he learns he has cancer. The doctor in charge of his case, Josef Ackerman, offers a choice: he can either undergo the gruelling and fallible radiotherapy currently prescribed for his disease, or he can become a pioneer in a new, radically experimental treatment programme in which patients are “frozen down�, remaining in a state of suspended animation until such time as medical science has advanced sufficiently to offer a cure.

This story of a teenage druid whose body is discovered in a peat bog has memorable moments – but its evocation of time and place is unconvincing

Anna North’s fourth book, Bog Queen, is a stranded or braided novel. First “a colony of moss� speaks – or rather, does not speak, but “if such a colony could tell the story of its life�, here’s some of what it might say. Then we have Agnes in 2018, American, tall, awkward, expert in forensic pathology and uncertain about everything else, including much of life in England. And then, in the first person, there is an iron age teenage girl, the druid of her village, riding towards a Roman town with her brother Aesu and friend Crab: “I had been druid for two seasons at that point and everyone said I was doing very well.�

Agnes has a post-doctoral fellowship in Manchester, from which she is summoned to the discovery of a body in a peat bog in Ludlow. The story shadows that of Lindow Man, found by peat harvesters in a bog near Wilmslow in 1984. In this novel, “Ludlow� is a town in which “the steel mill has closed down� leaving nothing but “[a] few shops, a Tesco, a Pizza Express�. It’s “the Gateway to the north� and a bus ride from Manchester. Novelists may of course invent time and place as they see fit, but it’s an odd choice to borrow the location of a bourgeois satellite town of Manchester and give it the name of a pretty medieval market town in the Welsh Marches, with a history that belongs to neither.

The Indigenous Canadian author brilliantly captures the interdependence of humans and the natural world, in a darkly satirical critique of colonialism

Noopiming, by the Canadian writer-musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, means “in the bush� in the language of the Ojibwe people. The title of this startlingly original fiction is an ironic reference to Roughing It in the Bush; or, Forest Life in Canada, an 1852 memoir about “the civilisation of barbarous countries� by Susanna Moodie – Simpson’s eponymous “white lady� – a Briton who settled in the 1830s on the north shore of Lake Ontario, where Simpson’s ancestors resided and she now lives.

That 19th-century settlers’ guidebook went on to be hailed as the origin of Canadian women’s writing; Margaret Atwood adopted the Suffolk-born frontierswoman’s voice in her 1970 poetry collection, The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Though she mentions Moodie’s book only in an afterword, Simpson’s perspective is different. For Moodie, extolling “our copper, silver and plumbago mines� in the extractivist British colony, the “red-skin� was a noble savage, and the “half-caste� a “lying, vicious rogue�. Yet, rather than a riposte to the toxic original, Noopiming – first published in Canada in 2020 and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary award in 2022 – sets about building a world on its own terms. The “cure�, then – the antidote to Moodie’s blinkered vision – is this book.

The Welsh author vividly captures the solitude, hard labour, dramas and dangers of rural life

In these six stories of human frailty and responsibility, Welsh writer Cynan Jones explores the imperatives of love and the labour of making and sustaining lives. Each is told with a compelling immediacy and intensity, and with the quality of returning to a memory.

In the story Reindeer a man is seeking a bear, which has been woken by hunger from hibernation and is now raiding livestock from the farms of a small isolated community. “There was no true sunshine. There was no gleam in the snow, but the lateness of the left daylight put a cold faint blue through the slopes.� The story’s world is one in which skill, endurance, even stubbornness might be insufficient to succeed, but are just enough to persist.

The return of Charlie and Lola; the second lives of trees; the dangers of time travel; a YA Bluebeard retelling and more

The Street Where Santa Lives by Harriet Howe and Julia Christians, Little Tiger, £12.99
When an old man moves in on a busy street, only his little neighbour notices; with his white beard and round belly, she’s convinced he’s Santa. But when Santa falls ill, other neighbours must rally round to take care of him. Will he be better in time for Christmas? This sweet, funny, acutely observed picture book is a festive, joyous celebration of community.

I Am Wishing Every Minute for Christmas by Lauren Child, S&S, £12.99
Twenty-five years after their first appearance, this delightful, engaging new Charlie and Lola picture book is filled with Lola’s excited impatience as she and her big brother get everything ready for Christmas.

The healing power of gardens; celebrating an abolitionist; hope in the toughest times; a gladiator romantasy and more

The Butterfly House by Harry Woodgate, Andersen, £12.99
Miss Brown’s wild garden scares most people, but when Holly discovers her reclusive neighbour’s sadness, she decides to help turn the wilderness into a butterfly haven. A beautiful, moving picture book about the healing power of gardens and community.

The History of We by Nikkolas Smith, Rock the Boat, £8.99
Via rich, dynamic paintings and thoughtful pared-back text, Smith answers the question “What does the beginning look like?� with this powerful picture book, the shared story of humanity’s first ancestors in “the fertile cradle of Africa�.

A bothered bear; a great guide to drawing; a life of Josephine Baker; a role model daughter; a search for words and more

Bear’s Nap by Emily Gravett, Two Hoots, £12.99
Someone is cheeping and keeping Bear from sleeping in this increasingly uproarious picture book filled with forest-dwelling creatures and their noises. A joy to read aloud.

This Is Who I Am by Rashmi Sirdeshpande, illustrated by Ruchi Mhasane, Andersen, £12.99
A moving celebration of heritage and identity, this softly coloured picture book follows a little girl with “a foot in two worlds�, who is both “the richness of all the worlds she belongs to� and uniquely, proudly herself.

A huge brolly; sibling revelry; poetic Paris; first aid for youngsters; Regency blackmail; blackly comic YA fiction and more

A Totally Big Umbrella by Sarah Crossan, illustrated by Rebecca Cobb, Walker, £12.99
Rain ruins all Tallulah’s favourite things until she finds a really huge umbrella – but it’s so big it holds her back. Could there be worse things than getting wet? Enchanting and imaginative, this gentle, playful picture book addresses an anxious child’s need to find control.

The Elephant and the Piano by Colette Hiller, illustrated by Nabila Adani, Magic Cat, £7.99
Short-tempered and destructive, Bonti the elephant is all alone – until the music of a piano reaches him. A luminous, touching picture book, based on a true story.

As the first part of his acclaimed Blinding trilogy is released in the UK, the novelist talks about communism, Vladimir Nabokov – and those Nobel rumours

In 2014, when he was travelling around the US on a book tour, Mircea Cărtărescu was able to fulfil the dream of a lifetime: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection. Cărtărescu is a great admirer of the Russian-American author, and shares with him a literary career that bridges the western and eastern cultural spheres – as well as a history of being mooted as the next Nobel literature laureate but never having won it.

Above all, the Romanian poet and novelist shares Nabokov’s fascination with butterflies. As a child, he harboured dreams of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, Cărtărescu was allowed access to Nabokov’s former office and marvelled at specimens the St Petersburg-born author had collected. “His most important scientific work was about butterflies’ sexual organs, and I saw these very tiny vials with them in,� he whispers in awe. “It’s like an image from a poem or a story. It was absolutely fantastic.�

Democracy, birds and hangover cures – famous fans put their questions to the visionary author

After the ­phenomenal global success, not to mention timeliness, of the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale in 2017, Margaret Atwood has been regarded as “a combination of figurehead, prophet and saint�, the author writes in her new memoir Book of Lives. Over 600 pages this “memoir of sorts� ranges from her childhood growing up in the Canadian backwoods to her grief at the death of her partner of 48 years, the writer Graeme Gibson, in 2019, with many friendships, the occasional spat and more than 50 books (including Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace and the Booker prizewinning The Blind Assassin and The Testaments) in between.

The author, who turned 86 last week, always likes to take the long view, often from a couple of centuries’ distance. As Rebecca Solnit notes below, she now has a long view of our times. Age and the freedom of being a writer (as she says, she can’t get sacked) make her fearless in speaking out.

The Norwegian author on his autofictional epic, moving to London, and the psychopath at the heart of his new novel

Fifteen years ago, discussing the success of his six-volume autofictional work My Struggle on Norwegian radio, Karl Ove Knausgård said he felt as if he had “actually sold my soul to the devil�. My Struggle had become a runaway success in Norway – a success that would subsequently be repeated across the world – but the project provoked anger in some quarters for its portrayal of friends and family members. This was a work of art that came at a price. Hence, for its creator, its Faustian aspect.

That experience lies at the root of Knausgård’s latest novel, The School of Night, the fourth volume in his Morning Star sequence, in which his typical character studies and fine-grained attention to the minutiae of daily life are married to a compelling supernatural plot involving a mysterious star appearing in the sky and the dead returning to life. Volumes one and three, The Morning Star and The Third Realm, cycled between the same group of interconnected characters, while the second book, The Wolves of Eternity, moved back to the 1980s and told the story of a young Norwegian man and his discovery of a Russian half-sister. Only towards the end of its 800 pages did the novel intersect with the events of The Morning Star. The School of Night, perhaps frustratingly for some, again moves backwards instead of forwards, this time to 1985 London, and follows the art school career of a young Norwegian, Kristian Hadeland, who is pursuing his dream of fame as a photographer. Kristian, events reveal, is someone who will sacrifice anything, and anyone, to succeed. Charting Kristian’s rise and fall is an addictive and eerie reading experience.

The Safekeep author on her secret childhood reading, falling in love with Elizabeth Strout and why she keeps coming back to Zadie Smith

My earliest reading memory
I had a children’s encyclopedia on the shelf above my bed – orange and brown, the cover old flaking plastic – but I retain nothing of what I read. I do remember a book of dirty jokes I was obsessed with at the age of eight. I was convinced it was off limits to me (it wasn’t) and so I waited until my parents were at work to shamefully steal it from the bookshelf. One time, my mother found it under my pillow and I was mortified. I recall her being confused and putting it back with a mumbled “I don’t judge� as she left the room.

My favourite book growing up
That must have been one of Thea Beckman’s novels, most likely Hasse Simonsdochter. Beckman was the author for young adults in 80s and 90s Netherlands.

The no-nonsense comic actor and author further cements her status as a national treasure with her trademark gobby one-liners

A lot of terrible things happen to Kathy Burke in her memoir, though you won’t find her mired in self-pity. Burke was a toddler when her mother died from stomach cancer, meaning she has no memory of her. In the Islington council flat where she grew up, she shared a bedroom with her alcoholic dad who would give up booze only to fall off the wagon and, at his worst, became violent. When a stranger on the estate called her ugly in front of her friends, she cannily deflected the insult with laughter. “I’m the best dancer at the ugly bug ball though,� she hooted, and did a little dance.

Burke would find her tribe on London’s punk scene and, in her teens, got the acting bug and a place at London’s Anna Scher Theatre school. This put her on the path to a brilliant and varied acting and writing career that saw her appearing in comedy sketches with Harry Enfield and French and Saunders, being called a genius by Peter Cook and taken by Luc Besson’s private jet to collect the prize for best actress at Cannes film festival for Gary Oldman’s 1997 film Nil By Mouth. There, much to her chagrin, she found herself “accepting a bellini cocktail from Harvey fuckface Weinstein�.

A journey through a visionary landscape, exceptionally bright in icy weather, conjures a surreal semi-mythical world

Winter Walk

She left the hut and bright log fire at noon
And walked outside on crisp white winter snow
To find the iced slopes shadowed like the moon,
The wild wood desolate and bare below;
The red trees wet, adrift with icy flow,
The evergreens with glassy needled leaves;
A bloodstone veined red and white this view weaves.