Reading for the New Year
To start the new year, New Yorker writers are looking back on the last one, sifting through the vast number of books they encountered in 2025 to identify the experiences that stood out. Here, a handful of writers make recommendations, as part of a series that will continue in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for the next one and, in the meantime, should you wish to grow your to-be-read pile further, you can always consult the magazine’s annual list of the year’s best new titles.
Attention Seeking
by Adam Phillips
Over the holidays, my plan is to read “Attention Seeking,” in which Phillips, a psychoanalyst who is also a brisk and elastic writer, reclaims the titular activity as prosocial, meaningful, and valuable. I’m going to be honest. I don’t think I will like this book very much. I anticipate shaking my fist and shouting, “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” But maybe I will instead discover the ways in which I am wrong, wrong, wrong about attention-seeking. Over more than twenty spry, charisma-soaked works, Phillips has riffed and reflected on seemingly under-explored aspects of everyday life: “giving up,” “missing out,” “kissing, tickling, and being bored.” He’s got a new book out in January about the gap between desire and reality. When Phillips requests my attention, he gets it.—Katy Waldman
The Stranger’s Child
by Alan Hollinghurst
I acquired a copy of this around the time it came out, in 2011, and let it sit unread on my shelf for fifteen years. Searching for something to take on a trip this past spring, I grabbed it on an impulse. The book impressed me. Hollinghurst’s novel begins in 1913, when a Cambridge student named George brings his friend Cecil home for a school break. Cecil is a swaggering aristocrat with ambitions to be a poet; when he departs, he leaves behind an arch ode as a flirtatious gift to his friend’s teen-age sister, Daphne—though it seems also to allude to a trysting relationship with George. Then the narrative jumps. We learn that Cecil died young, in the First World War, and has been lionized; that his poems, beginning with that ode, are the sorts of things that children memorize at school; and that Daphne is married, restlessly, to his brother. The novel continues across three more time leaps, to the near-present. Some characters remain in view, while others die or drift away. New people appear. Nothing enormous happens, and yet everything happens; each era becomes its own world, caught in its concerns, standing on what came before. I found the novel not just engrossing page to page—Hollinghurst at his best is a writer of human sensitivity and exquisite precision—but astonishingly true to the experience of life across time. For a narrative in the tradition of British realism, the question is how to be an interesting twenty-first-century novel rather than a costume drama. By the late chapters, Daphne and her contemporaries, now old, seem to remember less about those days with Cecil than does the reader, who came through them recently—an inspired way of calling forth the novel-ness of the novel without breaking the realist’s line. Despite leaving many questions hauntingly unanswered, or because of it, Hollinghurst’s book succeeds in catching not only the long view but the night winds of an entire world.—Nathan Heller
Friday
by Michel Tournier
In “Friday,” the French writer Michel Tournier re-dreams the island life of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Until recently, I had never heard of “Friday,” originally published (to great acclaim) in 1967. I expected the simple pleasures of a perspectival shift. But the book proved to be far more unpredictable and captivating than that, and also so funny, so full of pathos. Crusoe develops a legal system, builds a Conservatory of Weights and Measures, and falls in love with a cave. Friday’s arrival, relatively late in the book, unsettles unexpected elements of Crusoe’s order, while altering and rebuilding others. The book’s tone shifts from philosophical to playful to despairing to sensual, and on around again. Tournier doesn’t stick to the individual plot details of the original, especially in the ending. Almost magically, this makes the mirror considerations of isolation, society, and nature all the more faithful and true.—Rivka Galchen
Falling Upward
by Richard Rohr
A very dear friend of mine, who worked in construction for decades before becoming a deacon in the Lutheran Church, died, of complications from cancer, last fall. He and I had been praying and reading poetry together in his final months, and he had hoped we would be able to do a book study together as well. Life, and then death, got in the way of that plan, but the week before he passed he gave me a copy of the book he’d planned for us to read together: the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr’s “Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life.” I started the book that very night, making it through Brené Brown’s foreword and then stopping in my tracks when I got to one of my favorite poems, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. There was a huge harvest moon that night and, as I texted my friend about the poem, I wondered if it was the last one that he would ever see. It was. But as the shadows lengthened and winter deepened, I finally turned back to the book. One of my resolutions for the new year is to honor Deacon Mike’s memory by having the conversation that he hoped we’d have about spiritual transitions with as many others as I can.—Casey Cep
Brief Lives
by Anita Brookner
One great pleasure in life is coming across a book by a writer you’ve never read before, really loving it, and then knowing that you now have that writer’s full corpus ahead of you to enjoy. This year, this happened to me with the novelist Anita Brookner, who died in 2016, and whose work I’d somehow never gotten into before, even though I must have spotted her Vintage Contemporaries spines at about a million used bookstores over the years. The novel that I started with, after finally pulling it out of the shelf at one of those stores some months ago, is “Brief Lives” (1990), which centers on the difficult relationship between a pair of what we might nowadays call frenemies—the domineering Julia and the unassuming Fay. The story is told in the first person, from Fay’s point of view. She is married, unsatisfyingly, to Owen, a solicitor in London, whose legal partner, the attentive Charlie, is married to Julia; the situation throws the women into a forced, long-standing acquaintanceship. (“Basically, I found her alarming, and she found me boring,” Fay says.) Nothing especially extreme happens in the novel, but what Brookner does beautifully is lay bare the emotional storms simmering underneath the humdrum rhythms of what might appear, at first glance, to be largely uneventful middle-class, middle-aged realities—the seemingly decorous lives of inward-turning women. In this, she reminded me of her fellow-Briton Barbara Pym, whose novels I similarly came to relatively late, and whose body of work I ended up reading to completion nearly as soon as I began it. I can’t wait to do the same with Brookner.—Naomi Fry
