Alistair Owen's 3 favorite reads in 2025

• 2023
• 2024
• 2025

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1984 production of Richard III was so iconic that I was aware of the late Antony Sher’s star turn without ever having seen it – his use of crutches to augment and elongate his limbs creating the indelible image of a giant, malevolent spider.

Sher’s contemporaneous acting journal and sketchbook, republished on the 20th anniversary of the play’s premiere, is similarly extraordinary, charting his journey through rehearsals and into performance and revealing him to be as talented a writer as he was an actor – and a skilful artist and caricaturist to boot. Sher’s later diaries of playing Falstaff and Lear contain the same mix of confidence, insecurity and self-deprecating humour, and, taken together, represent a fitting memorial to an actor some will know best, not entirely inappropriately, from his playful cameo as Will Shakespeare’s quack Bankside shrink in Shakespeare in Love.

Writing in the style of a beloved author is always risky – infinitely more so when that author was your father. Nick Cornwell’s seamless editing of John le Carré’s posthumously published final novel, Silverview, boded well for his full-length foray (under his own pen-name, Nick Harkaway) into the morally murky world of George Smiley. The result, however, goes far beyond literary mimicry.

Taking place between the events of 1963’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and 1974’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, this book reads like nothing less than a lost le Carré. The ironic tone, the intricate texture, the distinctive turn of phrase, are all present and correct, but so are the themes of idealism, loyalty and betrayal that le Carré combined and recombined throughout his remarkable career. So accomplished, in fact, is his youngest son’s story of the “Circus”, that news of Harkaway writing a follow-up, The Taper Man, scheduled for publication in 2026, felt both inevitable and essential.

You don’t expect a novel’s contents page to make you laugh out loud, but then you don’t expect a novel to be structured around British Transport Police’s public safety slogan “See it. Say it. Sorted”. After 30 years of reading his fiction, though, I never know what to expect next from Jonathan Coe.

The wit and warmth of Coe’s writing, coupled with his acute but affectionate eye for the quiet absurdities of British life, has long camouflaged a formal daring and subtle anger – both of which are very much in evidence here. Telling one story using three genres – cosy crime, dark academia and autofiction – Coe produces not just an intriguing murder mystery and an incisive comedy of manners but an unnerving state of the nation satire: consciously harking back to his scabrous breakthrough bestseller, What a Carve Up!, to show how the individualistic Thatcherite past has led inexorably to the post-truth populist present. He’s seen it. He’s said it. If only a novel this good could sort it…