Maya Slater's 3 favorite reads in 2025

• 2023
• 2024
• 2025

My choices this year are all connected with war. Susan Hill is also the author of The Woman in Black, a scary ghost story which I couldn’t put down, and which was – perhaps still is – a terrifying theatrical experience (apparently – I haven’t dared see it).

She wrote Strange Meeting as a very young woman. It is a graphic account of being a young English officer on the front line during the First World War. No detail is spared. We are down the trenches, then, after an anguished wait, "over the top," to where the enemy waits to mow the soldiers down…

You can feel the agony, sometimes physical, always mental, that stays with them day and night. The horrors are almost worse in that the characters have strong feelings for each other. The heroes, two young officers, love each other deeply and tenderly (though completely platonically), clinging to their feelings for each other in the face of systematic, pointless destruction. Will they survive or not?

It’s a powerful book to read, a painfully vivid recreation of what World War I meant to a whole generation of young men, so many of whom did not survive.

Published in 1926, this book allows us to glimpse what it was really like being a woman in Britain in the years after the Great War.

Lolly, a meek spinster, is a subordinate member of a stiflingly conventional, well-bred family. But deep inside, she is wild and rebellious. She finally escapes to the country and becomes a witch, a follower of Satan, and this, paradoxically, is her salvation.

The earlier pages, depicting her daily life, are especially riveting – every detail has a precious period feel. The outstanding quality of this book is the limpid, seemingly simple accuracy of every sentence, often needle-sharp, often paradoxical: the women "find consolation in consoling each other"; Lolly reads in secret, "undisturbed, and without disturbing anybody." Or, talking of the daily functioning of the household, "unseen and underground, the preparation and demolition of everyday went on…" Every sentence needs to be savoured.

A small masterpiece.

My third choice is again a war book. This time it confronts us, from a woman’s side, with the horrors of the German occupation of France in 1940, the sadistic torture of French Resistance fighters, the misery of a woman’s life in a concentration camp, and the problems awaiting those war women who finally make it back to France.

The heroine of this true story is the sister of Christian Dior, Catherine, whose incredible courage takes her through being deliberately half-drowned by the Nazis, half-starved when deported, and finally returned to France, where she slowly recovers, lives quietly in the country, grows wonderful roses, and becomes the inspiration for the famous Dior scent, "Miss Dior."

Difficult and rewarding to read, and the result of years of research by the author.