After a long hiatus, I restarted blogging about my favourite short stories half-way through 2025. Here are some of my favourite novels from my 2025 reading, to join those short stories:
On the Calculation of Volume I, by Solvej Balle (trans. Barbara J. Haveland)
This novel is the first of a series, which will eventually total 7 novels. Tara, the protagonist, relives the same day over and over. She keeps a diary (the novel takes the form of this diary), to catalogue her days, believing that if she can find things that don’t fit, things that break the pattern, she can escape.
I enjoyed the repetitiveness. There’s some beautiful language. The descriptions evoke a place I’ve never been to. I simultaneously believed Tara was stuck forever, and wanted her to find a way out. It’s hard to read a novel about this type of situation, and not wonder what you’d do yourself, in the same position. I loved the spiral structure; throughout the story, Tara moves further and further away from her husband, her life, her reality, while the same day still repeats.
Read an extract here, from the very opening.
A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh
I taught this novel to an A-level class, and really enjoyed it. It’s a satire of a particular social class type, at a particular moment in time, but 90 years later readers can still enjoy the humour of the characters and situation, even if we don’t have first-hand experience of these people. I particularly loved the strange tangent the novel took into surrealism – totally unexpected, if you haven’t read the short story that Waugh wrote first (he wrote the novel, later, as the backstory to the short story).
Read an extract here, from the middle-ish of the novel.
I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman (trans. Ros Schwartz)
I’d had this novel on my ‘to read’ list for ages, and finally got around to it earlier this year. It’s a bleak tale of survival in a dystopian world, where the female protagonist exists with questions that have no answers (who am I, where am I from, where am I now, what was life like before, what happened, what is love, what is memory…?). There is no happy ending, but I found it compelling.
Read an extract here, from near the beginning of the novel.
Mina Ma 