This time last year, I was experimenting with a career in teaching. I’d spent more than a decade in journalism, reviewing, judging and editing books. I thought teaching would be a logical extension of the bookish life. Should I put away the quill, I asked myself, and exchange it for a piece of chalk? I opted for a kind of exploratory sabbatical, covering English lessons at a local school. The job didn’t require any qualifications, or relevant experience. I walked in to it with an ease I should have suspected. The man I was replacing had left after a few weeks; I would last no more than a few months.
I was meant to teach kids about books and reading and writing, but I ended up doing all the learning myself. Schools offer an amazing insight into the future of the written word. When I was at school, education was as it had been for the previous thousand years or so. We went to school with rucksacks full of books. In lessons we read books, or pretended to. For homework, we also read books, or claimed to. Classrooms were full of books; so were our lockers; so was the library. Books were the most natural, most common and most important objects in a school.
Today they have receded from school life. Schooling is now mediated not by the page but by the screen. Interactive whiteboards are there to zonk kids out on videos. With laptops always close to hand, books are uncalled for. Homework is done on various e-learning platforms. There are no textbooks: only “resources”. The library is called a learning resource centre (“LRC”), with few books inside. Schoolchildren spend more time on PowerPoint than with a book.
Yet, I would discover, so many genuinely wanted to read. They craved recommendations for books and were disappointed there was virtually nothing to choose from in the “LRC”, or in public libraries; in an ongoing scandal, good books have been recklessly discarded en masse. Of the dizzying number of wonderful books published each year few will likely reach the eyes of young people. I had to lend a boy a copy of Macbeth; the next time I saw him, he knew by heart the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech, about life being a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury”. OK, I’d asked him to learn it. But he did. Instead of giving kids like him books, we bombard them with screen time, and so rob generations of any intimacy with the written word, its stories and fancies, its reason and rhetoric.
This was the year people started fretting about the consequences of this for what has historically been our book-oriented culture (others will say it’s when the “moral panic” began). A year ago, in the OECD’s once-in-a-decade skills survey, we learned that adults across the developed world are becoming less literate. A paper showed that even literature students could not comprehend Dickens (thrown by the description of a man’s moustache as “whiskers”, one student thought the passage referred to a cat.) According to the National Literacy Trust, enjoyment of reading among young people fell this year to its lowest ever recorded level (surveys began in 2005). Amid all this, the one book that seemed to find itself more, not less, read was Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which had argued in 1985 that declining literacy posed a threat to democracy.
What this year’s gloomy discourse has, paradoxically, proved is how much readers care about books. These arguments are life-giving. Postman’s mantle was recently picked up in our pages by James Marriott, in a salvo that spawned such controversy that many defences of contemporary reading sallied forth. Whatever side you might think you’re on, you’re actually on the same side: the one that says, “We are passionate about the reading life!” That’s why, at the New Statesman, we haven’t just reviewed books in 2025; we’ve reflected on why they matter – “Why the novel matters” was the subject of our annual lecture, this year delivered by Geoff Dyer. What will kill the book is indifference, but this passion around it suggests there’s still so much life left in literature. Our list of the year’s best books, selected by luminaries from Julian Barnes to Slavoj Žižek, also speaks to that vitality, and for the first time this year we have inaugurated a New Statesman fiction book of the year and non-fiction book of the year, arising from the favourite reading of our distinguished jurors.
From this renewed buzz about reading as a Big Issue emanated my personal favourites among the year’s books. In Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today (Fig Tree), the novelist Naomi Alderman explored the revolution instigated by mass literacy – and hinted at how the world might change with its decline. Literary criticism from Anne Enright, collected in Attention (Jonathan Cape), and from Zadie Smith, in Dead and Alive (Hamish Hamilton), showed me how arguing about books breathes new life into even the oldest and deadest of texts. And academic Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Look Closer (Fern Press) and novelist Ann Morgan’s Relearning to Read (Renard Press) offered masterclasses in close reading. Because here’s the thing about books: this year I left the classroom – but miraculously, I can carry one around with me whenever I like.
The New Statesman fiction book of the year
Daniel Kehlmann is arguably Germany’s most popular contemporary novelist, as well as being one of the country’s most intellectually serious writers. Measuring the World was the second-bestselling novel globally in 2006 and charted the relationship between a mathematician and a natural scientist in the 18th century. In his 2025 book The Director, Kehlmann reprises his fascination with the lives of writers and intellectuals, by looking at the relationship between Austrian filmmaker GW Pabst (1885-1967) and Nazi Germany. Pabst, a pioneer of German expressionist cinema, was staunchly opposed to fascism. But after returning from political exile – in Kehlmann’s imagined account – he found himself compromising with the authorities in order to be able to create art. We think of artists as uncompromising souls, but in film especially, compromise is at the heart of the business. While not as well known as Leni Riefenstahl, Pabst’s situation was more morally fraught, because he was genuinely opposed to Hitler. From our jury, Ian Buruma, Erica Wagner and Anne Applebaum all champion this novel for its exploration of questions of enduring relevance, about how art is made and unmade by politics.
The Director
Daniel Kehlmann, trs Ross Benjamin
riverrun, 352pp, £22
The New Statesman non-fiction book of the year
Frances Wilson will be no stranger to readers of these pages; a brilliant literary critic and biographer, she has authored studies of the lives of Thomas De Quincey and DH Lawrence. These have now been followed up by a book-length engagement with another morally complex writer: Muriel Spark. Electric Spark seeks to unravel the enigma of a writer we think we know so well from her widely read novels, from the phenomenally popular, made-into-a-movie The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) to her witty, ethically questioning masterpiece The Girls of Slender Means (1963). In fact, away from her much-loved pages, Spark was leading a scandalous and unfathomable life, full of baffling decisions, heart-rending love and cruelty, and unresolvable crises. She was acclaimed as a great novelist, but disreputable as a mother, wife, lover and Catholic. All of this is captured with unfailing sympathy and insight. Wilson’s admirers among our jury include venerable literary biographers Richard Holmes and Lyndall Gordon. On the strength of Electric Spark, we are pleased to confirm Frances Wilson among their ranks.
Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark
Frances Wilson
Bloomsbury, 432pp, £25
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[Further reading: The many Tom Stoppards I knew]
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This article appears in the 04 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Books of the Year