Best of Books 2025: Editor’S Choice

 Two Italians and one German hover over my year of reading, and, as novelists, they belong to two different planets in the stories they choose to tell. Giaime Alonge shuttles between a cruel history and its relics in a recognisable present in a novel that employs the tested conceits of genre fiction to make a literary original. Vincenzo Latronico zooms in on the static anxieties of a generation trapped in the bubble of digital ephemera and intertwined identities, and it is his way of updating the work of the modern novel’s master of ennui and a structural adventurist. Daniel Kehlmann, the German novelist, returns to the life and times of the Austrian filmmaker GW Pabst to highlight the moral cost of creative freedom in the time of Nazism, and he does so with sparkling virtuosity that captures the tragic with a comic flair.

Alonge’s The Feeling of Iron (translated by Clarissa Botsford; Europa Editions) visits the same territory immortalised in the art of memory by Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, but with the narrative expansiveness only a novelist indebted to the rewards of remem­bering alone can achieve. Stretching from the secrets of Nazism to Latin America’s drug-fuelled freedom struggles, Alonge’s parallel chronicles, set in the Forties and in the early Eighties, in the end, become one searing closure of a lethal fantasy once played out in Hitler’s laboratories. At the centre of the action are three men who defy the stereotypes of the executioner and survivors; the roles get reversed as the terms of justice and freedom themselves evolve over time. Hans Lichtblau was the supervisor of a chemical secret the Nazis thought would win them the war, working directly under Himmler. He is still out there, thriving in the sheltering shadow of the CIA, under a different name. Anton Epstein and Shlomo Libowitz are both witnesses and survivors, today leading the hunt for Lichtblau. Alonge brings a here-and-now clarity to the dehumanising project of the Final Solution, and we even get finely sketched glimpses of Heydrich and Himmler along the way. The Feeling of Iron is not historical fiction as such. Alonge mines the history of evil to construct a propulsive thriller of lives lost and found —but unredeemed.

›› FIRST LINES Faraway on the horizon, Leningrad was burning. The German air force had dropped more than six thousand incendiary bombs over the old center the night before.

In Latronico’s slim novel—I read its 115 pages in one-go—Anna and Tom, aged between twenty-one and thirty, are an expat couple living in Berlin, in a plants-filled flat, eating kale salad and reading Monocle and The New Yorker, moving with the same set of millennials and visiting the same clubs and restaurants and mostly having good sex—and throughout the novel, you have been denied any dialogue between them. Perfection (translated by Sophie Hughes; Fitzcarraldo Editions) carries an entire world of lives stranded in metropolitan ennui in a sculpted canvas of ideas. The novel is Latronico’s homage to George Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties, a passage from which forms the epigraph: “That was where real life was, the life they wanted to know, that they wanted to lead.” Anna and Tom, two “digital creatives” currently having their past passion as present job, are living a life that strikes a fine balance between placid predictability and the yearning for breaking the idyll. The motifs of their times, including the image of the dead refugee boy on the beach, touch their life, but the contentment and cosiness of their impermanence make Anna and Tom, and we don’t know the name of the European country they come from, talismanic travel­lers in a world whose marvels and melancholies could be passing sensations on a computer screen. In Perfection, the novelist alone has a voice, precise and savagely satirical, and too authentic to be missed.

›› FIRST LINES Sunlight floods the room from the bay windows, reflects off the wide, honey-coloured floorboards and casts an emerald glow over the perforate leaves of a monstera shaped like a cloud.

Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director (translated by Ross Benjamin; riverrun) “fictionalises” GW Pabst without excluding the truths about the filmmaker’s struggle with his conscience at a time when pragmatism alone could retain a semblance of existential clarity. Pabst, the great talent spotter whose finds include Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, flees Nazi Germany and suffers humiliating mediocrity in Hollywood. He returns home and becomes part of the system: a state director, and his encounter with Goebbels is as comic a setpiece as his directing Leni Riefenstahl. Being Pabst in the Nazis’ cultural world is, to a certain extent, like being Dmitri Shostakovich in Stalin’s Russia, brilliantly portrayed by Julian Barnes in The Noise of Time: a Faustian bargain in which each frame extends the inevitable disin­tegration of the self. In The Director, Kehlmann, from multiple perspectives, lets imagination redeem the biography of Pabst from the hidden hurts and horrors of history, every scar on his conscience magnified by one of fiction’s finest practitioners.

›› FIRST LINESWhy am I in this car?

I’ll sit still. Sometimes, if you don’t move, your memory comes back.