Our Favorite Books of 2025 by The Paris Review

This year, we asked our contributors, our readers, our current and former interns, and other friends of the Review for their favorite books of the past year. Here’s what they said. Service by John Tottenham is a novel about a disgruntled, begrudging, malcontent man who works in a bookstore and is also a writer. So immediately you understand why he is disgruntled, begrudging, and malcontent. He is robustly rude to everyone, delivering diatribes on the customers’ vapidity and eviscerating his own brooding arena of envy and failure as well. At first this is entrancing. Soon it becomes too one-note; we seek even the slimmest hint of redemption. But you must persevere—maybe skim the complaining a bit—as the novel eventually becomes a discourse on the vagaries of writing: obstacles, setbacks, successes, tricks of the trade. Pills are involved. —Nancy Lemann, author of “A Person and a Robot” Rie Qudan’s Sympathy Tower Tokyo (translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood) follows Sara Machina

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