Books
2025 in review: Books
Our critics’ stand-out Jewish books of the year include eviscerating fiction, assiduously researched history, memoirs and reflections on the lives of poets
December 24, 2025 12:47
Our critics’ stand-out Jewish books of the year include eviscerating fiction, assiduously researched history, memoirs and reflections on the lives of poets
December 24, 2025 12:47The Traitors Circle
by Jonathan Freedland
John Murray
[Missing Credit]
Jonathan Freedland’s latest book is my Jewish book of the year, although many of its leading characters weren’t Jewish. They were a loose-knit collection of high-minded and courageous Germans who actively opposed Hitler during the Second World War, some of them protecting and hiding Jews, and some paying for it with their lives. Freedland tells their story with a novelist’s eye for narrative and suspense, and a post-war twist that will keep you riveted to the end. Robert Low
Norway’s War: A People’s Struggle Against Nazi Tyranny, 1940-45
by Robert Ferguson
Head of Zeus
[Missing Credit]
For Hitler’s Germany, read Quisling’s Norway. Pursuing a theme not dissimilar to Jonathan Freedland, Robert Ferguson, a British writer long resident in Norway, chronicles the internal opposition to the Nazi occupation, including the extraordinarily daring actions of many brave Norwegians to enable the escape of some of the country’s tiny Jewish population to neutral Sweden and thence to the UK and other safer havens. Well researched and immaculately written. RL
The Land in Winter
by Andrew Miller
Sceptre
[Missing Credit]
Shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, Andrew Miller’s novel is set in the Big Freeze of 1962-3, one of the coldest winters for 300 years which older JC readers like me will still remember with a shiver. The story of two young married couples living near Bristol, the Arctic conditions mirror their own relationships and, the author hints, the state of post-war Britain. Slowly and subtly, several Jewish themes emerge, with no thaw in sight. RL
Island Calling
by Francesca Segal
Vintage
[Missing Credit]
A novel set on a tropical island is generally a summer read, but Island Calling – part two of a trilogy – is the perfect antidote to dreary British weather all year round. Sensible British vet Charlotte is our guide to the world’s most remote island, settled centuries back by Brazilian Jews seeking a safe haven. Love triangles, interfering mothers and a fabulous cast of eccentrics: this light but well-crafted saga will make you wish you too could take the first boat out to Tuga. Jennifer Lipman
Chutzpah
by Yehudis Fletcher
Doubleday
[Missing Credit]
Tell-all memoirs about taking flight from the Charedi community aren’t all that rare, but Fletcher’s story is unique. A rabbi’s daughter with little education who endured parental neglect, sexual abuse and domestic violence before she hit her 20s, she not only survived but thrived. The twist? She has stayed in her community despite marrying a Jewish woman, campaigning for the rights of strictly Orthodox women and children and generally refusing to conform. Her story is astonishing; she is an inspiration. JL
Help! My Child’s Anxiety is Giving Me Anxiety
by Saskia Joss
Headline
[Missing Credit]
Who’d be a parent today? Our kids are more anxious than ever; teens are still recovering from the pandemic disruption, and all of us are trying to figure out why we ever thought smartphones for under 18s made sense. Enter Joss, daughter of Vanessa Feltz and a therapist and teacher, providing guidance without judgement. I’ve already deployed some of her tactics; the book is brimming with advice on everything from talking about divorce to eating disorders and school refusal. A genuine helping hand for parents in need. JL
The Einstein Vendetta
by Thomas Harding
Michael Joseph
[Missing Credit]
The name Einstein has a justifiable resonance — not least this year, just 70 years after the death of the world-famous scientist. But as Thomas Harding shows in this densely researched book, just being related to Albert Einstein could have fatal consequences for Albert’s less famous cousins, murdered by the Nazis in Italy. It’s a haunting tale, written like a thriller and deserving of many plaudits. Jenni Frazer
38 Londres Street
by Philippe Sands
Weidenfeld and Nicolson
[Missing Credit]
This is the story of two monstrous men, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, responsible for thousands of deaths in south America, and the former Nazi official, Walter Rauff. Sands, a well-known human rights lawyer, meticulously traces the fight to deport Pinochet from the UK, where he had landed for a “shopping visit” in 1998; and at the same time tells us of Rauff’s role in developing the gas vans used to murder Jews during the Holocaust. Sands almost, but not quite, shows a direct tie between Pinochet and Rauff. An extraordinary unravelling. JF
The Prosecutor
by Jack Fairweather
W H Allen
[Missing Credit]
Fritz Bauer was a righteous Jewish lawyer who was determined to secure justice for the victims of the Nazis in the years following the end of the Second World War. Bauer took part, with varying degrees of success, in three great set-piece court cases: the Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, and the prosecution of 24 defendants for their part in developing Auschwitz. Fairweather’s meticulous research underpins some devastating stories. JF
My Name is Stramer
By Mikołaj Łoziński
Pushkin Press
[Missing Credit]
This has been an extraordinary time for central and east European writers, especially on Jewish subjects. My Name is Stramer is the story of a large Jewish family, Nathan Stramer, his wife Rywka and their six children. They live in a two-room apartment in south-east Poland, near Kraków. The mood of the novel darkens. Antisemitism grows in Poland and then Poland is invaded from west and east. The noose tightens around them all. Who will survive and how? David Herman
Love’s Labour
By Stephen Grosz
Chatto & Windus
[Missing Credit]
This book of case histories by the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz is clearly written and deeply moving. Above all, it brings the experience of psychoanalysis to life. What seem to be stories about love turn out to be about something else. Grosz is a fine storyteller. Here, as in his acclaimed bestseller, The Examined Life, he has written a humane and compelling book. Better still, his book is full of astonishing insights into his patients’ lives – and the lives they cannot live. DH
Magnates & Masterpieces: The German-Jewish Collectors of Edwardian Britain
by John Hilary
Yale University Press
[Missing Credit]
This beautifully illustrated and superbly researched book tells the story of a group of extremely rich German Jews who arrived in Britain during the mid and late nineteenth century, established themselves in high society because of their wealth and made an extraordinary contribution to cultural life in the Edwardian era, building up some of the most famous art collections in Europe. Through their story Magnates & Masterpieces brings a whole era of Jewish culture to life. DH
Paul Celan: Letters to Gisèle
New York Review of Books
[Missing Credit]
This reduced version of the original French edition, ably translated by Jason Kavett and with insightful commentary by Bertrand Badiou, charts the life and art of one of the greatest poetic geniuses of the twentieth century. Celan claimed that his frequently hermeneutic work was anti-biographical. This volume shows how much the poetry is illuminated by setting it in the context of his life. Mark Glanville
Occupied Words: What the Holocaust did to Yiddish
by Hannah Pollin-Galay
University of Pennsylvania Press
[Missing Credit]
This is a brilliant exploration of the effects of deep physical trauma on language by an outstanding scholar in the field of Yiddish literature. Pollin-Galay shows how much the body is involved in the evolution and transformation of language, en route shedding light on some of the darker aspects of Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Prize-winning Night. MG
Yiddish: A Global Culture
by David Mazower
White Goat Press
[Missing Credit]
This is the catalogue accompanying the masterful exhibition of the same name at the Massachusetts-based Yiddish Book Center. In common with other catalogues of scrupulously-researched, magnificently-mounted exhibitions, combining beautifully-produced, visually-striking content with scholarly notes and essays, it illuminates its subject more successfully than much conventional literature. Mazower’s great-grandfather was the major Yiddish writer Sholem Asch. It is heartening to see his important, often underrated culture so lovingly cherished. MG
Tangled Up: The History and Science of Alzheimer’s Disease’
by Prof Michael Hornberger
Canbury
[Missing Credit]
Dementia has become the most common cause of death in the UK but the majority of us are probably unaware of the history of the disease and the German psychiatrist whose name identifies it. Professor Hornberger explores Alois Alzeimer’s achievement, in tandem with the otherwise largely overlooked Czech academic neuropathologist Oskar Fischer, in establishing the history and science of this most pernicious killer. Alzheimer died in 1915 of a cardiac infection; Oskar Fischer was beaten to death by Nazi guards at Terezin Camp in 1942. Recommended reading, not only to those living with the disease but to all of us, who cannot avoid contact with it. Amanda Hopkinson
The Poems of Seamus Heaney
edited by Bernard O’Donoghue and Rosie Lavan, with Matthew Hollis
Faber
[Missing Credit]
What a gift he has left us. A lifetime’s dazzling reflections on what it is to be human, how memory, love and loss intertwine, how the personal is imbricated with the political, how “once in a lifetime…hope and history rhyme”. Evoking “the music of what happens”, Heaney infused the secular with the spiritual in language offering glimpses into the sacred nature of life as revealed in the everyday. What a gift he had. Howard Cooper
The Last Days of Budapest
by Adam LeBor
Head of Zeus
[Missing Credit]
This thoroughly documented chronicle of the 1944-45 Nazi occupation of Budapest depicts the city as a hotbed of spies and collaborators. But there were also many rescuers of Jews, and LeBor uses newly unearthed diaries and letters to tell their stories. Besides the bold rescue missions of foreign diplomats Raoul Wallenberg, Carl Lutz and Giorgio Perlasca, he relates the astonishing acts of private Hungarians such as glamorous actress Katalin Karády, who bought the lives of Jewish children about to be murdered with her precious jewellery, then cared for them until liberation. Monica Porter
Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
by Francesca Wade
Faber & Faber
[Missing Credit]
Regarded by some as a towering revolutionary of modernist literature, whilst others dismiss her writings as incomprehensible gibberish, this study of Gertrude Stein paints a more nuanced picture of both her personal relationships and her attitude towards her work. Stein left her vast archive to Yale University and this, plus interviews the academic Leon Katz carried out after Stein’s death with her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas, provided Francesca Wade with new insights, including that Toklas was more actively involved in Stein’s creative process than previously acknowledged. MP
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