Published on - Astrid Jansen

5 books to read in 2025

Leïla Slimani, for whom writing is an eternal restart, likes to emphasise the paradox of the artist who "photographs change, captures transformation". This idea inspires us: literature as a moving mirror of an era. In 2025, we are celebrating the imagination of established authors, such as Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. Here are five books to plunge into new imaginations, open up new perspectives, and explore other worlds.

The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story by Olga Tokarczuk   

The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, Olga Tokarczuk's first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 2019, is set in 1913 in a sanatorium in Prussian Silesia. In this closed universe, where men philosophise between two treatment sessions, the arrival of a young student upsets the fragile balance of the place. Exchanges are tinged with strangeness. Tokarczuk weaves a spellbinding text, combining the narrative elegance of a Thomas Mann with radical feminist audacity, offering an acerbic - yet profoundly human - portrait of our condition.   

Meet Olga Tokarczuk on 5 February at Bozar  

 

How to Lose a Country by Ece Temelkuran  

It's a political 'anti-manual' and, above all, a hard-hitting, essential book. In How to Lose a Country Turkish journalist and author Ece Temelkuran outlines the seven steps that a populist leader can take to tip a democracy towards dictatorship. Drawing on her own experience and observations in many countries, she talks about the term "real people", conspiracy theory, and the trivialisation of ignorance, and invites us to reflect on the threats to our institutions and the need to remain vigilant. An illuminating text for understanding current political excesses.   

Meet Ece Temelkuran on 11 Februrary at Bozar  

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann  

In The Director Daniel Kehlmann returns to the dark days of Nazism and, with a sharp sense of humour, illuminates serious subjects. Focusing on the complex figure of film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, torn between his artistic aspirations and the compromises imposed by the regime, the author examines the relationship between art and totalitarian power. Already a bestseller in Germany, this novel invites us to reflect on contemporary authoritarian excesses, but above all it's a really good story! Between satire and drama, the successful German-Austrian author delivers a work that, like Lubitsch or Chaplin, depicts history through its cracks and absurdities.  

Meet Daniel Kehlmann on 13 March at Bozar  

 

My Friends by Hisham Matar  

Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land, Hisham Matar has written a novel of rare intensity, in which the intimate and the political intertwine with deeply moving poetry. Through the destinies of three Libyan students who left to study in England in the 1980s, as Gaddafi's dictatorship took hold in Libya, My Friends explores themes linked to exile. The story resonates as a meditation on the loss of a country and a mother tongue, but also on the hope and consolation that come from writing.   

Meet Hisham Matar on 21 May at Bozar  

J'emporterai le feu by Leïla Slimani   

With J'emporterai le feu, Leïla Slimani completes a literary trilogy that began in 2020, tracing the story of a Franco-Moroccan family between Rabat and Paris, tradition and modernity, attachment and emancipation. This final instalment, set in the 1980s and 1990s, focuses on Mia and Inès, the granddaughters of Mathilde and Amine, the characters of the first volume. Inspired by her own family, but not constrained by autobiography, Slimani paints subtle portraits of women that question social codes. Winner of the Prix Goncourt in 2016, her work is once again imbued with a disarming humanity, supported by nuanced, precise writing and meticulous attention to each of her characters.   

Leïla Slimani was at Bozar on 28 January