The collapse of a tenement building sparks this panoramic view of life in a New York neighbourhood, from a writer on The Wire

When the explosion shakes New York’s East Harlem one morning in 2008, Royal Davis is dozing in a coffin, his face itching behind a prosthetic as students film a zombie movie in his funeral parlour. Veteran detective Mary Roe is arresting a homeless man who has just presented a bank with a ransom note. And would-be film-maker Felix Pearl is struggling to sleep in the multi-tenanted brownstone he calls home before his room starts to “flutter” and he is flung into the wall, his nose popping with blood.

The blast comes from a five-storey tenement that has collapsed nearby, cloaking everything in acrid dust. As sirens wail and helicopters hover “like small black spiders beneath the roiling sky”, Price’s ensemble mobilises. Royal, spotting that death may be on onlookers’ minds, enlists his young son to pass out business cards. Mary begins to search for the missing. Felix grabs his camera to shoot: a man yelling at oncoming traffic, another praying by an ambulance, a mute, ash-caked woman standing with her howling dog.

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Retellings of novels like Huckleberry Finn and David Copperfield help to keep the canon alive

It might have lost out at the Booker , but James , a reworking of Huckleberry Finn by Percival Everett , was the unofficial book of 2024, topping best-of-the-year lists and winning the prestigious US Book Award for fiction . Everett retells Mark Twain’s 1884 picaresque novel about a 13-year-old boy’s escapades on the Mississippi from the perspective of runaway slave Jim. Shocking, gripping and surprisingly comic, it’s a bravura performance that celebrates and subverts the original.

Its success follows that of last year’s Women’s prize-winning Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver , a dazzling 550-page updating of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield transported to the author’s home region of Appalachia during the 1990s opioid epidemic. As the supreme chronicler of social injustice, Dickens provided Kingsolver with “a masterclass” in how to use narrative to make readers care about a latter-day underclass.

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An epic family saga, new novels from Natasha Brown and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, plus a David Szalay masterpiece … the coming year looks good

• Nonfiction to look out for in 2025

Next year may, at first glance, lack the dazzle of literary celebrity. That said, there are new books from two Nobel winners. First, in February, We Do Not Part (Hamish Hamilton) by Han Kang – a complex and unsettling novel about two white women in Korea wrestling with the weight of history. Then there’s Abdulrazak Gurnah in March with Theft (Bloomsbury), a characteristically poised and elegant story about three young people growing up in present-day Tanzania. One more big hitter: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count (4th Estate) is published in March – probably the major publication milestone of 2025. It’s embargoed, though, so I haven’t read it.

Of those I have read, what follows, month by month, are the books that stood out. As ever, I have left first novels to the Observer ’s debut fiction feature.

To explore any of the books featured, visit guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

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The writer on unattainable studs, erotic fantasies, and why she owes her birth father nothing

Born in Peru, Isabel Allende, 82, worked as a journalist and children’s writer. In 1982, she published her first adult novel, The House of the Spirits, which became an international bestseller. Her titles have been translated into 42 languages, and include a memoir for her daughter, who died at 29. Allende’s accolades include the US presidential medal of freedom and PEN Center lifetime achievement award. Her course, Magical Storytelling , is available on BBC Maestro’s online platform. She lives in California.

When were you happiest?
When my kids were little – and now, in my old age.

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New work from Zadie Smith, memoirs from Jacinda Ardern and Bill Gates, plus the third instalment in Rebecca Yarros’s romantasy series - here’s the biggest fiction and nonfiction for the year ahead

Nonfiction

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A shy man leads a solitary existence until a young girl – and a cat – inveigle their way into his apparently contented life in this big-hearted tale

All Jack Paton ever wanted was to be a famous country singer, but somehow it never happened. Certainly, the odds were stacked against him: cripplingly shy, no self-confidence. And although he considers it “a landscape of country music”, it can’t have helped matters that he was born in one of the more windswept corners of Shetland, far from Texas or Tennessee, and has remained there ever since, keeping his dreams to himself.

That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz, Malachy Tallack’s second novel, follows Jack, now approaching his 63rd birthday, as he spends his days pottering about in the cottage he has lived in since he was a child, listening to music, playing guitar and thinking of the past. The narrative flicks between Jack in the present, as he begins to question his life choices, and his parents, Sonny and Kathleen, decades earlier, as they toil in the island’s whaling industry and build the house Jack will later inherit. Like Tallack’s previous novel, The Valley at the Centre of the World , which also focused on life on these isolated islands, the pace is subdued and the action limited. So much so that Jack’s life is thrown into turmoil, and the gentle plot set in motion, by the discovery of an abandoned kitten on his doorstep.

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Sex and the City star says it is ‘the thrill of a life’ to be appointed to 2025 panel alongside Roddy Doyle, Kiley Reid and Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ to pick year’s best novel

Her Cosmopolitan-sipping, Manolo-wearing, wise-cracking Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City was a generation-defining star turn. Now Sarah Jessica Parker has an unexpectedly cerebral new role, as a judge on next year’s Booker Prize.

Parker said it was “the thrill of a life” and “a golden ticket” to be appointed to the 2025 panel, which will be chaired by former winner Paddy Doyle. The actor, who earlier this year appeared on the London stage in the play Plaza Suite, has been quietly embedded in the literary world since becoming an editorial director at Hogarth in 2017, launching her own imprint, SJP Lit, with the independent publisher Zando in 2022.

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The author and artist’s latest gothic novel is inspired by his lifelong love of theatre. He talks about his journey from stage to page – and why his house in Austin is home to a 4ft doll of Madame Tussaud

“I need to take a picture of this for my wife. She absolutely adores Kenneth Williams .” We’re in the recently revamped performance gallery of the V&A, a dazzle of theatrical memorabilia. “This” is Kenneth Williams’s costume from Carry on Cleopatra, worn while protesting “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!” And wielding the cameraphone is British novelist Edward Carey, visiting from his home in Texas to launch his eighth novel, Edith Holler. It’s an irresistible, darkly gothic story set in a theatre and full of the author’s trademark illustrations – so the gallery makes a fittingly immersive interview location.

We dart between costumes, playbills and set models. For Carey’s heroine, a 12-year-old girl in 1901 Norwich, the Holler theatre is all she knows: she believes that to step outside the building will bring disaster. “She has been fed on fancy, on nothing,” Carey says. “But to her, all these fanciful ideas are real.”

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At 90, the author reflects on his friendship with the renowned mathematician, quantum realities and how his grandfather inspired his latest book

Alan Garner is a few days from his 90th birthday when we meet, and his plan for the day itself is “to be very quiet”. He says, “I sound antisocial but I’m not. I’m very sensitive to people and I don’t like more than three or four people in a room at a time.” Since The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published in 1960, he’s had a long and singular writing life, with a certain amount of gregariousness forced on him by its extraordinary late flowering over the last dozen years.

There was the surprise of a conclusion, half a century on, to those very first children’s fantasy novels: in 2012’s Boneland , the adult Colin seeks answers to childhood mysteries through astronomy, therapy and quantum physics. There was a vivid child’s-eye memoir, Where Shall We Run To? , setting down Garner’s wartime primary school years in rural Cheshire. Three years later he wrote the Booker-shortlisted Treacle Walker , which, in drawing on his childhood as well as local landscape and legend, seemed to distil the whole arc of his literary career into one riddling, playful, dizzyingly deep novella. And now comes Powsels and Thrums , a collection of essays, poetry and short fiction that ranges across his life and work, and showcases “a side of me I’ve used in research that has never appeared until now”.

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