The Kallys® – Best Books of 2025 – The Perfect List
The Kallys® are an annual set of made-up awards (aren’t they all?) that celebrate my favourite creative works from the calendar year just gone. It’s a fun way to reflect on my favourite arty experiences and share them with others. I give you full permission to pass these suggestions off as your own when someone comes to you for a cool recommendation. I hereby present The Kallys®: Best Books of 2025.
Reading used to be my favourite pastime and then, as the years advanced, I found myself drifting away from books. The advent of social media and an online world didn’t help either.
In recent years I’ve made a concerted effort to read more books. And I really have to push myself to do it sometimes (which is ridiculous in and of itself). But there is nothing that quite compares to reading a gripping story.
Personally I love the tactile feel of a book rippling through my fingers, but I’m not some hardliner who thinks audiobooks or Kindles are bullshit. They’re perfectly fine.
It’s about the storytelling.
It’s about being transported somewhere else, or getting a secret peek at an unknown world. And if the storytelling is compelling, all you want to do is return to that book.
So, I must confess, this year I wasn’t as good about my reading as other years (largely thanks to time spent writing scripts for a dream project that’ll hopefully go into production in 2026) so I’ve picked out the two books that still reverberate and resonate with me at the end of the year.
One is poetic and the other prophetic.
1 \ We Are An Archipelago – Erin Fornoff
Many moons ago I was lucky enough to see Erin Fornoff perform her first poems at The Brownbread Mixtape, and she’s long been one of my absolute favourite poets. She has a knack for capturing the specific soul of a place, and this poetic play is no different.
On the surface We Are An Archipelago is a story that follows ninety-nine-year-old Bill, who returns to Ocracoke, the tiny island of his birth, to live out his final days, and Deena, a young woman fleeing a complicated past. But this piece is much more than that, with layers of meaning and things unsaid. It has real depth.
I first caught it at the Dublin Fringe and was knocked out by it. Erin’s writing is, as always, finely tuned and avoids the usual sentimental shite, opting instead for a story that’s lyrical and deeply moving. A proper gem. Catch it on tour in 2026!
2 \ The Trading Game – Gary Stevenson
Ordinarily I wouldn’t reach for a book about the world of finance and trading, but after seeing Gary Stevenson speakso compellingly online, I was intrigued to read his autobiography.
And it’s quite the tale. A proper real-life underdog story of a smart kid from East London who wins a game to land a job at Citibank, eventually becoming their most profitable trader during the 2008 crash. Only to walk away from millions to warn us that the game is impossibly rigged.
This is such a readable book thanks to Stevenson’s snappy storytelling. He has a rare gift for sharp, funny writing, and a ridiculously impressive talent to recall specific events and details.
What I really enjoyed most though, was Stevenson’s bone-deep honesty about the world of high finance and the slow dawning that he is part of the problem; with a sobering message about an economy built on unsustainable inequality.
If you want to understand how the world really works (and the real human impact of capitalism) then The Trading Game is the book to read.
