Dua Lipa’s 2025 Reading List

Tommy Orange starts with a brief but sharp history lesson in the prologue of There There, dispelling 400 years of slurs and stereotypes against Native people in 10 fiery pages – almost too painful to bear, but essential to start his story. If you are expecting beads and fry bread, you’ve come to the wrong book.

It might take you a second to get into the voice of Crow but once you are, you are in for a treat. Grief Is The Thing With Feathers is definitely a book where you really just have to surrender to the story – take it from me, let yourself go and enjoy the wild ride.

Baby Inés doesn’t die as her parents feared – she is still born, despite her prognosis. However, this story doesn’t shy away from the complex realities of raising a child with profound disabilities – instead, it focuses on the transcendent power of love, as the parents get to know their daughter.

On one level, Widow Basquiat is a chaotic love story between the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and his lover and muse, Suzanne Malouk. Just 20 years old when they meet, we witness them hustling to make it in 1980s New York: a place where anything feels possible but that also hides a dark and sinister side of drugs, violence and racism.

I didn’t ask you to leave. The opening line of Vincent Delecroix’s masterful short novel Small Boat gains increasing significance as he spins together threads of a story which is as shocking as it is familiar.

In This House of Grief, Helen takes us inside the real-life trial of Robert Farquharson and invites us to join her as she sits through days of detailed evidence, weeks of witness testimony and years of appeals. What she reveals along the way is not simply a courtroom drama but a sharp and forensic analysis of the human condition.

Nobody puts it better than Herberta Hind, the book’s straight-talking (Black) FBI agent, when she says: ‘History is a motherfucker.’ And once you’ve read The Trees, you’ll understand why.

This is a book that constantly keeps you guessing. Even down to the dialogue, which is like nothing I’ve ever read before. In Flesh, David pares speech back to the bone, and there are almost no physical descriptions of any of the characters – you’re left to picture them for yourself.

Margaret Atwood: iconic, heroic… prophetic? My monthly read for November is The Handmaid’s Tale, a book that terrified me when I read it in high school, but which I could at least mentally file under ‘dystopian fiction’. Today, I’m not so sure.

Brightly Shining is the perfect festive read – full of wonder, hope and magic. But as you might have come to expect from my choices, there’s also a darker side to this story. Written by Norwegian author Ingvild Rishøi and beautifully translated by Caroline Waight, this is a contemporary reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s heartbreaking fable, The Little Match Girl.