What We Read in 2025 and Why It Matters

Our London Advocacy team have pulled together some of their favourite reads of 2025. Our shortlisting criteria is simple, you must have read it this year and, if you were recommending it, it must have a profound impact on the reader.

Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back - Marc J. Dunkelman

Abundance was the political buzz word of 2025 with Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson claiming most of the credit thanks to their eponymous book. Proponents argue that creating more will lead to a prosperous society – but that our political systems are geared towards preventing rather than enabling growth.

In Why Nothing Works, Dunkelman provides a nuanced, historical approach, exploring the tension within the American progressive movement between those who want to exercise power by consolidating it and those who want to limit and constrain it.

In a post-pandemic world, parties of the left are increasingly finding themselves defending institutions they once pushed back against. That political parties continue to find themselves defending bat tunnels and fish discos shows they are being captured by them. Dunkelman concludes by saying that “a Government too hamstrung to serve the public good will fuel future waves of conservative populism.”

Alex McLaren – Senior Account Director

The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead

This is a novel about Elwood Curtis, a Black teenager in 1960s Florida whose life is upended when he’s unjustly sent to the Nickel Academy, a brutal reform school based on the real Dozier School for Boys. There, he forms a friendship with Turner, whose realism challenges Elwood’s belief in fairness and justice. Their experiences reveal how deeply cruelty, racism, and institutional failure were woven into everyday life, and how many young lives were quietly erased or broken as a result.

Although the book is set in the Jim Crow South, its message is still relevant today, including here in the UK. It’s a reminder that we can’t move forward if we ignore our difficult history. By confronting past injustices honestly, we are better placed to recognise ongoing inequalities and work toward fairer and more accountable institutions in the 21st century.

Nicole Wyatt – Senior Consultant

The Achilles Trap - Steve Coll

Using Iraqi archives and Saddam’s own taped conversations, Coll unpicks how decades of mixed signals, covert games and short term opportunism in Washington led to the catastrophe of the 2003 Iraq War. Reviewers have called it “richly detailed” and “a compelling tale even for those steeped in the sordid history of US-Iraqi relations”, and said there are “few better roadmaps to where American foreign policy in the Middle East has ended up today”.

For politicians, the real sting is what it says about diplomacy and trust. Coll shows how a superpower that talks about partnership, while repeatedly treating others as problems to be managed or exploited, eventually teaches the world to plan around it. The Iraq disaster after 9/11 accelerates a long fall in the West’s moral authority, a trend reinforced by Trump era unilateralism. This book forces decision makers to ask whether their words and alliances build long term confidence, or quietly push others to hedge against them.

Gavin Megaw – President & Managing Partner

The Travelling Cat Chronicles - Hiro Arikawa

A head in some form of political narrative started out as a happy place but by the end of 14 years in Westminster, it became more work than pleasure. Leaving Parliament was an opportunity to down the tomes and dive back into reading for joy, and so a new chapter began.

At the beginning of this year, I found a new genre of books – Asian fiction centred around people or places, and I have found it hard to leave its library. Whether they be focused on bookshops or coffee shops, the simplicity of a story around connection has been one that I have supped all year.

However the one that has particularly stuck in my head was one bought for my 50th birthday in July – The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa.  Oh my.  What a beautiful book it is. A book about life long friendships, mortality, kindness and the depth of a human-animal relationship.  I won’t ruin it for others but it is a beautifully written gentle journey through the ages of a cat (Nana) and the boy (Satoru) who found him. What I will say is don’t read it on a train. I sobbed and sobbed and then sobbed again.  In fact my heart is heaving as a type.  It was worth every tear.  And it is better than sobbing over a Tim Shipman best seller.

Tracey Crouch – Managing Director

The Cicero Trilogy – Robert Harris

I have loved listening to Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy on Audible, especially the first two volumes Imperium and Lustrum. Using many of his writings, the books tell the story of Cicero’s career, the collapse of the Roman Republic and the rise of dictatorship under Caesar.

There are lots of parallels with modern politics - Harris was close to several of the top people in New Labour and it’s fun to guess who’s meant to be who. But the sections covering Cicero’s speeches have also made me think again about what makes for good political oratory and how to win over an audience.

Larry Smith – Senior Director

Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead is a contemporary retelling of Dickens’ David Copperfield, set in rural Appalachia. The novel follows Damon Fields from his traumatic birth in a trailer home to his turbulent childhood shaped by poverty, parental addiction, the foster care system, and the opioid epidemic.

The story of Demon Copperhead provides a succinct example of how Government policy to combat poverty must be holistic. Initiatives such as the National Youth Strategy, must be coupled with economic growth policies including getting young people of all ages into work and education.

The book is ultimately a critique of systems that fail the people they are meant to protect. The novel is a reminder that real change comes from investment, accountability, and a willingness to hear uncomfortable truths from those living at the margins.

Lily Lofty – Senior Consultant

Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a very British Revolution 1945 – 2016 -Tom McTague.

Rather than treating post-war politics as a sequence of elections or economic settlements, McTague charts how cultural narratives around Anglo–European relations and British identity emerged, evolved and became embedded. He shows how figures such as Monnet, De Gaulle, Powell and Attlee shaped competing visions of Britain and Europe, and how an imperial self-image gradually shifted towards a more communitarian national identity.

The book illustrates how Tory romanticism ultimately eclipsed Churchillian and Macmillanite pro-Europeanism, informing Euroscepticism from its development under Thatcher and Major to its popularisation in the early-2000s anti-Euro campaigns and the Brexit referendum. In parallel, McTague traces Labour’s journey from a focus on the national economy and Fabian constitutionalism to today’s comparatively internationalist outlook. Although it ends in 2016, the book offers rich insight into the cultural roots of contemporary political debate.

Robert Shannon – Intern

Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell - John Preston

Robert Maxwell was one the great monsters of the 20th century: a Czech-born World War II hero-turned Labour MP who built up a major media empire in Britain, at one stage including the Daily Mirror, whose collapse featured the embezzlement of hundreds of millions of pounds, impoverishing thousands. 

The circumstances of his death in 1991, after apparently falling overboard from his yacht Lady Ghislaine (named after his beloved youngest child, currently serving a 20-year prison term for child sex trafficking) provide the ’mystery’ in the title of John Preston’s unputdownable account.

Maxwell loomed large over politicians here and abroad: his funeral on the Mount of Olives was attended by Israel’s PM and president. This book is a fascinating portrait of a towering and corrupt personality whose brutal occupation of the crucial space linking politics and the media sparked disaster on all sides.

Patrick Hennessy – Senior Director