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Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for the

Spectator, and I'm joined this week by our chief book reviewer, Philip Hensher, to look back over the joys of

2025 in the bookshops. Philip, what have you enjoyed this year? Does anything kind of leap out?

There were a couple of novels that I absolutely absolutely loved and it was a slight surprise because I do think the novels going through a bit of

a drab patch but the novel that absolutely swept me away was Tashawls the South. I thought it was

one of the most overwhelming accounts of a really

passionate teenage love affair just in and just evoking this extraordinary kind of tropical

heat. It was just, oh, it was just all about what it's like to be 16 and riding on the back of your 18-year-old lover's motorbike

and then being taken home to an orchard and being shagged against a tree.

And you know that this, you know that this, this affair can't go on forever,

but you're going to remember it for the rest of your...

Oh, it was... Oh, that was a wonderful book.

I do not know how that got left off the...

Well, I know perfectly well why it got left off the book shortest.

The other book that I thought was so fantastic, and I know that you're a fan,

is Mick Heron's latest in the Slough House series.

...