OUR FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2025
This month, in a scorching follow-up to their book Overshoot, Malm and Caton’s The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late is among the 2025 top picks from the Rebel Library, alongside exciting new titles from Amitav Ghosh, Bill McKibben, Sarah Hall and others.
If you’re looking to give someone special a book for Christmas, here are some of our recommendations, all of which you can find in your local independent bookstore.
December 2025
Fiction
Helm by Sarah Hall
Non-human protagonists are having quite a moment in fiction: Laline’s Paull’s The Bees and Pod, and Polly Clark’s Tiger are just two recent examples of narratives in which animals take centre-stage. But in Helm, Sarah Hall goes a step further in articulating the more-than-human world by giving voice and agency to Britain’s only named wind, the Helm of the title – to dazzling effect. Spanning the Neolithic to the Anthropocene, the wind blows through the landscapes of a panoply of human lives to evoke the tragic trajectory of humankind’s decreasing bond with the natural world. Yet despite the urgency of her subject-matter, Hall remains a deft and often humorous storyteller, and the novel is as much a love-letter to the natural world as an obituary of it.
The Morningside by Téa Obreht
Silvia and her mother are refugees on Island City after being expelled from their ancestral home in a not-too-distant future. They end up living and working alongside Silvia’s aunt Ena at The Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower abandoned to climate change.
Silvia knows almost nothing about the place she was born and spent her early years; nor does she know why she and her mother had to leave. But Ena gives the young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished homeland.
Startling, inventive, and profoundly moving, The Morningside is a novel about the stories we tell, and the stories we refuse to tell, to make sense of where we came from, and who we hope we might become.
Read in the context of today’s conflicts and injustices, climate emergencies, and political and racial divisions – together more dystopian than any dystopian novel – the book surprised me most with its undercurrent of hope.
Jessamine Chan, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
NON FICTION
Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilisation byBill McKibben
“We live on an earth where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun; the second-cheapest is to let the breeze created by the sun’s heating turn the blade of a wind turbine,” writes the veteran activist and climate scholar Bill McKibben in his most hopeful book yet. If ever there were a book to assuage your climate anxiety – if only a little – it’s this one. In short succinct chapters McKibben maps out the phenomenal rise of the technologies that were once classified as “alternative” – and makes a powerful case that the revolution under way heralds a swerve that may yet save us from the apocalyptic scenarios conjured by fossil fuel growth.
What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Sometimes the bravest thing we can do while facing an existential crisis is imagine life on the other side. This provocative and joyous book maps an inspiring landscape of possible climate futures.
Through clear-eyed essays and vibrant conversations, infused with data, poetry, and art, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson guides us through solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice. Visionary farmers and financiers, architects and advocates, help us conjure a flourishing future, one worth the effort it will take—from every one of us, with whatever we have to offer—to create.
If you haven’t yet been able to picture a transformed and replenished world—or to see yourself, your loved ones, and your community in it—this book is for you. If you haven’t yet found your role in shaping this new world or you’re not sure how we can actually get there, this book is for you.
With grace, humor, and humanity, Johnson invites readers to ask and answer this ultimate question together: What if we get it right?
Wild Fictions by Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh’s superb essay collection maps the turbulent waters in which human survival, climate breakdown and colonial history converge, and the migrant’s smartphone becomes the talisman of a “global citizenry of desire.”
“Climate change and migration are in fact two cognate aspects of the same thing,” he writes: the outcome of a frenzy of production and consumption in an age of disaster capitalism, imperial violence, and the delusion of “neutral” progress.
Wild Fictions is a timely atlas of entangled destinies, highlighting the increasingly endangered symbiosis of the human, the more-than-human, and the planet we call home.
The Long Heat by Andreas Malm And Will Carton
In a blistering follow-up to their best-selling Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton pull no punches. Business as usual, they show, has pushed the planet so deep into the danger zone that all the risks to life on Earth are now exponentially multiplying. And yet it is still easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The Long Heat: Politics for When it’s Too Late is a wake-up call to anyone seduced by the hope that the Wild West frontier of “climate management” in the form of carbon removal technologies that promise (but have not yet delivered) viable, scalable solutions to the emergency. Indeed, the final, last-ditch spectre of largely speculative, high-risk geoengineering serves only to distract from the primary unaddressed task of bringing fossil fuel industry to a halt and keeping oil, coal and gas in the ground. Short of a global revolution that forces a new paradigm, Malm and Carton suggest, nothing can stop the death spiral of late-stage capitalism. Which leaves the reader to either throw up their hands on defeat – or say “Bring it on.”
How To Fall In Love With The Future by Rob Hopkins
Rob Hopkins’ latest work is a profound exploration of the human capacity to envision and shape a better future. In a world often overshadowed by uncertainty and anxiety, Hopkins invites us to embrace hope and creativity. Combining practicality and inspiration, How to Fall in Love with the Future urges readers to cultivate a relationship with the future that is grounded in optimism and proactive engagement.
Through compelling narratives, innovative ideas, and actionable strategies, Hopkins calls for a re-imagining of our roles in our communities and the wider world, emphasising that every individual has the power to impact the future positively, whether through grassroots movements, sustainable practices, or simply by fostering connections with others.
Hopkins blends personal anecdotes with broader societal observations, making the content relatable and engaging. His writing is infused with a sense of urgency, yet it is also filled with joy and possibility, reminding us that falling in love with the future requires both courage and creativity. A vital read for anyone seeking to become an active participant in shaping a world that reflects their values and dreams.
The Shetland Way: Community and climate crisis on my father’s islands by Marianne Brown
How do we balance our needs with the needs of the natural world around us? How can we have nuanced conversations and debate in a time of extreme activism or extreme denial? How can we begin to understand the complexities of a subject as enormous as climate change? And how can we change the way we live to save our lives?
This is one woman’s story of how her quest to make peace with her father’s death brought her straight to the heart of a challenging debate about how we save the planet.
Shetland is a place bound together by community, history and culture. But when a huge windfarm is greenlit to export energy to mainland Scotland, it creates rifts between neighbours, friends and even families. One side supports the benefit to a planet spiralling into climate disaster; the other challenges the impact on an environment with an already struggling wildlife population.
As an environmental journalist, Marianne is drawn to investigate this story of sustainable energy that is irrevocably tied to her grief. But nothing is ever straightforward, and she soon finds herself on a transformative journey into the heart of a debate that mirrors global concerns about how we save the planet.
Books for Children
Otherlands: An illustrated journey through Earth’s lost worlds by Thomas Halliday, illustrated by Gavin Scott
Watch thundering herds of dinosaurs crash through thick forests. Dive into a sea of glass reefs, emerging from the water to see monkeys fighting for survival on an accidental raft. Travel millions of years into the past to when dinosaurs and woolly mammoths roamed the earth. Find out how plants and trees and creatures great and small shared a world very different from our own. And uncover the footprints they left behind . . .
Starting with the last ice age and ending when the very first animals that started to swim and hunt, this illustrated journey back through time is adapted from the bestselling Otherlands by Thomas Halliday.
Age:8 to 11 years
Sofia Valdez, Future Prez by Andrea Beaty, illustrated by David Roberts
Inspire the next generation with this engaging picture book starring Sofia Valdez, a community leader who stands up for what she believes in!
Every morning, Abuelo walks Sofia to school . . . until one day, when Abuelo hurts his ankle at a local landfill and he can no longer do so. Sofia misses her Abuelo and wonders what she can do about the dangerous Mount Trashmore. Then she gets an idea―the town can turn the slimy mess into a park! She brainstorms and plans and finally works up the courage to go to City Hall―only to be told by a clerk that she can’t build a park because she’s just a kid! Sofia is down but not out, and she sets out to prove what one kid can do.
Age:5 to 7 years
Poem of the Month
On Another Panel About Climate, They Ask Me To Sell The Future And All I’ve Got Is A Love Poem
by Ayisha Siddiqa
What if the future is soft and revolution is so kind that there is no end to us in sight.
Whole cities breathe and bad luck is bested by a promise to the leaves.
To withstand your own end is difficult.
The future frolics about, promised to no one, as is her right.
Rage against injustice makes the voice grow harsher yet.
If the future leaves without us, the silence that will follow will be an unspeakable nothing.
What if we convince her to stay?
How rare and beautiful it is that we exist.
What if we stun existence one more time?
When I wake up, get out of bed, my seven year old cousin
with her ruptured belly tags along.
Then follows my grandmother, aunts, my other cousins
and the violent shape of their drinking water.
The earth remembers everything,
our bodies are the color of the earth and we
are nobodies.
Been born from so many apocalypses, what’s one more?
Love is still the only revenge. It grows each time the earth is set on fire.
But for what it’s worth, I’d do this again.
Gamble on humanity one hundred times over
Commit to life unto life, as the trees fall and take us with them.
I’d follow love into extinction.
This poem features in What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Ayisha Siddiqa is a Pakistani-American climate justice and human rights advocate from New York City. She is the co-founder of Fossil Free University and PollutersOut! Find her on Instagram.
Contact our Librarian if you would like themed book lists to support teaching about climate change.
We’re always looking for ideas for books to add to our growing collection of literature on the climate and nature crisis. If would like to share ideas, please get in touch! Contact mattroselibrary@gmail.com.