Whether you are looking for your next page turner to read by a roaring fire this Christmas or a present for the impossible-to-buy-for, The Irish Times Women’s Podcast is here to help.
Book clubbers Bernice Harrison, Niamh Towey and Ann Ingle join podcast presenter Róisín Ingle to share their favourite reads of 2025, as well as some books they hope to see in their own stockings.
The book club’s recommendations range from art history, to juicy tell-all memoirs to escapist fiction set in sleepy British seaside towns. Whether it’s a gift for family, friends or even for yourself, there’s something for everyone here.
The Women’s Podcast best books of 2025 to gift this Christmas:
I absolutely dread going to my husband’s parents’ home for Christmas
Patrick Freyne’s quest for the best Christmas sandwich in Dublin: ‘I give it five Santas out of five’
‘Nobody had heard of Ireland, it was amazing. I had to explain it was beside England’
‘Startling’: First look behind the RCSI’s new ‘front door’ on St Stephen’s Green
Bernice Harrison
- Vermeer: a Life Lost and Found by Andrew Graham Dixon
- I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir by Keith McNally
- Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Niamh Towey
- Our London Lives by Christina Dwyer Hickey
- Confessions by Catherine Airey
- Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Ann Ingle
- The Fortnight in September by R. C. Sheriff
- Seascraper by Benjamin Wood
- The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
- The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Róisín Ingle
- The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins
- All the Way Down to the River: Love, Loss and Liberation by Elizabeth Gilbert
- The Compound by Aisling Rawle
- Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith
- 99 Words for Rain (And one for Sun) by Manchán Mangan
- One of Us by Elizabeth Day
Other recommendations:
- When The Going Was Good by Graydon Carter
- Openhearted by Ann Ingle
The next book the group will be reading is Flesh by David Szalay. That episode will be out in January 2026.
