Cultural highlights 2025: Masterworks old and new, on page and on screen

Jon Gower

One of the most lauded books of 2025 is Anthony Shapland’s A Room Above a Shop which was chosen as both the Waterstones Welsh Book of the Year and the Hay Festival’s Book of the Year and, one imagines more laurels will follow.

This tender, affective and affecting tale of love in and above a south Wales valleys hardware store is written in pared-back prose, with never a wasted word.

Yet it hits hard emotionally, the words sharp as tacks, the author’s unquestionable talent beating them into arresting patterns as if with a hammer.

It’s consistently beautiful stuff as in these memories of a boy foraging in the countryside with his mother: “His mouth waters at crab-apple bullets made sweet; the sherbet flowers and dark berries of the elder, the Judas tree; papery hazelnuts in the paws of thieving squirrels; wimberries stuffed in pint bottles, and remembers their stained lips with sticky, smiling teeth.”

I loved the deeply considered, wise and life-enhancing essays gathered within Your Lowly Hedgehog Knows by Radnorshire book seller and garden designer Gareth Howell-Jones.

It’s a sort of self-help manual for locating wonder in the world, and is imbued with plenty of that sense of wonderment itself. Such as locating a sort of lichen safari park in the churchyard near the author’s home: ‘…Where the dead, weathering into anonymity, are graciously commemorated with living medallions, rosettes and epaulettes. Off-white, primrose and celadon are the muted tones of the honours here, but Ada Lloyd d.1910 has been granted a golden spray like a meteor shower – I wonder what singled her out.’

For my money, easily the best non-fiction title this year was Rob Cowan’s The North Road, which follows the author’s journey from London to Edinburgh in an ‘exercise in awareness’ which traces the A1 road’s northerly progress and mixes genres ever so freely.

So we have a mixture of conventional travel writing, psychogeography and fiction as Cowan follows Roman ways and motorways, coach paths, primary roads and pilgrim trails.

It has a glorious mix of voices and gets better with every step, full of personal recollection and vivid time slips, adding up to a vivid, telling account of the state of post-Brexit Britain.

“One of the most striking disclosures from the Brexit vote has been its sporadic echoes of the civil wars… unquiet history stares us in the face. Brexit burst into flame from sparks struck over similar tinder.”

One I will inevitably read again come 2026.

There’s a talented generation of Welsh language writers coming through at the moment which is heartening in the extreme to writers like myself, now long in the tooth.

Iestyn Tyne’s travelogue-cum-biography of the poet Prosser Rhys Y Cyfan a Fu Rhyngom Ni appeared just over a century since Rhys won the National Eisteddfod Crown in 1924 with his controversial poem “Atgof (“Memory.”)

Tyne deftly mixes archival research with visits to significant places in what is at heart a love story and is particularly graced by having a poet redact the tale.

Meanwhile Grug Muse’s spirited account of cycling coast-to-coast across the United States of America, Croesi Cyfandir ar Ddwy Olwyn left this reader feeling quite exhausted, not by anything mechanically wrong with the prose but, rather, by the sheer endeavour and stamina required to undertake the 4000-mile journey in all weathers.

I’ll think of this uplifting book the next time I humbly cycle round to the shops. Grug Muse and Iestyn Tyne having seemingly written travelogues in tandem and both move along elegantly, like well-oiled machines. These are writers with ample gifts.

I was very late to the party when it came to the BBC’s Belfast-set crime drama Blue Lights, written by local journalists Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, which follows three rookie police officers working in a uniquely dangerous place.

It’s up there in terms of the script with Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley and American classics such as The Wire, which followed the same pattern of local reporters turning into scriptwriters.

The acting in Blue Lights is uniformly superb, some of the best I recall on television of late, and is what boxed set binge-watching is all about.

Having watched Matthew Rhys dazzle on stage in Mark Jenkins’ ‘Playing Burton’ for Welsh National Theatre I went to catch up with some of his latest TV work.

In the Netflix series ‘The Beast in Me’ he plays the mesmerizingly attractive real estate mogul Nile Jarvis who is suspected of murdering his wife.

He moves in next door to Aggie Wiggs, an author who’s spent several years struggling to write following the death of her young son.

The very stubborn Nile seems determined to add a running path to the neighbourhood so Aggie finds herself butting heads with him. That is until she realizes he might just be the perfect subject for her next book.

It’s tense and gripping stuff and Rhys and Clare Danes, who plays Aggie Wiggs have a teasing, complicated chemistry that adds to the strength of their individual performances in a tense cat and mouse game.

As I had a birthday just before Christmas ‘The Poems of Seamus Heaney’ will offer a kind of alternative sustenance to the turkey and mince pies.

It’s doorstop sized, weighing it at over 1200 pages, so will help keep out the draughts in the hall if necessary, even as it reminds me of how elegant and meaningful a poet he is.

I read one poem yesterday morning and it nagged at me for the rest of the day, teasing me with its meaning.

Having decided to go to Dublin for Bloomsday next year I’m deep into a re-read of Richard Ellmann’s magisterial biography of James Joyce and have everything else Joyce wrote to enjoy again by way of preparation for the trip, including the confounding Finnegan’s Wake.

Reading the masterwork that is Ulysses again will be an exciting part of 2026 as it may well be simply the best novel ever written. Discuss.