The 2025 autumn season is breaking records: 484 novels will hit our bookshops, 5.45% more than in 2024. While the usual favourite topics are still present – intimacy, family, gender – a new trend is emerging strongly: geopolitics and international current affairs. In a world that seems to defy rational understanding, is fiction becoming the last refuge of meaning?
Intimacy in the service of geopolitics
Emmanuel Carrère perfectly illustrates this shift with Kolkhoze, a family novel that spans more than a century of Russian and French history, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the war in Ukraine. The writer transforms his mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse – a historian of Russia and member of the Académie Française – into a fictional character to explore the historical roots of the Ukrainian conflict. Geopolitics thus becomes a matter of blood and heritage, no longer a mere backdrop but a narrative driving force.
This approach contrasts sharply with the traditional media treatment. Where current events fragment, the novel unifies. Where information accumulates facts, fiction reveals invisible connections. Carrère does not merely recount history: he makes it visceral, personal and understandable.
Other authors tackle contemporary tensions head-on. In ‘The White Lady’, Russian author Sergei Lebedev explores the psychological consequences of the invasion of Ukraine. Palestinian author Isabella Hammad, in ‘Hamlet on the Wall’, delves into daily life in Ramallah, where a theatre group stages Hamlet under occupation. These novels are examples of literature that refuses to look away.
From the national mirror to the global prism
This ‘geopolitisation’ of literature marks a historic break. While literature has always drawn inspiration from historical upheavals, as exemplified by Stendhal and Tolstoy, who were already deciphering their era, it remained confined to national issues. Today, novelists embrace a world where crises are globalised and interconnected. Climate issues, migration and economic tensions know no borders. Novels no longer reflect the history of a country: they attempt to make sense of global chaos.
This change responds to an urgent need. In our information-saturated societies, we suffer less from a lack of data than from an excess of incomprehensible fragments. This autumn’s novels take us on a journey to many countries, from China to Iran, Turkey and the United States, offering the kind of overview that the media struggle to provide.
Why this craze now?
There are several reasons. First of all, the novel has a power that other genres do not have. It has the ability to go beyond the facts and transform statistics into individual destinies. Faced with current events, often reduced to a succession of figures and headlines, the novel humanises the issues and geopolitical abstraction. It explores the emotions, doubts and dilemmas of men and women caught up in turmoil. It allows us to identify with lives we would have thought distant.
Secondly, in a world saturated with information, literature offers a need for meaning. Faced with a constant stream of fragmented news, readers seek a coherent narrative that allows them to understand the world. The novel, with its narrative structure and psychological depth, offers this perspective. It does not explain the world, it tells its story. Moreover, leaders know that in a complex world, whoever controls the narrative controls the meaning.
Finally, literature can be a space of freedom. In times of political tension, novels offer a way to explore complex truths, circumvent censorship and offer subtle criticism of power systems and nuanced truths that are impossible to express in polarised public debate.
What if novels were a decision-making tool for leaders?
This literary trend is not anecdotal for leaders. In an environment where understanding geopolitical issues determines business strategies, these novels constitute an unsuspected strategic watch. They anticipate societal transformations, decipher mentalities, and reveal fractures that escape traditional analysis.
When Carrère recounts ‘the Bolshevik Revolution, the exile of White Russians to Europe, two world wars, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and Putin’s imperial Russia,’ he is not just telling a story: he is shedding light on the underlying logic behind contemporary Russian geopolitical choices.
The 2025 literary season reminds us of a simple truth: faced with the complexity of the world, fiction is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Only fiction can transform chaos into narrative, the incomprehensible into wisdom. For tomorrow’s decision-makers, ignoring this geopolitical literature would be tantamount to depriving themselves of a valuable analytical tool.
