The books quiz of 2025 – set by Mick Herron, Bernardine Evaristo, Ali Smith and more

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1.BERNARDINE EVARISTO Who is considered to be the world’s first male or female author?
2.Approximately how many books are published in the UK annually, including self-publishing?
3.Where do these lines of text originate: “we are untamed / a wilderness of women / we are waste ground / what a waste love / nothing grows on us / sterile and barren / an un-useful female / empty as church pews / the wind rattles its fists / inside our wombs / come now, snake boy / come now, heretic healer”?
4.SARA PASCOE On the cover of Tina Fey’s autobiography, which body part has she borrowed from a hairy man?
5.Kingsley Amis’s Jim was …
6.The novel Grown Ups was written by:
7.MICK HERRON Who played the first corpse in the first episode of the TV series based on Ann Cleeves’s Vera Stanhope novels?
8.Whose favoured headgear was a hunting accessory?
9.Who wrote the novel Red Christmas, in which armed terrorists take control of a snowbound hotel?
10.PHIL WANG In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, what is Sal Paradise’s favourite diner treat?
11.Madeline Miller’s Circe is a novel centred on a secondary character from which ancient epic?
12.In which of Dan Brown’s books does his best-loved protagonist, Robert Langdon, make his first appearance?
13.YAEL VAN DER WOUDEN In which of the following essays can the careful reader find the phrase “dead and alive”, which inspired the title of Zadie Smith’s new collection?
14.In Torrey Peters’s Stag Dance, what do the lumberjacks pin upon themselves in order to indicate that they’d like to be courted as a “skooch”, a lady, for the dance?
15.In the opening pages of Jo Harkin’s The Pretender, who do we find out is our main character’s greatest enemy?
16.WILLIAM BOYD Muriel Spark’s maiden name was … ?
17.Who wrote these lines: “But now, after the kindling of so many memories, the first touch of her body, musical and strange and perfumed, sent through him a keen pang of lust”?
18.Whose work did FR Leavis acclaim, in 1932, as “one of the essential new achievements in modern poetry”?
19.NUSSAIBAH YOUNIS The line “The rest of the time we respectfully forgave each other for utterly failing to be what we felt we deserved” is from which novel?
20.In May 2025, which novel won the Dylan Thomas prize?
21.Which of these is not a character in The Trees by Percival Everett?
22.ADAM KAY AI firm Anthropic settled a lawsuit with 500,000 authors in September. How much did they receive per book?
23.What was the first career of Dan Brown, who this year published his eighth novel?
24.The brilliant Tom Lehrer died this July, aged 97. Asked about remaining single, which book did he mention? “I have a notoriously short attention span. I can barely concentrate on … let alone sustain a relationship”
25.ALI SMITH “Shall I pick the eyes out of a story for £40?” Who said this when someone wanted to edit their short story?
26.Whose recent memoir, the name of which is a Chekhov reference in a comic story, coalesces round nuclear warfare and HG Wells’s love life?
27.“Doesn’t anyone in France know that after you’ve turned fourteen, rolling the eyes is completely unacceptable?” In whose vision of our times is this seemingly throwaway line?
28.SARAH MOSS In Jane Eyre, the superintendent of Lowood school gives Jane and Helen a secret bedtime snack of:
29.When William Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud, he was with:
30.There is a longstanding rumour that Mary and Percy Shelley first had sex:
31.FERDIA LENNON Nobel Laureate Samuel Beckett used to do the school run for which famous wrestler?
32.Muhammad Ali’s autobiography The Greatest was edited by which author?
33.The title of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime is inspired by a line from which Sherlock Holmes tale?