New novels from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ian McEwan, plus the return of Slow Horses and Margaret Atwood looks back … Guardian critics pick the must-read titles of 2025

The Guardian’s fiction editor picks the best of the year, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count to Thomas Pynchon’s return, David Szalay’s Booker winner and a remarkable collection of short stories.

The Guardian’s fiction editor picks the best of the year, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count to Thomas Pynchon’s return, David Szalay’s Booker winner and a remarkable collection of short stories

There aren’t many giants of 20th-century literature still writing, but 2025 saw the first novel in 12 years from American great Thomas Pynchon, now in his late 80s: Shadow Ticket (Jonathan Cape) is a typically larky prohibition-era whodunnit, set against rising nazism and making sprawling connections with the spectre of fascism today. Other elder statesmen publishing this year included Salman Rushdie with The Eleventh Hour (Cape), a playful quintet of mortality-soaked short stories and his first fiction since the 2022 assault that blinded him in his right eye; while Ian McEwan was also considering endings and legacy in What We Can Know (Cape), in which a 22nd-century literature scholar looks back, from the other side of apocalypse, on a close-knit group of (mostly) fictional literary lions from our own era. In a time of climate terror, the novel is both a fascinating wrangle with the limits of what humans are able to care about – from bare survival, to passion and poetry, to the enormity of environmental disaster – and a poignant love letter to the vanishing past.

But perhaps the most eagerly awaited return this year was another global figure: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose first novel in more than a decade, Dream Count (4th Estate), follows the lives of four interconnected women between Nigeria and the US. Taking in love, motherhood and female solidarity as well as privilege, inequality and sexual violence, it’s a rich and beautifully composed compendium of women’s experience.

From an enraging indictment of Spotify to Del Amitri frontman Justin Currie’s account of Parkinson’s and a compelling biography of Tupac Shakur, here are five titles that strike a chord

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
Liz Pelly (Hodder & Stoughton)
Enraging, thoroughly depressing, but entirely necessary, Mood Music offers a timely, forensically researched demolition of Spotify. In Pelly’s account, the music streaming giant views music as a kind of nondescript sonic wallpaper, artists as an unnecessary encumbrance to the business of making more money and its target market not as music fans, but mindless drones who don’t really care what they’re listening to, ripe for manipulation by its algorithm. Sharp business practices and evidence of its deleterious effect on the quality and variety of new music abound: the worst thing is that Pelly can’t really come up with a viable alternative in a world where convenience trumps all.

Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters With Rock Royalty
Kate Mossman (Bonnier)
There’s no doubt that Men of a Certain Age is a hard sell, a semi-autobiographical book in which the New Statesman’s arts editor traces her obsession with often wildly unfashionable, ageing male artists – Queen’s Roger Taylor, Bruce Hornsby, Steve Perry of Journey, Jon Bon Jovi among them – through a series of interviews variously absurd, insightful, hair-raising and weirdly touching. But it’s elevated to unmissable status by Mossman’s writing, which is so sparkling, witty and shrewd that your personal feelings about her subjects are rendered irrelevant amid the cocktail of self-awareness, affection and sharp analysis she brings to every encounter. In a world of music books retelling tired legends, Men of a Certain Age offers that rare thing: an entirely original take on rock history.

An eco-masterpiece, icy intrigue, cyberpunkish cyborgs, memory-eating aliens and super-fast travel sends the world spinning out of control

Circular Motion
Alex Foster (Grove)
Alex Foster’s novel treats climate catastrophe through high-concept satire. A new technology of super-fast pods revolutionises travel: launched into low orbit from spring-loaded podiums, they fly west and land again in minutes, regardless of distance. Since every action has an equal and opposite reaction, our globe starts to spin faster. Days contract, first by seconds, then minutes, and eventually hours. It’s a gonzo conceit, and Foster spells out the consequences, his richly rendered characters caught up in their own lives as the world spirals out of control. As days become six hours long, circadian rhythms go out of the window and oceans start to bulge at the equator. The increasing whirligig of the many strands of storytelling converge on their inevitable conclusion, with Foster’s sparky writing, clever plotting and biting wit spinning an excellent tale.

When There Are Wolves Again
EJ Swift (Arcadia)
There are few more pressing issues with which fiction can engage than the climate crisis, and SF, with its capacity to extrapolate into possible futures and dramatise the realities, is particularly well placed to do so. Swift’s superb novel is an eco-masterpiece. Its near-future narrative of collapse and recovery takes us from the rewilding of Chornobyl and the return of wolves to Europe, through setback and challenge, to 2070, a story by turns tragic, alarming, uplifting, poetic and ultimately hopeful. Swift’s accomplished prose and vivid characterisation connect large questions of the planet’s destiny with human intimacy and experience, and she avoids either a too-easy doomsterism or a facile techno-optimism. We can bring the world back from the brink, but it will require honesty, commitment, hard work and a proper sense of stewardship.

From Seamus Heaney’s collected poems and Simon Armitage’s animal spirits, to prizewinners Karen Solie and Vidyan Ravinthiran

Many of 2025’s most notable collections have been powered by a spirit of wild experimentation, pushing at the bounds of what “poetry� might be thought to be. Sarah Hesketh’s 2016 (CB Editions) is a fabulous example: it takes 12 interviews with a variety of anonymous individuals about the events of that year and presents fragments of the transcripts as prose poems. The cumulative effect of these voices is haunting and full of pathos, as “they vote for whoever, and their life stays exactly the same�.

Luke Kennard and Nick Makoha also daringly remixed their source material and inspirations. The former’s latest collection, The Book of Jonah (Picador), moves the minor prophet out of the Bible into a world of arts conferences, where he is continually reminded that his presence everywhere is mostly futile. Makoha’s The New Carthaginians (Penguin) turns Jean-Michel Basquiat’s idea of the exploded collage into a poetic device. The result? “The visible / making itself known by the invisible.�

Anthony Hopkins and Kathy Burke on acting, Jacinda Ardern and Nicola Sturgeon on politics, plus Margaret Atwood on a life well lived

Not all memoirists are keen to share their life stories. For Margaret Atwood, an author who has sold more than 40m books, the idea of writing about herself seemed “Dead boring. Who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper?� Happily, she did it anyway. Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (Chatto & Windus) is a 624-page doorstopper chronicling Atwood’s life and work, and a tremendous showcase for her wisdom and wit. Helen Garner’s similarly chunky, Baillie Gifford prize-winning How to End a Story (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is a diary collection spanning 20 years and provides piquant and puckish snapshots of the author’s life, work and her unravelling marriages. Mixing everyday observation and gossipy asides with profound self-examination, it is spare in style and utterly moreish.

In Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me (Hamish Hamilton) and Jung Chang’s Fly, Wild Swans (William Collins), formidable mothers get top billing. In the former, The God of Small Things author reveals how her mother, whose own father was a violent drunk, stood up to the patriarchy and campaigned for women’s rights, but was cruel to her daughter. Describing her as “my shelter and my storm�, Roy reflects on Mary’s contradictions with candour and compassion. Fly, Wild Swans is the sequel to Chang’s bestselling Wild Swans, picking up where its predecessor left off and reflecting how that book was only made possible by the author’s mother, who shared family stories and kept her London-dwelling daughter apprised of events in China.

The actor Paul Hilton brilliantly inhabits the character of a ranting working-class academic in this debut novel

Some books feel so suited to the audio format that they could have been written with the voice in mind. All My Precious Madness is one of those. Mark Bowles’s debut novel, which won the audiobook fiction category at the inaugural British Audio awards (where, full disclosure, I was a judge), is a deliciously sweary monologue from a middle-aged malcontent.

A sideways reflection on working-class identity and masculinity, the novel gives voice to Henry Nash, a man of little patience. Sitting in a London coffee shop and trying to write a monograph of his father, he rains judgment on the other patrons whose obnoxious phone calls he can’t help but overhear. An Oxford graduate turned writer and academic, Nash lives in a Soho flat where he has been known to furtively drop eggs on passersby who disturb him with their drunken racket.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some wonderful new paperbacks, from chilling short stories to a biography of a duke

Essays from Zadie Smith; Wiki founder Jimmy Wales on how to save the internet; a future-set novel by Ian McEwan; a new case for the Slow Horses - plus memoirs from Kamala Harris and Paul McCartney… all among this season’s highlights

Helm by Sarah Hall
Faber, out now
Hall is best known for her glittering short stories: this is the novel she’s been working on for two decades. Set in Cumbria’s Eden valley, it tells the story of the Helm – the only wind in the UK to be given a name – from its creation at the dawn of time up to the current degradation of the climate. It’s a huge, millennia-spanning achievement, spotlighting characters from neolithic shamans to Victorian meteorologists to present-day pilots.

Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I finally got round to Thoreau’s Journal. It is determinedly down-to-earth and soaring, lyrical and belligerent, humane and cantankerous. Walt Whitman thought Thoreau suffered from “a very aggravated case of superciliousness�, but as Walt also said (of himself) the Journal of this brooding, solitary figure is great; it “contains multitudes.�

Homework by Geoff Dyer is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson is published by Cassava Republic. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

This nebulous study of Luigi Mangione veers close to romanticising him as a latter-day Robin Hood

On 5 December 2024, the New York Times ran the headline “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan�. The newspaper then noted that Brian Thompson was “shot in the back in Midtown Manhattan by a killer who then walked coolly away�. The murder in broad daylight was indeed both cold and shocking. But many Americans had a different response: for those who had been denied health insurance or faced exorbitant healthcase costs, the news felt cathartic. Social media blew up. One post read: “All jokes aside … no one here is the judge of who deserves to live or die. That’s the job of the AI algorithm the insurance company designed to maximize profits on your health.�

Five days later, Luigi Mangione, a good-looking, 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with a master’s in computer science, was apprehended at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He awaits trial on federal and state charges of murder, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. So who is Mangione? And what might have motivated the alleged crime? These are the questions John H Richardson attempts to answer in an investigation that explores broader themes, too.

The anthropologist and father of New York’s mayor-elect offers a revisionist view of modern Ugandan history

Children of Ugandan Indians are having a bit of a moment. Electropop boasts Charlie XCX; statecraft, the Patels: Priti the shadow foreign secretary, Kash the FBI boss. And while the ones who go into politics have tended to be conservative, we now have a counterexample in Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who clinched the New York mayoralty at the beginning of this month.

The anomaly is best explained by the politics of his father, Mahmood Mamdani. The apple, it seems, did not roll especially far down the postcolonial hillside. Mahmood, professor of government and anthropology at Columbia University, has long styled himself as the left’s answer to VS Naipaul. Where the Nobel-winning curmudgeon surveyed postcolonial Africa with disdain, revelling in the wreckage of independence, Mamdani presents a more forgiving view: pathos instead of pity, paradox instead of despair. If independence didn’t live up to the promise, he argues, it was because the colonised had been dealt a losing hand.

Genius and arrogance play leading roles in a new biography of the man who helped uncover the structure of DNA

Most people could tell you that Francis Crick, together with James Watson, discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and shaped our understanding of how genes work. Fewer know that Crick also played a key role in modern neuroscience and inspired our continuing efforts to understand the biological basis of consciousness.

Crick once said the two questions that interested him most were “the borderline between the living and the non-living, and the workings of the brain�, questions that were usually discussed in religious or mystical terms but that he believed could be answered by science. In his new biography of the Nobel prize-winning scientist, Matthew Cobb, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, does an admirable job of capturing the rare thinker who not only set himself such ambitious goals but made remarkable progress in achieving them, radically remaking two scientific disciplines in the process.

The first scholarly biography in more than 100 years of the man who immortalised the Tudor court does not disappoint

Much of what we know, or think we know, about the court of Henry VIII comes directly from the paintings of Hans Holbein. There’s the famous portrait of the king himself – puffy, phallic and cruel, looking more like a murderer than a monarch. But there is also ascetic Thomas More, hiding his cruel streak behind fine bones, and sly yet thuggish Thomas Cromwell, with those shifty eyes and the beginnings of a double chin. “Hans the Painter� did the wives too – an appropriately sketchy drawing of Anne Boleyn, a saintly portrait of Jane Seymour who died after giving birth to Henry’s heir, and a pin-up version of Anne of Cleves.

It was this last portrait that caused an international incident in 1539 when Holbein was sent by Henry to the Low Countries to check whether Anne was pretty enough to be his next wife. Based on Holbein’s portrait, Henry committed to the marriage in absentia, only to be horrified when the actual Anne arrived on the Kentish coast, looking “nothing so fair as she hath been reported�. The union lasted six months.

The Ferryman and His Wife by Frode Grytten; Woman in the Pillory by Brigitte Reimann; Iran+100, edited by various; Sea Now by Eva Meijer

The Ferryman and His Wife by Frode Grytten, translated by Alison McCullough (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99)
On the last day of his life – how does he know? He just does – Norwegian ferryman Nils Vik takes a final boat trip, alone after a lifetime helping others. He remembers those he has ferried, including actor Edward G Robinson; Miss Norway 1966, who was “declared the most beautiful woman in the nation and won a Fiat 850�; and young gay man Jon, who was bullied by his father, then drowned in a car, channelling the Smiths: “What a heavenly way to die … to die by his lover’s side.� That blend of light and dark runs through the novel, but the person Nils really misses is his late wife Marta. He masks his turmoil (“After the storm … there’s no evidence. Only the calm blue surface�), and tries to remember the happy times. He recalls his daughter taking him to see a play. “What did you like about it?� “Everything.� The reader understands.

This collection of macabre stories set across England explores class, hierarchy and the enduring nature of inequality

Folk horror may have had a dramatic resurgence in recent years, but it has always been the backbone of much of our national storytelling. A new anthology of 10 stories set across England, Bog People, brings together some of the most accomplished names in the genre.

In her introduction, editor Hollie Starling describes an ancient ritual in a Devon village: the rich throw heated pennies from their windows, watching those in need burn their fingers. Folk horror by its nature is inherently connected to class and hierarchy. Reverence for tradition is a double-edged sword – or a burning-hot coin.

The rain stops, the sun shows, another night comes dark and flowing with energy. I don’t sleep; I feel my way through the landscape, the trees that reach and catch my shirt sleeves, holding on to me, saving me from slipping on mossy roots, the unfriendly gorse keeping me at a distance, saying don’t step here, stopping me from tearing my feet on its throne of thorns. Stars alive, alight, I wish you could see them…

First light fattened like a dying star and formed the signature of an industrial town already at toil predawn, its factory stacks belching the new day black, the mills dyeing the forked-tongue river sterile inside that Hellmouth north of Halifax where paternal cotton kings had housed their workers in spoked rows of blind back-to-backs quick to tilt and rot.

The reader grapples with fascism and complicity through the eyes of a mute autistic girl being treated during the second world war

As I started reading Alice Jolly’s new novel, whose narrator is a mute autistic girl in wartime Vienna, I realised that I was resisting its very premise. I am generally sceptical about books that use child narrators to add poignancy to dark plots, or novels that use nazism as a means of introducing moral jeopardy to their characters’ journeys. And yet by the end Jolly had won me over. This is a book that walks a tightrope between sentimentality and honesty, between realism and imagination, and creates something spirited and memorable as it does so.

We meet our fierce narrator, Adelheid Brunner, when she is brought into a children’s hospital by her grandmother, who cannot cope with the little girl’s fixations. Adelheid is obsessed with the matchboxes of the title, which she is constantly studying, ordering and occasionally discarding. In the hospital, she finds that she and her fellow child inmates are the object of obsessive study in turn by their doctors – sometimes understood, sometimes valued, and then, tragically, sometimes discarded.

Working in a bookshop while failing to write a novel, the narrator admits to being a ‘living cliche’ in this bitter black comedy

“I had become a living cliche: the cantankerous bookseller,� the narrator declares a third of the way through John Tottenham’s debut novel. “No book or movie that included a scene set in a bookstore was complete without such a stock ‘character’.� That’s one way to pre-empt criticism, and Sean Hangland is just such a stock figure. Embittered, rude, apathetic, resentful of the success and happiness of others and intellectually snobbish, he’s a 48-year-old aspiring writer who makes ends meet, just about, working in an independent bookshop in a gentrifying part of LA.

He worries about turning 50 having made nothing of his life. He notes, lugubriously, that he barely seems to get any writing done and that – having no gift for plot, characterisation or prose – the novel he claims to be trying to produce will be lousy anyway. He keeps bumping into old friends whose books are being published by hip independent presses or who have acquired nice girlfriends, or both. His teeth are in bad shape.

The return of Charlie and Lola; the second lives of trees; the dangers of time travel; a YA Bluebeard retelling and more

The Street Where Santa Lives by Harriet Howe and Julia Christians, Little Tiger, £12.99
When an old man moves in on a busy street, only his little neighbour notices; with his white beard and round belly, she’s convinced he’s Santa. But when Santa falls ill, other neighbours must rally round to take care of him. Will he be better in time for Christmas? This sweet, funny, acutely observed picture book is a festive, joyous celebration of community.

I Am Wishing Every Minute for Christmas by Lauren Child, S&S, £12.99
Twenty-five years after their first appearance, this delightful, engaging new Charlie and Lola picture book is filled with Lola’s excited impatience as she and her big brother get everything ready for Christmas.

The healing power of gardens; celebrating an abolitionist; hope in the toughest times; a gladiator romantasy and more

The Butterfly House by Harry Woodgate, Andersen, £12.99
Miss Brown’s wild garden scares most people, but when Holly discovers her reclusive neighbour’s sadness, she decides to help turn the wilderness into a butterfly haven. A beautiful, moving picture book about the healing power of gardens and community.

The History of We by Nikkolas Smith, Rock the Boat, £8.99
Via rich, dynamic paintings and thoughtful pared-back text, Smith answers the question “What does the beginning look like?� with this powerful picture book, the shared story of humanity’s first ancestors in “the fertile cradle of Africa�.

A bothered bear; a great guide to drawing; a life of Josephine Baker; a role model daughter; a search for words and more

Bear’s Nap by Emily Gravett, Two Hoots, £12.99
Someone is cheeping and keeping Bear from sleeping in this increasingly uproarious picture book filled with forest-dwelling creatures and their noises. A joy to read aloud.

This Is Who I Am by Rashmi Sirdeshpande, illustrated by Ruchi Mhasane, Andersen, £12.99
A moving celebration of heritage and identity, this softly coloured picture book follows a little girl with “a foot in two worlds�, who is both “the richness of all the worlds she belongs to� and uniquely, proudly herself.

A huge brolly; sibling revelry; poetic Paris; first aid for youngsters; Regency blackmail; blackly comic YA fiction and more

A Totally Big Umbrella by Sarah Crossan, illustrated by Rebecca Cobb, Walker, £12.99
Rain ruins all Tallulah’s favourite things until she finds a really huge umbrella – but it’s so big it holds her back. Could there be worse things than getting wet? Enchanting and imaginative, this gentle, playful picture book addresses an anxious child’s need to find control.

The Elephant and the Piano by Colette Hiller, illustrated by Nabila Adani, Magic Cat, £7.99
Short-tempered and destructive, Bonti the elephant is all alone – until the music of a piano reaches him. A luminous, touching picture book, based on a true story.

As the first part of his acclaimed Blinding trilogy is released in the UK, the novelist talks about communism, Vladimir Nabokov – and those Nobel rumours

In 2014, when he was travelling around the US on a book tour, Mircea Cărtărescu was able to fulfil the dream of a lifetime: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection. Cărtărescu is a great admirer of the Russian-American author, and shares with him a literary career that bridges the western and eastern cultural spheres – as well as a history of being mooted as the next Nobel literature laureate but never having won it.

Above all, the Romanian poet and novelist shares Nabokov’s fascination with butterflies. As a child, he harboured dreams of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, Cărtărescu was allowed access to Nabokov’s former office and marvelled at specimens the St Petersburg-born author had collected. “His most important scientific work was about butterflies’ sexual organs, and I saw these very tiny vials with them in,� he whispers in awe. “It’s like an image from a poem or a story. It was absolutely fantastic.�

Democracy, birds and hangover cures – famous fans put their questions to the visionary author

After the ­phenomenal global success, not to mention timeliness, of the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale in 2017, Margaret Atwood has been regarded as “a combination of figurehead, prophet and saint�, the author writes in her new memoir Book of Lives. Over 600 pages this “memoir of sorts� ranges from her childhood growing up in the Canadian backwoods to her grief at the death of her partner of 48 years, the writer Graeme Gibson, in 2019, with many friendships, the occasional spat and more than 50 books (including Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace and the Booker prizewinning The Blind Assassin and The Testaments) in between.

The author, who turned 86 last week, always likes to take the long view, often from a couple of centuries’ distance. As Rebecca Solnit notes below, she now has a long view of our times. Age and the freedom of being a writer (as she says, she can’t get sacked) make her fearless in speaking out.

The Norwegian author on his autofictional epic, moving to London, and the psychopath at the heart of his new novel

Fifteen years ago, discussing the success of his six-volume autofictional work My Struggle on Norwegian radio, Karl Ove Knausgård said he felt as if he had “actually sold my soul to the devil�. My Struggle had become a runaway success in Norway – a success that would subsequently be repeated across the world – but the project provoked anger in some quarters for its portrayal of friends and family members. This was a work of art that came at a price. Hence, for its creator, its Faustian aspect.

That experience lies at the root of Knausgård’s latest novel, The School of Night, the fourth volume in his Morning Star sequence, in which his typical character studies and fine-grained attention to the minutiae of daily life are married to a compelling supernatural plot involving a mysterious star appearing in the sky and the dead returning to life. Volumes one and three, The Morning Star and The Third Realm, cycled between the same group of interconnected characters, while the second book, The Wolves of Eternity, moved back to the 1980s and told the story of a young Norwegian man and his discovery of a Russian half-sister. Only towards the end of its 800 pages did the novel intersect with the events of The Morning Star. The School of Night, perhaps frustratingly for some, again moves backwards instead of forwards, this time to 1985 London, and follows the art school career of a young Norwegian, Kristian Hadeland, who is pursuing his dream of fame as a photographer. Kristian, events reveal, is someone who will sacrifice anything, and anyone, to succeed. Charting Kristian’s rise and fall is an addictive and eerie reading experience.

The author on Anna Karenina, the brilliance of Anita Brookner and finally getting Nabokov

My earliest reading memory
I acquired from somewhere, in my more or less atheistic family, a Ladybird Book of the Lord’s Prayer, whose every page I can recover in all its lurid 1960s naturalism. “As they forgive us our trespasses against them …� The horrified boy leaves a hand mark on the wall his father has just painted.

My favourite book growing up
One of my favourites was E Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods. The lives of those Edwardian children seemed as rich as a plum pudding, with their knickerbockers and their ironies, their cook and their sophisticated vocabulary. I didn’t understand, in my childhood, that they were separated from me by a gulf of time and change. Because of books, the past seemed to be happening in the next room, as if I could step into it effortlessly.

Understanding the surprising mechanism behind apathy can help unlock scientific ways to boost your motivation

We all know people with very different levels of motivation. Some will go the extra mile in any endeavour. Others just can’t be bothered to put the effort in. We might think of them as lazy – happiest on the sofa, rather than planning their latest project. What’s behind this variation? Most of us would probably attribute it to a mixture of temperament, circumstances, upbringing or even values.

But research in neuroscience and in patients with brain disorders is challenging these assumptions by revealing the brain mechanisms that underlie motivation. When these systems become dysfunctional, people who were once highly motivated can become pathologically apathetic. Whereas previously they might have been curious, highly engaged and productive – at work, in their social lives and in their creative thinking – they can suddenly seem like the opposite.

A sharply satirical attack on unevenly applied 19th-century laws to enforce religious observance still bites today

Rich and Poor, or Saint and Sinner

The poor man’s sins are glaring;
In the face of ghostly warning
He is caught in the fact
Of an overt act —
Buying greens on Sunday morning.