Dynasties, disruptors, and Guinness: 2025's best business books
Gareth Sheridan's book charts the growth of his Nutriband firm into a successful enterprise navigating the shark-fest of public trading.
As the year draws to a close, looks back at some of the best Irish and international business books of 2025.
Sheridan has come a long way from painting houses in Terenure to being one of the most high-profile Irish entrepreneurs of 2025.
The 35-year-old took his startup, Nutriband, all the way to a successful listing on the Nasdaq exchange — but with many a door slammed in his face along the way. This book tells his fascinating story, describing the ups and downs.
Turning a college thesis in to a successful enterprise, Sheridan brought it to the US, navigating the shark-fest of public trading.
With the help of some great partners, his company was listed on the Nasdaq in 2021. One Nutriband product, Aversa, has been developed as a non-abusable alternative to opiate pain medicines, providing pain management for chronic sufferers but without the risk of addiction.
Nutriband, well on the way to becoming a billion-dollar concern, with breakthrough products and patents in 45 countries, is a story of Irish iron-willed resilience — and never taking no for an answer.
And, to prove he’s not just ambitious in the corporate arena, Sheridan also announced his intention to run as a candidate in Ireland’s presidential election, though he ultimately did not run.
The story of the birth of modern entertainment in Ireland through two generations of a remarkable immigrant family who helped shape it — from the birth of cinema to the end of Hollywood’s golden age.
Maurice Elliman arrived in Dublin in 1892, as a penniless refugee from the pogroms in Tsarist Russia.
He started out by projecting magic lantern shows in travelling fairgrounds, and by the time he died, 50 years later, was hailed as a pioneer of cinema and “the father of the Dublin film trade”.
His son, Louis, expanded the business in to a national entertainment empire of 30 cinemas and major Dublin theatres, among them the Royal and the Gaiety — where the leading lights of international theatre, opera, dance, and music brought Irish audiences entertainment equal to any on New York’s Broadway or London’s West End.
A remarkable tale of Ireland’s golden age of entertainment.
It’s been quite a year for the family famous for the pint of plain — mostly down to the Netflix series, 'House Of Guinness'.
Growing up at Farmleigh House, the country mansion now owned by the State, Arthur Edward Guinness — Ned for short — was fascinated by the secrets and legends that surrounded the early generations of his famous family of brewers.
Against the backdrop of epic and convulsive times in Ireland and Britain, he explores the struggles and passions of his ancestors, who went from obscurity in Kildare to the pinnacle of Irish and British society.
Each generation confronted new challenges, until the author’s great-great-grandfather bought out his glamorous older brother and floated Guinness on the stock exchange.
Overnight, Edward Cecil Guinness became Ireland’s richest man. This book is a tale in which innovative brewing, sibling rivalry, and social mobility are interwoven with historic national events, including Catholic Emancipation, the Famine, the Home Rule movement, and, ultimately, Irish independence.
“The nostalgic smell still hits me as I walk around The Liberties today, and I always know, then, I am home,” Guinness writes.
's technology reporter Eva Dou pieces together a portrait of Huawei’s reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei, and his sprawling corporate empire.
Based on wide-ranging interviews and archival research, House of Huawei dissects the global web of power, money, influence, surveillance, bloodshed, and national glory that Huawei helped to build — the untold story of the company that shook the world.
On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company in to one of the world’s most powerful technological empires.
Zhengfei was thrust in to the global media eye in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff and helped set alight a US-China trade war.
The time has come to rethink liberal answers to society’s biggest challenges — by ditching scarcity politics and embracing visionary action to create an abundant future.
Authors Klein and Thompson analyse the political, economic, and cultural forces that have led us to this point, unpicking the barriers to progress so as to shift the political agenda, which not only protects and preserves, but also builds.
From healthcare to housing, infrastructure to innovation, they lay out a path to a future defined by abundance.
The threat to liberal democracy is not just autocrats — it is a lack of effective action by so-called progressives.
We have the means to build an equitable world without hunger, they argue, fuelled by clean energy — rather than the present political sphere driven by public institutions that no longer deliver on big ideas.
Republished this year, the author Mark Manson has a gift for the eye-catching phrase, including: “You cannot be a powerful and life-changing presence to some people without being a joke or an embarrassment to others.”
In this self-help guide, he suggests we stop trying to be ‘positive’ all the time and, instead, become better at handling adversity.
For decades, we’ve been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life — but those days are over. “Let’s be honest; sometimes things are f**ked up and we have to live with it.”
Never missing an opportunity to employ that well-worn expletive, he concludes: “In life, we have a limited amount of f**ks to give — so you must choose your f**ks wisely.” If you want to give a New Year's gift that will prompt lively dinner table conversations, this tome seems a safe bet.
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