Plenty of excellent books are coming out in early 2025. Suzanne Collins has written a new Hunger Games book, and Rebecca Yarros has written Onyx Storm. Brandon Sanderson’s Wind and Truth is highly anticipated by those who love fantasy books. A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping is also on many people’s lists.
Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3) by Rebecca Yarros
After nearly eighteen months at Basgiath War College, Violet Sorrengail knows there’s no more time for lessons. No more time for uncertainty.
Because the battle has truly begun, and with enemies closing in from outside their walls and within their ranks, it’s impossible to know who to trust.
Violet must journey beyond the failing Aretian wards to seek allies from unfamiliar lands to stand with Navarre. The trip will test every bit of her wit, luck, and strength, but she will do anything to save what she loves―her dragons, her family, her home, and him.
Even if it means keeping a secret so big that it could destroy everything.
They need an army. They need power. They need magic. And they need the one thing only Violet can find―the truth.
Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. In honour of the Quarter Quell this year, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.
Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy tries not to think too hard about his chances. He only cares about making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.
When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12, a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town.
Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail as the Games begin. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.
Scythe & Sparrow by Brynne Weaver
From the #1 New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of the genre-breaking international TikTok sensation Butcher & Blackbird and Leather & Lark comes the final book in the Ruinous Love Trilogy―a friends-with-benefits dark romantic comedy packed with murder, mayhem, and spice.
Doctor Fionn Kane is running from a broken heart, one he hopes to mend in small-town Nebraska, far away from his almost-fiancé and his derailed surgical career. It’s a simpler life: head down, hard work, and no romantic relationships. He wants none of the circus he left behind in Boston.
But then the real circus finds him.
Motorcycle performer Rose Evans has spent a decade on the road with the Silveria Circus, and it suits her just fine, especially when she has the urge to indulge in a bit of murder when she’s not in the spotlight. But when a kill goes awry, and she ends up with a broken leg, Rose finds herself stuck in Nebraska, at the home of the adorably nerdy town doctor.
The problem is not every broken heart can be sewn back together.
. . . And the longer you stay in one place, the more likely your ghosts will catch up.
The Primal of Blood and Bone by Jennifer L. Armentrout
In the shadows and flames, Primals will fall…
And from the blood and ash, new gods will rise.
In the thrilling penultimate chapter of the viral BLOOD AND ASH series by #1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer L. Armentrout, Poppy and Casteel face their most complex challenges as old enemies rise and ancient powers stir from their slumber.
Bound by love but driven by destiny, they must navigate a world on the brink of
devastation—where every choice has deadly consequences. With their bond tested and their future hanging in the balance, the realm’s fate rests on the strength of their hearts and the power of the Deminyen.
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.
Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she will find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.
Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as quickly as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually spent in blood.
Say You’ll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez
There might be no such thing as a perfect guy, but Xavier Rush comes disastrously close. A gorgeous veterinarian giving Greek god vibes—all while cuddling a tiny kitten? Immediately yes. That is until Xavier opens his mouth and proves that even sculpted gods can say the wrong thing. Like, wrong. Of course, there’s nothing Samantha loves more than proving an asshole wrong…
. . . unless, of course, he can admit he made a mistake. But after one incredible and seemingly endless date—possibly the best in living history—Samantha is forced to accept that her family is in crisis and any kind of relationship would be impossible. Samantha begs Xavier to forget her. To remember their night together as a perfect moment, as crushing as that may be.
Only no distance or time is nearly enough to forget something between them. And the only thing better than one perfect memory is to make a life—and even love—worth remembering.
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
The future of storytelling is here.
Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing than a lucrative career in medicine or law, Zelu has always felt like the outcast of her large Nigerian family. Then her life is upended when, in the middle of her sister’s lavish Caribbean wedding, she’s unceremoniously fired from her university job, and, to add insult to injury, her novel is rejected by yet another publisher. She writes something just for herself with her career and dreams crushed in one fell swoop. What comes out is nothing like the quiet literary novels that have so far peppered her unremarkable career. It’s a far-future epic where androids and AI wage war in the grown-over ruins of human civilization. She calls it Rusted Robots.
When Zelu finds the courage to share her strange novel, she does not realize she is about to embark on a life-altering journey that will catapult her into literary stardom and perhaps obliterate everything her book was meant to be. From Chicago to Lagos to the far reaches of space, Zelu’s novel will change the future for humanity and the robots who come next.
A book-within-a-book that blurs the line between writing and being written, Death of the Author is a metafiction masterpiece combining Yellowface’s razor-sharp commentary with the heartfelt humanity of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Surprisingly funny, deeply poignant, and endlessly discussable, this is the tale of a woman on the margins risking everything to be heard. It is a testament to the power of storytelling to shape the world as we know it.
The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld
Two academic rivals from Cambridge must travel to Hell to rescue the soul of their advisor. Getting there was easy. Surviving it – and each other – is another thing entirely.
2025’s most unexpected love story will be hell in the new novel by New York Times #1 Bestseller R.F. Kuang. It is coming in August 2025!
Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
Alice Scott is an eternal optimist who dreams of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize-winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: To write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years—or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be the Margaret Ives. Tragic heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the 20th Century.
When Margaret invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person to tell her story, three things keep Alice’s head in the game.
One: Alice genuinely likes people, which means people usually like Alice—and she has a whole month to win the legendary woman over.
Two: She’s ready for this job and the chance to impress her perennially unimpressed family with a Serious Publication.
Three: Hayden Anderson, who should have no reason to be concerned about losing this book, is glowering at her in a shaken-to-the-core way that suggests he sees her as competition.
However, the problem is that Margaret only gives them pieces of her story—pieces they can’t swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning that pulses between them every time they’re in the same room.
And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story—like Margaret’s spinning tale—could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad…depending on who’s telling it.
Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six comes an epic new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle program and the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.
Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as an aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle Program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few to go to space.
Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilots Hank Redmond and John Griffin, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.
As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan questions everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.
Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes instantly.
Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.