By Maria Haskins
I read a lot. Partly I read a lot because it’s part of my work as a writer, reviewer, and editor. But I also read a lot simply because I love to read and 2025 has been a great year for reading. Here are 10 of the books published in 2025 that I read and loved, presented in the order in which they were published this year:
Transmentation | Transience: Or, an Accession to the People’s Council for Nine Thousand Worlds by Darkly Lem
This science fiction novel is set in an intricately constructed, jaw-droppingly strange multiverse where some people can body-hop (you’ll see) between universes. It’s a multiverse where ancient alliances, secret organizations, fierce conflicts, and nefarious plots shape a multitude of worlds and lives. What makes this sprawling book work is that the epic, complex story is told through the lives of a motley crew of characters, from bureaucrats and spies to academics and fighters. This makes the story feel both vast in scope as you travel the multiverse with them, and intensely intimate, because you get to see the impact of the plots, feuds, and machinations on the people caught up in the midst of it all. This book is the first in a series with the next instalment set to come out in 2026, and if you’re wondering who the author Darkly Lem is, it’s “five authors in an impeccably tailored trench coat”, aka Josh Eure, Craig Lincoln, Ben Murphy, Cadwell Turnbull, and M. Darusha Wehm.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
I’ve mentioned this book before in my columns here at Ruadán, and if you haven’t yet read this trippy, brutal, visceral (lots of viscera) tale of vampires and vengeance set in the American west, you are definitely missing out. I’ve been a fan of Stephen Graham Jones ever since I read his werewolf novel Mongrels, and I’d rank The Buffalo Hunter Hunter as his best work to date. There are fictional horrors here to be sure, including some inventive takes on the vampire mythos, but it’s the real, historical horrors that are the warp and weft in the story of Good Stab the Blackfeet Indian who loses everything but gains eternal life.
Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
When Sunrise on the Reaping came out this year, I finally decided to see where Collins is taking her story about Panem more than a decade after the frenzy surrounding the movies and the original Hunger Games trilogy. First, I read The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (published in 2020 ), about how the young Coriolanus Snow becomes the man who will eventually turn himself into President Snow. It’s an unflinching, razor sharp story about power and ambition and reading I felt I was watching Collins sharpening a shiv. The book that truly slayed me though was Sunrise on the Reaping. While Ballad is all about Snow, Sunrise is all about Haymitch, the man who later becomes Katniss and Peta’s mentor in their Hunger Games. In this book, Collins lays bare the brutal machinery of oppression, propaganda, and politics, as well as the deep roots of resistance, that are the very heart of Panem. I’d never have thought that Haymitch would break my heart, but in this book, he does.
Notes From a Regicide by Isaac Fellman
The publisher describes this novel as “a trans family saga set in a far-off, familiar future” and “a heartbreaking story of trans self-discovery with a rich relatability and a science-fictional twist”. Fellman’s book is all those things and more. The story is told through the eyes of Griffon Kerning. When Griffon was a teen, Etoine and Zaffre saved him from his abusive first family and became his new parents. Etoine and Zaffre were both artists and escapees from a far-off, failed revolution, and after their death, Griffon goes through Etoine’s journal trying to understand who they were and how they became the “wonderful, strange people” who helped him build a new life. Everything is vibrantly alive in this magnificently queer book as Fellman tells us a richly textured and profound story about gender and sex and relationships, about love, neurodiversity, depression, trauma, transitioning, parenthood, PTSD, and so many other facets of the human experience. This is not an action-packed story, but it’s bookended by two unforgettable duels that are fought not with weapons but with paint, brushes, and canvas.
Girl In the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner
In the very first chapter of her book, Wagner introduces us to an aspect “the Strangeness” that inhabits the Clackamas National Forest near Mt. Hood. It comes in the form of a coyote that “had not been normal in a very long time.” It’s a perfect, eerie set up for what follows as freelance writer Erin Harper arrives in the small town of Faraday with a mission: trying to figure out what happened to her brother who disappeared in the area several years ago. In Faraday, she meets up with a group of new and old friends, and as they start looking into her brother’s disappearance, things get progressively weirder, darker, and finally downright terrifying. The story is taut, suspenseful, and flat-out brutal at times, and while I don’t want to spoil anything, I will say that there’s not just some ho-hum serial killer lurking in the woods, but something a lot stranger and more insidious.
It Was Her House First by Cherie Priest
This is a haunted house story that is definitely not your average haunted house story. For example, in addition to several ghosts, It Was Her House First contains the nitty gritty, down and dirty details of what it takes to fix up a very old, very dilapidated house; how to deal with grief in good and not so good ways; and a backstory that includes the fate of an aging Hollywood starlet. Just like she did in her excellently creepy 2024 horror novel The Drowning House, Priest anchors this haunting tale firmly in the moody landscape of the Pacific Northwest and the book has a great down-to-earth, darkly tragic energy, with grief, anxiety, and greed woven into the tapestry.
Summer in the House of the Departed by Josh Rountree
Rountree’s novella is dark, melancholy, and haunting in a way that carries echoes of Ray Bradbury’s work. The story is told by Brady who spends much of his childhood in his grandmother’s old house in Texas, wrapped up in her world and her stories and surrounded by all the ghosts hanging around the house: a girl, a cowboy, Brady’s grandfather, and others. In 1981, his grandmother mysteriously disappears and so does everyone else in the town. The rest of Brady’s life becomes a threadbare blanket wrapped around that unexplained disappearance. When he returns to the house in 2025, he comes there with a purpose: to see what ghosts were left behind, and if the magic is still as real as when he was a child.
A Ruin Great and Free by Cadwell Turnbull
This is the third (final?) installment in the sprawling, multiverse-spanning Convergence saga that started with No Gods, No Monsters, and Turnbull delivers the goods with a grand and mind-blowing finale. Werewolves, ancient secret societies, trippy magic, shapeshifters of all kinds, a dragon, and big epic fights, this book has it all and then some. Turnbull takes some big swings in this book, and it all pays off in the end with a multitude of lives and stories intertwining as the fate of gods, monsters, humans, mages, and others are decided. One of the most original things about Turnbull’s writing here (and elsewhere) is that he writes so insightfully about communities, about the effort, and hard work it takes to build real, lasting, functional communities, and about how people are capable of aiding and destroying each other in equal measures. Also, and this is not a spoiler: read Turnbull’s science fiction novel The Lesson before reading this book. You’ll thank me later.
Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei
There are not enough books about the strong, complex, and often complicated bonds between siblings in the world, but this eco-speculative novel, set in a dystopian future that feels only too near and real, is powered by the knotty relationship between three sisters. Skipper, Nora, and Carmen are all very different, and are all trying to find their own ways to eke out a living in a world fraught by environmental destruction and corporate greed. When Nora goes missing and leaves behind a mysterious note, Skipper and Carmen head out on a dangerous journey to find her and save her, and maybe save the world in the process. This is the second book by Kitasei that has knocked my socks off, the first one being the “anti-colonial space heist” The Stardust Grail.
Psychopomp & Circumstanceby Eden Royce
This Southern Gothic / historical fantasy novella comes out in October, and it’s a gorgeously written and deeply felt story about family and freedom, and about finding your own place in the world. Phee St. Margaret’s life in New Charleston is hemmed in on all sides by her mother’s expectations of marriage and domesticity. Everything changes when word arrives that Phee’s Aunt Cleo has died, and Phee takes on the role of pomp, the person who will plan her aunt’s funeral. Traveling by herself to Cleo’s home in the Micronity of Horizon, Phee must face an array of trials and must learn to trust her own powers and judgement. I love the way history, fantasy, and magic are stitched together in this story, and I absolutely adore the lush, melodic richness of Royce’s prose.
