At the end of the year, we ask ARB’s contributors to pick just one book that they found really interesting this year: maybe already a best-seller or award-frontrunner, maybe something obscure that hasn’t got as much attention. Here are our 21 selections for 2025:
A Ruin, Great and Free by Cadwell Turnbull (Blackstone)
*A Ruin, Great and Free *is the conclusion to Cadwell Turnbull’s sweeping Convergence Saga. The work is mind-bending, asking readers to face the ways they’ve drawn lines between human and monster, person and god, this universe and others, and even past, present, and future—and what those lines have wrought. Placing these questions within spaces of relational connection beyond normative frameworks and collective…
At the end of the year, we ask ARB’s contributors to pick just one book that they found really interesting this year: maybe already a best-seller or award-frontrunner, maybe something obscure that hasn’t got as much attention. Here are our 21 selections for 2025:
A Ruin, Great and Free by Cadwell Turnbull (Blackstone)
*A Ruin, Great and Free *is the conclusion to Cadwell Turnbull’s sweeping Convergence Saga. The work is mind-bending, asking readers to face the ways they’ve drawn lines between human and monster, person and god, this universe and others, and even past, present, and future—and what those lines have wrought. Placing these questions within spaces of relational connection beyond normative frameworks and collective resistance, I found hope in this novel for the possibility of building better worlds.
* * *
Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro (Deep Vellum)
Mariette Navarro’s Ultramarine embodies so much of what I love about literary speculative fiction. Sleek, poetic, and philosophical, Navarro’s ghost-story-at-sea follows the adventures of a cargo ship after its female captain agrees to permit the crew an unscheduled swim in the ocean. The sudden suspension of the tight codes of maritime discipline lead to a profound experience of disorientation and to Melvillean ruminations on the nature of the sea and the meaning of existence. It also leads to the arrival of a mysterious extra crewman who no one can quite remember being onboard before the swim…
* * *
The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott (Tor)
Kate Elliott’s new duology (The Witch Roads and The Nameless Land) has seemingly gotten more attention than her other recent books, but everyone should read these novels. Elliott’s trademark rich worldbuilding is entwined with deceptively simple, propulsive plots in each book, and even as she foregrounds a competent survivor’s attempts to find her way through political intrigue while dealing with her teenage nephew’s growing independence and changes to her own life, the setting offers an incisive consideration of the burdens that even a “good” empire imposes on its citizens. Plus, there’s a respectful romance with a disembodied dragon.
* * *
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (William Morrow)
Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor, is the most incredible book I read in 2025. It’s science fiction, it’s metafiction, and it’s a commentary on celebrity and interconnectedness in the age of social media. This might be the bok Okorafor was working on under the title “the Africanfuturist,” a while back; it’s a powerful expression of what Africanfuturism means. It is a labyrinthine, family-driven, vulnerable story in which the protagonists struggle with the world, but not so much against it. These characters, human and posthuman, get into situations that seem hopeless, but the book offers a sense that people’s deeply felt love for themselves and each other can change things.
* * *
When There Are Wolves Again by E. J. Swift (Arcadia)
Swift manages to tread the perfect line between realism and optimism in her look at Britain, stretching from 2020 out fifty years into the future. Combining beautiful moments of bearing witness to the changes in the natural world and a close attention to the personal, political, and the social, it grasps everything I never knew I wanted in a climate fiction novel, and more besides, offering a glimpse into a better world that might yet still come to pass, as well as the horrors already at hand. An emotional gutpunch full of the vulnerability of daring to hope.
When There are Wolves Again is speculative in the sense that the events of the novel haven’t happened yet, not that they are impossible. Two timelines stretching from the pandemic years into the late twenty-first century show two women—one a filmmaker, one an activist—who devote their lives to the protection and healing of the land around them. Swift beautifully evokes ordinary garden birds, farmland reclaimed for marsh, and the always-peopled wild places of the British Isles, and dares to imagine that we can make a way past grief and paralysis to get through our polycrises to somewhere imperfectly better.
* * *
A Granite Silence by Nina Allan (riverrun)
It is uncategorisable; at times it is wild fantasy then the next moment it doesn’t feel like fiction at all. It is powerful, haunting, and beautifully written.
* * *
On the Calculation of Volume (III) by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell (New Directions)
The third installment of Danish author Solvej Balle’s septology continues the fascinating story of Tara Selter’s journey outside of time, while pushing us to think more deeply about the ways in which we perceive time. What does it mean that there are others like Tara, living through the same day, every day, and how does each character make sense of their new world? Clues, such as an ancient Roman coin, tantalize us with their significance and turn us into detectives as we read Tara’s journal and try to piece together what happened to her.
* * *
(S)Kin by Ibi Zoboi (Versify)
Zoboi uses the myth of the soucouyant to bring to light the monsters that hide behind issues of identity, class, and immigration status in diaspora communities. Her choice to write the novel in verse makes it as beautiful as it is monstrous. And while Zoboi weaves together a complex mix of themes, narrators, and writing styles, her novel is still wonderfully accessible. I highly recommend it.
* * *
The Retreat by Gemma Fairclough (Wild Hunt)
I loved The Retreat because I felt it played on themes so relevant to modern life, such as corruption, the family unit, mental health, the erosion of nature, and overbearing male patriarchs, to name just a few! The way the book was written across a variety of media really brought the content to life, and Fairclough writes with such an air of authority and confidence you can’t help but be drawn into her world.
* * *
All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall (St. Martin’s)
The book follows a young girl, Nonie, who has a special gift to feel changes in weather and water. She is living in a New York City destroyed by climate change. I especially enjoyed the first section of the book, which takes place in the American Museum of Natural History, where Nonie lives with her family and tries to figure out both this new world she’s living in and the collections of past knowledge that she lives among.
* * *
rekt by Alex Gonzalez (Erewhon)
A riveting techno-horror thriller that delves deep into toxic masculinity and tech dystopias that’s horrifying and eerily prescient/plausible for our times.
* * *
Blood for the Undying Throne by Kim Sung-il, translated by Anton Hur (Tor)
Kim Sung-il’s Blood for the Undying Throne is a worthy sequel to Blood of the Old Kings, one of my favorite fantasy novels of the past few years. Building on the first book’s perceptive portrayal of empire as a vast system,* Blood for the Undying Throne* points to the homecoming of imperial violence, an empire consuming itself, and to the fragility and necessity of resistance to oppression and, indeed, of revolution. It tempers the first book’s victories with bitter regrets but pushes its characters on regardless, towards the possibility of something new, uncertain, yet to come.
* * *
The Naming of the Birds by Paraic O’Donnell (Tin House)
The most well-crafted novel I’ve read this year is Paraic O’Donnell’s The Naming of the Birds. A friend who is a poet confirmed my sense of the book’s quality. The woman who is the novel’s prime mover, named Nightingale, gathers her astounding energy from the abuse, Epstein Island-like, she endured as a child. She mentions the “irredeemably rich” as if she were Jesus interviewed mid-fit at the temple while giving the money changers and dove-sellers what for. Echoing Nightingale’s attitude, Octavia Hillingdon, who is aiding the police, says, “It’s all that money. They never have to learn anything.”
* * *
Somewhere Past the End by Alexandria Faulkenbury (Apprentice House)
Only one speculative event happens in Faulkenbury’s underappreciated debut novel about a mother and daughter trying to escape an end-of-days cult: the sudden vanishing of every member who follows the cult leader to the location where he says the rapture will happen. Writing about religious groups is rarely subtle and often has an agenda, but Faulkenbury writes these two women with nuance and care. There’s an honesty to their portrayal that feels both radical and incredibly familiar, somehow close to home. Even the rapture begins to feel like it’s something I’ve just missed out on.
* * *
Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler (MCD)
Ray Nayler’s Where the Axe is Buried extrapolates from today’s technology, especially neurotechnology, to a dystopian future. The story follows interlocking threads of technologists, government officials, rebels, and everyday people as new technologies destabilize governments ranging from technocratic to outright totalitarian. As a scientist, I’m impressed by the application of fictional neuroscience that is closely inspired by real science (especially the connectome, and what it means for the biological basis of the mind). A sharp understanding of the constant potential to abuse science and technology is balanced by human ingenuity in fighting for what’s right.
* * *
The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes (Tor)
It’s hard to decide which fever to focus on when reading Hiron Ennes’s The Works of Vermin: the fever of the prose or the fever of the convoluted (under)city which the prose conjures. The Works of Vermin is one of the most striking contributions to the New Weird in recent memory, told, in the best tradition of the sub-genre, through the eyes of discarded and despised people. Through them, we are introduced to the hallucinatory world of Tiliard, its horrors, and the poisoned, lurid labor that keeps them at bay and allows the city to lurch, horribly, along.
* * *
Elseship by Tree Abraham (Soft Skull)
Not strictly speculative, but a fascinating experimental work about building new kinds of relationships, Elseship narrates the year after an unrequited love confession. I enjoyed how the book used a mix of personal nonfiction, theory, photographs, charts, forms, illustrations, and creative use of negative space to challenge and deconstruct traditional romantic narratives.
* * *
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken (New Directions)
Rich as we are with witchcraft literature, it’s sometimes hard to imagine how such a thoroughly-mined vein could turn out gold–and then a book likeThe Wax Child comes along. Part of the book’s triumph is its seamless integration of primary sources with original, vivid prose. That triumph is magnified by the narrator, the witch’s wax doll, whose perspective is alien yet given life by human hands, and whose bodily fluidity permits knowledge of other bodies, violence toward other bodies.The Wax Child itself is a homunculus, doll, and story: a near-perfect union of form and function.
* * *
Notes From A Regicide by Isaac Fellman (Tor)
A formally fascinating bit of middle-future metafiction—the draft of a journalist’s memoir that includes excerpts from his adopted father’s journals—Fellman’s latest is a powerhouse. Almost nobody in speculative fiction is writing sentences like these, and what the novel’s doing structurally beyond that, with identity and desire, with revolution and regret, is staggering. The longer I sit with this the more it speaks to me about imperfect survival, about art considered broadly, vitally, actively. Immense and immensely human: don’t miss this.
* * *
Other Evolutions by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia (ECW)
Full of quiet and beautiful prose, Garcia creates an Ottawa familiar, uncanny, and strange, weaving a narrative of grief and forgiveness and weirdness that clings to every page.
* * *
We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope, edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older (Saga)
We Will Rise Again is a unique anthology of social justice-oriented fiction written in partnership with working activists. Each story is a speculative extrapolation on a current issue, and the stories are interspersed with interviews and essays. The result is a thought-provoking, polyphonic collage that manages to engage authentically with nuanced issues while also leaving the reader feeling optimistic and empowered.
