Favourite reads of 2025

[aquila1nz]

Best Books of 2025

The Ministry of Time is from the point of view of a chaperone for a man kidnapped from the past. It contains lots of unreliable narration, pointed details that don't point where they seem to and it sent me to both wikipedia (looking up more on the Franklin expedition) and AO3 (looking for whether an RPF community spawned a book nominated for this many awards - answer yes).

The Incandescent is my favourite book of the year, it asks some of the same questions that Naomi Novik's Scholomance books do; "Why send kids to magic schools if it puts them in danger?" but its protagonist is a senior teacher at a fancy English public school teaching A level demonology and confident in her ability to protect the school from any demon incursions. I love the way Saffy's quotidian teacher and admin tasks build the school's world until we can see the very cracks in it. All the points for the choice the teenagers make, that very much makes it not a YA book.

The Witch Roads and The Nameless Land are typically brilliant Kate Elliott world building and characterisation, here including protective roads that predate an empire encroached on by dangerous fog, stone sculptures that turn out to contain guardians who can travel in others' bodies, and a courier trying to protect her nephew from being claimed by his father as he comes of age. I love Elen's confidence in herself and her abilities.

Kings of the World is also set in a private school that takes magic users alongside normal students and so gets a similar cohort of scholarship students who may have used magic in uncontrolled ways before they were old enough to understand the repercussions. It's also very different: student pov, the magic is far more about control and perceptions, it's set in an alternate New Zealand - the Southland - that Knox has used before, and like her The Absolute Book it moves between fantasy and quite realistic thriller tropes in ways I haven't seen elsewhere. But the similarities to The Incandescent have continued to itch at me.

The Mars House: Julian was a London ballet dancer before he became a climate refugee on Mars, where Earther's are treated as dangerous non-citizens unless they go through difficult surgeries to limit their strength. He enters a marriage of convenience with the scion of a noble house who is in favour of the surgeries.



Favourite Sequels and Series Books of 2025

Two ends to trilogies and three standalone series books.

The Lotus Empire. Both this and The Sovereign ended up being about the magic of growing things and sacrifice required by rulers who don't see how they can both rule and keep their lover, and yet they are very different stories.

The Martian Contingency is about beginning a colony on Mars. It's not my favourite in the series, that would be The Relentless Moon, but I was really interested in the way Elma had been unaware of so much that happened while the first Mars expedition was on the surface.

The Potency of Ungovernable Impluses, another novella mystery on the platforms of Jupiter, here our detectives are slightly separated by Pleiti's academic milieu and it feels like they are finally ready to face their relationship, meanwhile there are stil many questions about humanity's situation.

What Stalks the Deep, this is T Kingfisher which makes it imminently readable and Alex Easton is my favourite of her characters. Here ka has to face the inherent horror of deep spaces alongside more biological weirdities.

The Sovereign reminded me of Cl Polk's Soulstar, looking toward not just regime change but replacing societal structures. It's a little more built into the setting, and a little less hopeful than that book.




Books I Am Looking Forward To