Climate change plays a big role in the 2025 top 10 – as always, a fair amount of speculative fiction.
Jennifer Mills puts her own spin on climate fiction in Salvage, with a clear eyed future that is clearly tough but eschews doom and gloom. This is the story of Jude, adopted and raised in luxury but who runs away when things start to collapse. This is a story of adaptation, resilience and community.
People are turning into trees in Rhett Davis’ pehnomenal second book Arborescence. Centred on a believable couple who end up in different places in realtion to the changes going on in the world. Challenging, contemplative but also at times laugh out loud funny.
Nobel Prize winner Han Kang explores a dark episode of modern Korean history in her newest novel in translation We Do Not Part. This novel follows an author to Jeju Island where she learns through a ghostly encounter of the massacre of civilians in the aftermath of World War 2. Poetic, haunting, elegiac and devastatiing.
Ian McEwan has a go at climate change in What We Can Know. Set in a future Britain that has become an archipelago, the book follows an academic who is obsessed with a lost epic poem from the early twenty first century. A book that looks both lovingly and critically at our current age and asks broader questions about how much we can ever know about someone else’s life.
Joe Hill’s first novel in almost ten years, King Sorrow is the story of six friends who make a faustian deal with a malevolent dragon but it much more than this, charting the last 35 years of history along the way. Hill has clearly inhereted the storytelling gene from his father Stephen King in a novel that is remeniscent and reverential of King’s style but all Hill’s own
Mark Brandi returns to the world of his debut Wimmera in the equally dark and engaging Eden – the story of a man fresh out of prison who quickly becomes homeless and finds himself working and living in a Melbourne cemetary.
The Impossible Thing by Belinda Bauer is part historical fiction part crime fiction. It centres around the collection of coloured guillemot eggs for sale to wealthy collectors in early twentieth century Yorkshire and then the modern day collection industry which emerges from the investigation by two young men trying to recover a stolen heirloom.
In The Incandescent Emily Tesh delivers a new spin on the magical academy trope with a book that focuses on the staff at a high school for mages. This page turning tale is as much about the magic of teaching as it is about magic and demons.
Claire North jumps into big picture space opera with Slow Gods. The central character of Slow Gods is an outsider, trying to help with an impending catastrophe while also navigating the complexities of relationships. This is space opera in the vein of some of the greats like Iain M Banks and Ann Leckie
Corey Doctorow gives readers the origin story of his hero forensic accountant Martin Hench in Picks and Shovels. Set in San Francisco in the early days of the personal computer boom Doctorow sets up a David v Goliath battle between a computer company that is locking its customers into bad hardware and worse software and an upstart company that knows it can do better. Another engaging look at the horrors of American capitalism embedded in a fun caper story and atmospheric depiction of early 1980s San Francisco.
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