Pile by the Bed’s Top Five Fantasy books of 2025 and five honourable mentions
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.
Joe Hill’s 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 by all Hill’s own.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia switches register yet again in The Bewitching to explore the idea of witches across Mexican and North American folk lore. The narrative ties together three time frames – 1908 Mexico, 1930s New England and again at the same New England college in the 1990s.
New weird does not get much weirder than The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes – a heady mix of biopunk, steampunk, baroque and just plain weird. The story follows two characters at different ends of the social structure in the vermin-infested city of Tiliard. Ennes delivers not only a mind-bending scenario and setting but political and social commentary and devastating emotional beats
The third book in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s stunning Tyrant Philosophers series, Days of Shattered Faith further explores issues of empire, colonisation and conquest in a complex and enmdlessly fascinating fantasy world. A novella Lives of Bitter Rain, released later in 2025 provides some backstory for one of the main characters.
Honourable Mentions
Whisper in the Wind is the fourth book of Luke Arnold’s downbeat but always enjoyable npoir detective meets urban fantasy Fetch Phillips series. In this volume Phillips is once again fighting the forces of greed and corruption in a world in which the magic has gone away and humans are in the ascendancy.
A Drop of Corruption is the sequel of Robert Jackson Bennett’s multi award winning crime/fantasy mash up with kaiju, The Tainted Cup. This book once again features a Sherlock Holmes and Watson style detective duo this time sent to the edges of the empire to solve a locked room murder mystery
Alix Harrow explores the power of the national myth in her time looping romantic fantasy The Everlasting. Historian Owen Mallory finds himself sent back in time to write the legend of Sir Una, a knight of the realm and inspiration of a nation at war, but soon finds that this story and his own are much much more complicated.
Follow up to The Last Hour Between Worlds, Melissa Caruso returns to the multilayered world of the Echo Archives in The Last Soul Among Wolves. Kembra Thorne gets herself mixed up in a murder mystery, a curse and an ongoing threat while also trying to work out her relationship with logntime frenemy Rika Nonesuch.
Folk horror set in an Abbey in the East Anglian fens in the 10th century, Dianelle Giles’ Mere is an atmospheric fantasy book based around power struggles both human and supernatural.
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