I’m switching things up a little bit this year, and kicking off my year in review looking forward rather than back. One of my favourite things to do this time of year is to scour publishers catalogues in search of new titles to get excited about. This lead to a list of 18 of my most anticipated releases to look forward to. They are across a number of genres and split between authors I’ve read from before and books I’m excited for purely based off their synopsis.
Authors I’ve read from before:
New planets are fair game to asset strippers and interplanetary opportunists – and a commercial mission to a distant star system discovers a moon that is pitch black, but alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is anathema to human life, but ripe for exploitation. They named it Shroud.
Under no circumstances should a human end up on Shroud’s inhospitable surface. Except a catastrophic accident sees Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne doing just that. Forced to stage an emergency landing, in a small, barely adequate vehicle, they are unable to contact their ship and are running out of time. What follows is a gruelling journey across land, sea and air. During this time, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s dominant species. It also begins to understand them . . .
If they escape Shroud, they’ll face a crew only interested in profiteering from this extraordinary world. They’ll somehow have to explain the impossible and translate the incredible. That is, if they make it back at all.
Expected release date: February 27th
Publisher: Tor
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.
Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.
Expected release date: March 4th
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Can 'no' be a declaration of love? What happens when love is savage, dangerous and all-consuming? In this gorgeous and unsettling collection, women navigate the complexities and cruelties of desire across time and place, from a medieval convent to a Victorian parlour to a 1990s high school.
* An expectant mother feeds raw meat to the wasp's nest in her shed.
* A pair of sapphic lovers use ghost possession to fleece money from lecherous men.
* One woman in wartime London discovers that she loves her husband much more as a ghost.
* A teenage girl becomes infatuated with a bloodthirsty succubus.
Intensely atmospheric, surprising and darkly funny, this collection is a richly flavoured feast from a brilliant writer in full command of the form.
Expected release date: February 6th
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
In the canton of Yarrowdale, at the very edge of the Empire’s reach, an impossible crime has occurred. A Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air—abducted from his quarters while the door and windows remained locked from the inside, in a building whose entrances and exits are all under constant guard.
To solve the case, the Empire calls on its most brilliant and mercurial investigator, the great Ana Dolabra. At her side, as always, is her bemused assistant Dinios Kol.
Before long, Ana’s discovered that they’re not investigating a disappearance, but a murder—and that the killing was just the first chess move by an adversary who seems to be able to pass through warded doors like a ghost, and who can predict every one of Ana’s moves as though they can see the future.
Worse still, the killer seems to be targeting the high-security compound known as the Shroud. Here, the Empire's greatest minds dissect fallen Titans to harness the volatile magic found in their blood. Should it fall, the destruction would be terrible indeed—and the Empire itself will grind to a halt, robbed of the magic that allows its wheels of power to turn.
Din has seen Ana solve impossible cases before. But this time, with the stakes higher than ever and Ana seemingly a step behind their adversary at every turn, he fears that his superior has finally met an enemy she can’t defeat.
Expected release date: April 1st
Publisher: Del Rey
An anthology of stories from different disabled authors, chronicling their disabled childhoods, edited by one of my favourite authors, literary critiques and bookish creators. Growing up disabled can be an isolating experience. As much as you might be surrounded by loving and well-meaning friends and family, chances are no one close to you is going through this alongside you . . . until now!
From navigating sports at school, to facing the confusion of getting given free stuff all the time, to juggling hospital trips alongside your social life, this anthology of firsthand experiences of childhood disability will be a welcome companion for disabled children. For non-disabled children it provides a welcome own-voice perspective and will help build empathy and understanding. A very powerful, much-needed book.
Expected release date: April 24th
Publisher: Faber
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.
Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing – formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness – are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting a second chance.
Expected release date: May 13th
Publisher: Penguin Press
Annihilation meets Day of the Triffids in this full-on body horror/alien invasion apocalypse.
Since she was three years old, Anastasia Miller has been telling anyone who would listen that she's an alien disguised as a human being, and that the armada that left her on Earth is coming for her. Since she was three years old, no one has been willing to listen.
Now, with an alien signal from the stars being broadcast around the world, humanity is finally starting to realize that it's already been warned, and it may be too late. The invasion is coming, Stasia's biological family is on the way to bring her home, and very few family reunions are willing to cross the gulf of space for just one misplaced child.
What happens when you know what’s coming, and just refuse to listen?
Expected release date: May 6th
Publisher: Tor
Another one where there is little information available outside the tagline, yet V.E. Schwabs name will always peak my interest, despite me having a choppy trackrecord with her books (or vampire-novels for that matter). Santo Domingo de la Calzada, 1532.
London, 1837.
Boston, 2019.
Three young women, their bodies planted in the same soil, their stories tangling like roots.
One grows high, and one grows deep, and one grows wild.
And all of them grow teeth.
Expected release date: June 25th
Publisher: Tor
Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind - a subject of folklore and awe, who has blasted the sublime landscape of the Eden Valley since the very dawn of time.
Through the stories of those who've obsessed over this phenomenon, Helm's extraordinary history is formed: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate Helm, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish Helm, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture Helm - and the farmer's daughter who loved Helm. But now Dr Selima Sutar, surrounded by infinite clouds and measuring instruments in her observation hut, fears human pollution is killing Helm.
Rich, wild and vital, Helm is the story of a unique life force, and of a relationship:
between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other.
Expected release date: June 5th
Publisher: Faber & Faber
10. Sunbirth - An Yu
From the celebrated author of Ghost Music and Braised Pork, a bewitching and atmospheric novel following two sisters in an isolated village as the sun begins to diminish above them.
In Five Poems Lake, a small village surrounded by impenetrable deserts, the sun is slowly disappearing overhead. A young woman keeps one apprehensive eye on the sky above as she tends the pharmacy of traditional medicine that belonged to her great grandfather. She has few customers, and even fewer her older sister Dong Ji, her last living relative, works at a wellness parlor across town for those who can afford it—which, during these strange and difficult days, is not many.
Five Poems Lake had fallen on hard times long before the sun began shrinking, but now, every few days, a new sliver disappears. As the temperature drops and the lake freezes over, the population of the town realizes that they will soon die—if not of the cold and starvation, then of despair. When the Beacons begin to appear—ordinary people with heads replaced by searing, blinding light, like miniature suns—the town’s residents wonder if they may hold the answer to their salvation, or if they are just another sign of impending ruin. Soon, a photograph found in the possessions of their father, who disappeared mysteriously twelve years ago, will offer another clue in the mystery of the Beacons, and Dong Ji and her sister wonder if they may finally learn what happened to their father.
With a richly surreal sensibility that has earned comparisons to the work of Haruki Murakami, and anchored by searching curiosity and wisdom, in Sunbirth An Yu honors the unique relationship held between sisters and asks how much we can ever know about the deepest mysteries of the world. Expected release date: August 5th
Publisher: Grove Press
Very little information is available except for the tagline, but based on that alone (and the merit of the author of course) I'm already interested enough to put it on this list. Katabasis is pitched as R.F. Kuang's newest fantasy novel with themes of dark academia and ancient Greek mythology, in which two academic rivals from Cambridge must travel to hell to rescue the soul of their advisor. Getting there was easy. Surviving it – and each other – is another thing entirely.
Expected release date: August 25th
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Debuts and new-to-me authors
When Elise and her boyfriend, Tom, set off for Minnesota, all she knows about harvesting sugar beets (Beta vulgaris) is that her paycheck will cover a few months’ rent on their Brooklyn apartment. She’ll try anything to escape the incessant debt collection calls—and chronic anxieties about her body and her relationship. But as the grueling graveyard shifts set in, Elise notices strange threatening texts, a mysterious rash, a string of disappearances from the workers’ campsite, and snatches of a hypnotic voice coming from the beet pile itself.
As crewmembers vanish, Elise obsesses over Tom’s closeness with their charismatic coworker Cee and falls back on self-destructive patterns of disordered eating and dissociation. Against the horrors of her uncertain future, is the siren song of the beet pile almost . . . appealing? Biting and eerie, Beta Vulgaris harnesses an audacious premise to undermine straightforward narratives of class, trauma, consumption, and redemption.
Expected release date: February 11th
Publisher: W.W. North and Company
A FOLK TALE. A HORROR STORY. A LOVE STORY. AN ENCHANTMENT.
Margot and Mama have lived by the forest since Margot can remember. When Margot is not at school, they spend quiet days together in their cottage, waiting for strangers to knock on their door. Strays, Mama calls them. Mama loves the strays. She feeds them wine, keeps them warm. Then she satisfies her burning appetite by picking apart their bodies.
But Mama’s want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, little Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires and make her own bid for freedom.
With this gothic coming-of-age tale, debut novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire and animal instincts – and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.
Expected release date: February 4th
Publisher: Weidenfelt and Nicholson
Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, a masterful novel about loss and memory in the aftermath of a horrifying ecological disaster.
In the summer of 2020, as Europe is beginning to open back up after the first phase of the pandemic, a young Japanese woman based in the German city of Göttingen is working on a PhD about the iconography of medieval saints. She waits at the train station to meet her old friend from graduate school, Nomiya, who died nine years earlier in Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster, but has suddenly returned without any explanation.
When Nomiya arrives, the narrator guides him through Göttingen’s scale model of the solar system, talking about her studies, her roommate, and their mutual friends. Yet it isn’t long before his spectral presence in the city begins to fray the narrator’s psyche and destabilize the world beyond: eerie discoveries are made in the forest, Pluto begins disappearing and reappearing, and threads unravel in the fabric of time. The narrative continues to spiral and unfold to include the Japanese physicist Terada Torahiko, mysteriously sprouting teeth, and Saint Lucia, all set against the ever-lingering presence of death.
Expected release date: February 4th
Publisher: Literary Fiction
A red algae bloom has taken over Mercy, Louisiana. Ever since a devastating hurricane, mutated wildlife lurks in the water that rises by the day. But Mercy has always been a place where monsters walk in plain sight. Especially at its heart: The Cove, where Noon’s life was upended long before the storm at a party her older boyfriend insisted on.
Now, Noon is stuck navigating the submerged town with her mom, who believes their dead family has reincarnated as sea creatures. Alone with the pain of what happened that night at the cove, Noon buries the truth: she is not the right shape.
When Mercy’s predatory leader demands Noon and her mom capture the creature drowning residents, she reluctantly finds an ally in his deadly hunter of a daughter and friends old and new. As the next storm approaches, Noon must confront the past and decide if it’s time to answer the monster itching at her skin.
Expected release date: March 4th
Publisher: Bloomsbury YA
Have you ever felt uncomfortable in your own body? Perhaps you’re navigating the unwanted rhythms of aging, an unexpected illness or disability, society’s impossible and forever-changing beauty standards, or the feeling that your body has “betrayed” you in some way. If this is you, you are not alone. This experience has a Body Grief.
In This Is Body Grief, Jayne Mattingly offers a healing path through Body Grief so you can feel at home in the skin you’re in. Having navigated Body Grief as both an eating disorder recovery coach and as a newly chronically ill and disabled person and advocate, Mattingly walks readers through the range of complex emotions that encompasses this experience with intimate understanding and compassion, starting with dismissal, shock, and anger. Ultimately, she shows your body has never been, is not, and will never be against you. Self-love begins when you learn to trust and work in tandem with your body as it is in this very moment.
Expected release date: March 18th
Publisher: Non-fiction, disability
Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously – the one she was born into, and the one she has made.
Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family’s verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood, slip away.
Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents’ bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She’s newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone.
Expected release date: May 13th
Publisher: Riverhead Books
There is no flash of light, no crumbling, no quaking. Each person in New York wakes up on an unfamiliar block after its buildings rearrange their positions overnight. The power grid has snapped, thousands of residents are missing, and the Empire State Building is on Coney Island—for now. The next night, it happens again.
Esme Green and Arjun Varma work for the city of New York's emergency management team and are tasked with managing the disaster response for "The Unmapping." As Esme tries to wade through the bureaucratic nightmare of an endlessly shuffling city, she's distracted by the ongoing search for her missing fiancé. Arjun focuses on the ground-level rescue of disoriented New Yorkers, hoping to become the hero the city needs.
With scientists scrambling to find a solution—or at least a means to cope—and mysterious "red cloak" cults cropping up in the disaster’s wake, New York begins to reckon with a new reality no one recognizes. For Esme and Arjun, the fight to hold the city together will mean tackling questions about themselves that they are too afraid to ask—and facing answers they never expected. With themes of climate change, political unrest, and social justice, The Unmapping is a timely and captivating debut.
Expected release date: June 3rd
Publisher: Bindery Books
The Girl in the Creek by Hugo Award winner Wendy N. Wagner is an atmospheric and eerie story about a Pacific Northwest forest that seems to be devouring all who enter. A perfect read for fans of T. Kingfisher and Jeff VanderMeer’s cli-fi cosmic horror.
The Clackamas National Forest has always been a sanctuary for evil—human and alien.The shadows of looming trees and long-abandoned mines shelter poachers and serial killers alike. Then there’s the ruined hotel on the outskirts of picturesque small town Faraday, Oregon, nestled in the foothills of Mt. Hood. The one drowning in mushrooms and fungus not even the local expert can identify. Not to mention the stacks of missing persons cases.Freelance writer Erin Harper arrives in Faraday to find out what happened to her brother, whose disappearance in the forest has haunted her for years. But someone else has gone missing. And when Erin finds her in the creek, the girl vanishes again — this time from the morgue, and days later her fingerprints show up at a murder scene.Maybe it’s a serial killer, or maybe it’s the spores infecting the forest and those lost inside. Erin must find answers quickly, before anyone else goes missing. But she might be next.
Expected release date: June 15th
Publisher: Tor Nightfire
A bonus-entry to round out the list
Adding this book on here may or may not be cheating, as it's already been released in the USA, but has a 2025-release date on my side of the pond. That being said, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't among my most anticipated books to be released.
There’s a madman dog beside me, and the hounds of memory ahead of us . . . It’s love and beasts and wild mistakes, and regret, but never to change things.
What happens when the Zusak family opens their home to three big, wild, street-hardened dogs—Reuben, more wolf than hound; Archer, blond, beautiful, destructive; and the rancorously smiling Frosty, who walks like a rolling thunderstorm?
The answer can only be chaos: There are street fights, park fights, public shamings, property damages, injuries, hospital visits, wellness checks, pure comedy, shocking tragedy, and carnage that must be read to be believed.
There is a reckoning of shortcomings and failure, a strengthening of will, but most important of all, an explosion of love—and the joy and recognition of family.
Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth) is a tender, motley, and exquisitely written memoir about the human need for both connection and disorder, a love letter to the animals who bring hilarity and beauty—but also the visceral truth of the natural world—straight to our doors and into our lives and change us forever.
If you want even more upcoming releases, check out my dedicated page on my blog where I update newly announced releases that trigger my interest throughout the year. Until then, check back in next friday for the next entry in my Year in Review, all about my most Surprising and Underrated Reads.
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