My Most Anticipated Reads Of 2025

There are few books that I await with bated breath to read. Normally, they are follow-up installments to beloved series, but even those are few and far between. Since I'm in my fourth year of making reading 76% of my personality, I have honed what I enjoy reading and am therefore better placed to know what I'm going to enjoy before I’ve picked it up.

After reading my first two anticipated reads of 2025, Signs of Damage by Diana Reid and "Cure" by Kathrine Brabon, and loving them, I feel even more excited to tackle the rest of the list.

The Hounding - Xenobe Purvis

I can’t recall where I first came across advertising for The Hounding, but I do remember it being described as a cross between The Crucible and The Virgin Suicides. The Virgin Suicides was the first literary book I genuinely enjoyed, so any book that draws a parallel instantly grabs my interest.

Set in 18th century England, the neighbours in a small village are convinced that five sisters can shapeshift into dogs. The girls are seen as peculiar troublemakers in their community. It’s not often I would reach for anything historical, but if there is a whisper of melancholic girlhood and a bit of magical realism, I’m willing to look past it.

Make Me Famous - Maud Ventura

My top read of 2024 was Ventura’s novel My Husband. It is an obsessive stream-of-consciousness novel about a woman who is so infatuated with her husband that her obsession drives her to punish him for perceived misgivings.

In her second novel Ventura explores another deeply complicated woman and her relationship with maintaing her fame. While I will miss the setting of France, given that this story is more of a global affair.

Spoilt Creatures - Amy Twigg

Spoilt Creatures will be Any Twigg's first novel. It was recommended to me as a book for fans of Eliza Clarke, whom I adore. Spoilt Creatures is a novel about female rage (tick), cults (tick), obsession (tick), and queerness (tick). I wouldn’t mind giving this one a listen as an audiobook, because if a book is slow and melancholic, I often find myself drifting off.

The Unworthy - Agustina Bazterrica

Tender is the Flesh, Bazterrica’s first novel in English, is one of my favourite books of all time. In a cannibal dystopia, Marcos grapples with his wife leaving him and his job supplying human meat. Does that not sound like the perfect book for me?

In Bazterrica’s second novel, she writes of another dystopian society but with strong catholic imagery. The woman gets me. Luca enters the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, a house for Unworthy women. I swear if those nuns start eating each other I'm going to lose my goddamned mind.

When this book comes out, please don't speak to me, I will be in the bath reading this and listening to Punisher by Ethel Cain.

Alchemised - SenLin Yu

Alchemised is a reworking of the popular Harry Potter fanfic Manacled. This one is for recovering Harry Potter stans. This book is going to be a mammoth so I’ll probably listen to it on audiobook. Manacled is a cross-over between Harry Potter and The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s the cornerstone of Dromaine fan-fic that the divas are rabid for.

Manacled is set in an alternate timeline that diverges from the end of the Order of the Phoenix. While the magic system is largely the same, the focus is on healing magic, it was an exciting expansion.

I hope that Alchemised has the same darkness that manacled has. Several scenes made me gasp, which is always a good thing.

This book had better be good, because I’ve been telling heaps of people to read it. Don't make me look like a liar, SenLin.

Sunrise Over the Reaping - Suzanne Collins

If you've ever brought up The Hunger Games when I’m around, you’d know that I have potent feelings about this series.

My second year of university was when I started reading for fun. I had read a few books before that, but I was pushing through literary fiction and classics that I was reading to seem smarter.

The Hunger Games was some of the first books that I inhaled. I took the book to work and banned people from talking to me in the staffroom because I couldn't stop reading it. Years after the first three, when Collins released The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I got to relive that feeling. I cannot wait to dive into the world of Panem again and hopefully inhale what will be another page-turner.

Katabasis - R.F. Kuang

R. F. Kuang is one of the best writers working today. Unless she makes a massive blunder, every book she writes will be an automatic buy for me. While I haven’t read all of her books, I’ve enjoyed every single one that I have read.

The elevator pitch for Katabasis is that two students travel to hell to get a recommendation from the recently deceased professor. Because of the inventive and well-researched magic system in Babel, I am looking forward to seeing how Kuang shows her creativity again.