Best of 2025: Adult Fiction: General

"Your new favorite assortment of stories about fascist deer, car-vampires, memory-devouring tree gods, and the torment matrix"--Page 4 of cover.

"Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA's space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space. Selected from a pool of...

This is a story about hunger. 1532. Santo Domingo de la Calzada. A young girl grows up wild and wily--her beauty is only outmatched by her dreams of escape. But María knows she can only ever be a prize, or a pawn, in the games played by men. When an alluring stranger offers an alternate path, María makes a desperate choice. She vows to have no regrets. This is a story about love. 1827. London. A young woman lives an idyllic but cloistered life...

""An existential masterwork that, like life, is equal parts atrocity and delights."-Olivie Blake, New York Times bestselling author of Masters of Death. Lucky Day is the latest from Chuck Tingle, USA Today bestselling author of Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays, where one woman must go up against horrifying odds to save the world. Four years ago, an unthinkable disaster occurred. In what was later known as the Low-Probability Event, 8 million people...

"Seventeen-year-old Phoebe was never interested in her birth family the cusp of her high school graduation, her adoptive mother, Greta, insists on a visit to meet her biological parents and siblings. The encounter is a jolt, a revelation that derails Phoebe. With the help of her best friend Luna, Phoebe runs away--as far as their friend Patrick O'Connor's chaotic home, where she hopes to go unnoticed among his thirteen siblings. What begins as a adolescent...

"From the bestselling author of the wildly inventive Strange Pictures and a phenomenon in Japan-unnatural layouts, trap doors, windowless rooms- a sinister conspiracy is concealed within a house's warped and unsettling floor plans, When a writer fascinated by the macabre is approached by an acquaintance, he finds himself investigating an eerie house for sale in Tokyo. At first, with its bright and spacious interior, it seems the perfect first home....

"The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from...