New year, new you—and a whole stack of shiny new books to kick off 2025 right. Whether you’re sticking to resolutions or just resolving to read more (same), these January releases will have you starting the year on the right page. Let’s dive into what’s coming! 🎉
Coming January 07, 2025
opens in a new window opens in a new windowTo Challenge Heaven by David Weber and Chris Kennedy
The third entry into the New York Times bestselling series, To Challenge Heaven brings another thrilling adventure from the masters of military science fiction, David Weber and Chris Kennedy.
In a universe teeming with predators, humanity needs friends. And fast.
We’ve come a long way in the forty years since the Shongairi attacked Earth, killed half its people, and then were driven away by an alliance of humans with the other sentient bipeds who inhabit our planet. We took the technology they left behind, and rapidly built ourselves into a starfaring civilization. Because we haven’t got a moment to lose. Because it’s clear that there are even more powerful, more hostile aliens out there, and Earth needs allies.
But it also transpires that the Shongairi expedition that nearly destroyed our home planet … wasn’t an official one. That, indeed, its commander may have been acting as an unwitting cats-paw for the Founders, the ancient alliance of very old, very evil aliens who run the Hegemony that dominates our galaxy, and who hold the Shongairi, as they hold most non-Founder species, in not-so-benign contempt. Indeed, it may turn out to be possible to turn the Shongairi into our allies against the Hegemony. There’s just the small matter of the Shongairi honor code, which makes bushido look like a child’s game. We might be able to make them our friends — if we can crush their planetary defenses in the greatest battle we, or they, have ever seen…
Coming January 14, 2025
opens in a new window opens in a new windowWaterblack by Alex Pheby
The monumental conclusion to Alex Pheby’s Cities of the Weft trilogy.
One thousand million infants are dead, and Nathan Treeves is back. He’s become the Master of Waterblack, the City of the Dead. And Sharli, once a sacrifice, then an assassin, is now a trained God-Killer. She has killed many — but failed in killing Nathan Treeves years ago. Soon she, and the Women’s Vanguard, will have another chance, even as The Master, The Mistress and the Atheistic Crusade hurtle toward their final confrontation. The world of Mordew returns in the epic conclusion to the Cities of the Weft trilogy. Welcome to Waterblack.
opens in a new window opens in a new windowThe Bezzle by Cory Doctorow
New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in California’s prisons are traded like stock shares.
The year is 2006. Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He spends his downtime on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost 25$. Wait, what? When Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme during a vacation on Catalina Island, he has no idea he’s kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life.
Martin has made his most dangerous mistake yet: trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and spoiled their fun. To them, money is a tool, a game, and a way to keep score, and they’ve found their newest mark—California’s Department of Corrections. Secure in the knowledge that they’re living behind far too many firewalls of shell companies and investors ever to be identified, they are interested not in the lives they ruin, but only in how much money they can extract from the government and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners they have at their mercy.
A seething rebuke of the privatized prison system that delves deeply into the arcane and baroque financial chicanery involved in the 2008 financial crash, The Bezzle is a sizzling follow-up to Red Team Blues.
Coming January 21, 2025
opens in a new window opens in a new windowKinning by Nisi Shawl
Kinning, the sequel to Nisi Shawl’s acclaimed debut novel Everfair, continues the stunning alternate history where barkcloth airships soar through the sky, varied peoples build a new society together, and colonies claim their freedom from imperialist tyrants.
The Great War is over. Everfair has found peace within its borders. But our heroes’ stories are far from done.
Tink and his sister Bee-Lung are traveling the world via aircanoe, spreading the spores of a mysterious empathy-generating fungus. Through these spores, they seek to build bonds between people and help spread revolutionary sentiments of socialism and equality—the very ideals that led to Everfair’s founding.
Meanwhile, Everfair’s Princess Mwadi and Prince Ilunga return home from a sojourn in Egypt to vie for their country’s rule following the abdication of their father King Mwenda. But their mother, Queen Josina, manipulates them both from behind the scenes, while also pitting Europe’s influenza-weakened political powers against one another as these countries fight to regain control of their rebellious colonies.
Will Everfair continue to serve as a symbol of hope, freedom, and equality to anticolonial movements around the world, or will it fall to forces inside and out?
Coming January 28, 2025
opens in a new window opens in a new windowThe Atlas Complex by Olivie Blake
The Atlas Complex marks the much-anticipated, heart-shattering conclusion in Olivie Blake’s trilogy that began with the New York Times bestselling phenomenon, The Atlas Six.
Only the extraordinary are chosen.
Only the cunning survive.
An explosive return to the library leaves the six Alexandrians vulnerable to the lethal terms of their recruitment.
Old alliances quickly fracture as the initiates take opposing strategies as to how to deal with the deadly bargain they have so far failed to uphold. Those who remain with the archives wrestle with the ethics of their astronomical abilities, while elsewhere, an unlikely pair from the Society cohort partner to influence politics on a global stage.
And still the outside world mobilizes to destroy them, while the Caretaker himself, Atlas Blakely, may yet succeed with a plan foreseen to have world-ending stakes. It’s a race to survive as the six Society recruits are faced with the question of what they’re willing to betray for limitless power—and who will be destroyed along the way.
opens in a new window opens in a new windowExordia by Seth Dickinson
Michael Crichton meets Marvel’s Venom in award-winning author Seth Dickinson’s science fiction debut, named one of The New York Times’ Best SFF Books of 2024.
“Anna, I came to Earth tracking a very old story, a story that goes back to the dawn of time. It’s very unlikely that you’ll die right now. It wouldn’t be narratively complete.”
Anna Sinjari—refugee, survivor of genocide, disaffected office worker—has a close encounter that reveals universe-threatening stakes. Enter Ssrin, a many-headed serpent alien who is on the run from her own past. Ssrin and Anna are inexorably, dangerously drawn to each other, and their contact reveals universe-threatening stakes.
While humanity reels from disaster, Anna must join a small team of civilians, soldiers, and scientists to investigate a mysterious broadcast and unknowable horror. If they can manage to face their own demons, they just might save the world.
opens in a new window opens in a new windowThe Teeth of Dawn by Marina Lostetter
The Teeth of Dawn concludes the riveting and mind-ripping epic fantasy trilogy from acclaimed author Marina Lostetter, where a rebellion struggles to tear the mask off the illusions and enchantments of a society shrouded in layers of mystery. After barely surviving their encounter with the Savior, who has shaped the rules and realities of Arkensyre for generations, Krona and the other members of the growing rebellion see only one chance of overcoming his power: free and enlist the ancient gods he caged to augment his own power. But it’s one thing to believe in gods. It is quite another to meet them. And it’s not only the Savior who wants to hold fast to the illusions that govern all the lives in the valley; the Grand Marquis, his agencies, and the elites of Arkensyre will do anything they can to snuff out change.
To remake the world, first you must break it.