Doesn’t it feel like we were talking about the new year in January? Well, however we may feel, we finally made it through 2025. Most of us are in a rush for 2025 to end, but before we close out this tumultuous year, let us try to aim on a high note, particularly with a few highlighted book releases! December may not have as many book releases, but the robust, diverse stories gifted to readers make up for the quantity. There is something for every reader this month. Make sure to close out 2025 with one of these exciting reads!
Featured Book of the Month
An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole
Expected Publication Date: December 30
Warren University has stood amongst the ivy elite for centuries, built on the bones–and forbidden magic–of its most prized BIPOC students…hiding the rot of a secret society that will do anything to keep their own powers burning bright. No matter who they must sacrifice along the way.
Ellory Morgan is determined to prove that she belongs at Warren University, an ivy league school whose history is deeply linked to occult rumors and dark secrets. But as she settles into her Freshman year, something about the ornate buildings and shadowy paths feels strangely…familiar. And, with every passing day, that sense of déjà vu grows increasingly sinister.
Despite all logic, despite all reason, despite all the rules of reality, Ellory knows one thing to be true: she has been here before. And if she can’t convince brooding legacy student Hudson Graves to help her remember a past that seems determined to slip through her fingers as if by some insidious magic…this time, she may lose herself for good. (Credit: Poisoned Pen Press)
All Eyes on Him by Iliana Xander
When Natalie saw her best friend leaving the club with a handsome stranger, she never would have thought that the next morning, her friend would be discovered unconscious at a bus stop.
What happened that night? Only her best friend knows. And until she recovers from her coma, she won’t be able to tell her side of the story.
Natalie is desperate for answers–so she can’t believe her luck when she comes across a photo of the man her friend left with. Except he’s on the cover of a magazine, being heralded as the “Man of the Year.” This man appears untouchable. He’s a millionaire. He’s famous. But Natalie suspects he’s dangerous.
To prove it, she takes up a job as the housekeeper at his mansion. Her plan is simple. Watch his every move. Gather the evidence. And make him pay. But when she discovers that the last housekeeper went missing, she realizes she’s in over her head.
She thought she was setting the trap–but has she just fallen into his? (Credit: Poisoned Pen Press)
Sparks Fly by Zakiya N. Jamal
When Stella Renee Johnson’s roommate invites her to a sex club party but bails at the last minute, Stella decides to use the opportunity to finally cash in her V-card. But just when things are heating up between Stella and a sexy stranger, they realize they don’t have protection and Stella, taking it as a sign this wasn’t meant to be, flees.
Frustrated in more ways than one, Stella is shocked to learn that the digital media website where she works is partnering with an AI company. She’s even more shocked when the alluring man from the previous night walks in. Max Williams is the CEO’s brother and the creator of the AI program now threatening her job.
Despite the conflict of interest, Stella and Max can’t resist their magnetic attraction toward each other, and agree to keep their personal lives separate from what’s happening at work. But the more similarities they discover at home—both Black, book smart, and bisexual—the more they butt heads at work. Stella and Max must decide whether to think with their heads and walk away from their budding relationship, or follow their hearts and take a chance on love, no matter the cost. (Credit: Berkley)
The Six Loves of James I by Mr. Gareth Russell
From the assassination of his father to the explosive political and personal intrigues of his reign, this fresh biography reveals as never before the passions that drove King James I.
Gareth Russell’s “rollicking, gossipy” (Dan Jones, author of The Plantagenets), and scholarly voice invites us into James’s world, revealing a monarch whose reign was defined by both his public power and personal vulnerabilities. For too long, historians have shied away from or condemned the exploration of his sexuality. Now, Russell offers a candid narrative that not only reveals James’s relationships with five prominent men but also challenges the historical standards applied to the examination of royal intimacies.
This biography stands as a significant contribution to the understanding of royal history, illuminating the personal experiences that shaped James’s political decisions and his philosophical views on masculinity and sexuality. (Credit: Atria Books)
Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books by Hwang Bo-reum
Why do we read? What is it that we hope to take away from the intimate, personal experience of reading for pleasure?
How often do we ask these profound, expansive questions of ourselves and of our relationship to the joy of reading? In each of the essays in Every Day I Read, Hwang Bo-reum contemplates what living a life immersed in reading means. She goes beyond the usual questions of what to read and how often, exploring the relationship between reading and writing, when to turn to a bestseller vs. browse the corners of a bookstore, the value of reading outside of your favorite genre, falling in love with book characters, and more.
Every Day I Read provides many quiet moments for introspection and reflection, encouraging book-lovers to explore what reading means to each of us. While this is a book about books, at its heart is an attitude to life, one outside capitalism and climbing the corporate ladder. Lifelong and new readers will take inspiration from it, including a treasure trove of book recommendations blended seamlessly within. (Credit: Bloomsbury Publishing)
The Book of Women’s Friendship edited by Rachel Cooke
As Marilynne Robinson writes in her 1980 novel, Housekeeping, “Having a sister or friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house.” Bringing together work by more than 100 writers, The Book of Women’s Friendship explores the rich subject of friendship between women from every angle: its particular intensity and miraculous ease, its tendency to wax and wane, its role not only as a comfort and a privilege, but as vital to our health.
Friendship has never been more highly debated, and loneliness more prevalent. Yet women’s friendships have repeatedly been neglected or minimized in storytelling, fallen by the wayside of male relationships. In the first major anthology dedicated to women’s friendship–and the first serious anthology about friendship published in more than three decades–editor Rachel Cooke looks to art to find the words to capture women’s platonic love. Compiling selections from novels, poems, diaries, letters, comics, and graphic novels about women’s friendship, she places work from a diverse array of artists in conversation across time and place.
With excerpts from Jane Austen to Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf, from Dolly Alderton to Sarah Waters, and from Zadie Smith to Meg Wolitzer, The Book of Women’s Friendship celebrates and investigates friendship between women, from first encounters to final farewells, from falling out to making up again. This book takes the shape of a human life, beginning with early efforts at friend-making and -breaking in childhood to chance collisions in adulthood. It contemplates (though not for too long) the flip side of friendship, which is not enmity, but loneliness; celebrates solidarity in all its guises; and ends with loss, the moment of goodbye.
Warm, clever, and full of some of the most beautiful writing on friendship ever published, The Book of Women’s Friendship is also an act of friendship itself, dedicated to Cooke’s best friend, in the end becoming a book full of all the lovely, impossible, unsayable things that one friend might be moved to give to another.
The Layover by Beth Reekles
Gemma is the maid of honor, but her intentions are anything but honorable. After years of watching the bride get everything she worked for, losing her promotion on the eve of the wedding is the last straw. Armed with an incriminating video from the hen party, Gemma’s plan to finally get even is in motion: she’s going to stop this wedding.
Leon thinks his sister is making a huge mistake getting married. Colossal. The groom is rude and uptight, and he’s turned his sister into someone unrecognizable. If he could just get her alone for one quick, honest conversation, he’s sure he could save her from making the biggest mistake of her life. He has to stop this wedding.
Francesca and the groom have been close for years and once shared a perfect night together—until he met the bride-to-be. But she’s convinced he still loves her; that he’s the “one that got away.” This is her last chance to finally confess her love for him, or risk losing him forever. She must stop this wedding.
When bad weather grounds their flight, the trio meet. Faced with a ten-hour layover and nothing to do but get to know one another, it’s not long before their plans are revealed. Ten hours should be more than enough time to figure out how to get what they all want, or to change their minds—and their lives—completely. (Credit: W by Wattpad Books)
The Gallagher Place by Julie Doar
When Marlowe Fisher, an illustrator living in New York City, returns to her family’s bewitching Hudson Valley home for the holidays, she discovers a body in the woods–a murder that draws her back into the haunting case of her teenage best friend’s disappearance two decades earlier. What happened to Nora?
As police descend on the sprawling Fisher property, Marlowe is pulled into an investigation that threatens to unravel the town’s fragile loyalties and expose the shadowed legacy of a weekend home steeped in secrets. Marlowe must confront the fallibility of her own memory and the feeling that everyone–including her brothers–is hiding something if she’s to uncover the shocking truth about her lost friend. In this gripping debut, Julie Doar delivers a chilling mystery that explores the corrosive power of silence and the tension of family secrets. (Credit: Zibby Publishing)
Bloom How You Must: A Black Woman’s Guide to Self-Care and Generational Healing by Tara Pringle Jefferson
Self-care isn’t a trend among Black women; it has always been a throughline in our heritage. Consider Coretta Scott King, who along with fellow activists Betty Shabazz and Myrlie Evers-Williams, would enjoy “girls’ trips” to take a break from the stress of the Civil Rights Movement. Remember their contemporary Rosa Parks attended (and led) yoga classes while on the front lines for Black rights in Detroit.
Think of the enduring friendship between Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King, a sisterhood in which they have leaned on each other for nearly forty years while thriving in the glaring media and entertainment spotlight.
Picture Toni Morrison’s overflowing gardens and lush houseplants she tended while writing classics like Beloved and The Bluest Eye.
Recall Audre Lord’s enduring declaration written after her second cancer diagnosis: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Bloom How You Must explores and expands on this self-care legacy and shows how it can help every Black woman today.
Tara Pringle Jefferson excavates the roots of self-care and community care as a sustaining force for generations of Black women and transforms her findings into a blueprint women can follow in their daily lives. A blend of guidebook and journal, Bloom How You Must explores several distinct pillars of wellness, featuring:
- Research from leading wellness experts
- Interviews with women aged 19–99
- Stories of personal experience
- Overviews and explanations of each component of self-care
- Dedicated pages for readers to reflect on each chapter
- Exercises to put wellness into practice
- Easy-to-follow explanatory graphics and sidebars
With its diversity of insights,practical skills and multigenerational focus, Bloom How You Must is a love letter to the millions of Black women who want a less stressful life but don’t know where to begin. Bloom How You Must gives them the tools they need to improve their health and their daily lives. (Credit: Amistad)
The Rebel and the Rose by Catherine Doyle
From a remote hilltop haven, far from the city of Fantome, Seraphine Marchant and her Order of Flames plot to eradicate shade magic with lightfire. But as Sera struggles to control her blooming powers, destiny calls her back to Fantome—and to the assassin who haunts her dreams.
Ransom Hale can’t get Sera out of his head. As their rivalry grows and he grapples with the responsibility of leading the Order of Daggers, he feels himself slipping further from who he wants to be. Is he doomed to a life in the shadows? Or can he forge another path?
Meanwhile, rebellion is stirring in the kingdom, and a dangerous prince grows in power. Forced to work together by order of the king, Sera and Ransom’s conflicted hearts are tested to their limits. And all the while, an ancient prophecy is unfolding that will change the fate of Valterre forever… (Credit: Margaret K. McElderry Books)
A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Cheating Death by Maxie Dara
Nora Bird works for S.C.Y.T.H.E., which might seem odd for someone as terrified of death as she is. But ever since her parents died in an accident when she was six, she’s been obsessed with avoiding risk, and what better place to learn how to cheat death than the company that employs the nation’s grim reapers?
The work enables Nora to learn all about the myriad ways you can kick the bucket, which is comforting…until one day, a file crosses her desk with a name she recognizes. Her twin brother’s.
The twins haven’t spoken in six months, but Charlie is all Nora has left. Completely against her cautious nature, Nora steals the file and flees, racing to her brother’s house. She begs him to trust her that his death is imminent, and they hit the road (with his parrot, Jessica, who has plenty to say) in an attempt to evade both death and S.C.Y.T.H.E., whose sole mission of collecting souls has been disrupted by Charlie’s continued existence.
Alas, every time Nora saves him, a new cause of death appears in his file. Someone is determined to take Charlie out, and Nora will have to use everything she’s ever learned about death to discover the culprit. (Credit: Berkley)
The Quiet Mother by Arnaldur Indridason
Expected Publication Date: December 9
A woman is found murdered in her Reykjavík home, her apartment ransacked. On her desk lies a note with retired detective Konrad’s phone number. Days earlier, she had begged him to find the child she gave up nearly fifty years ago. But Konrad, reluctant to reopen old wounds, turned her away. Now, haunted by guilt, he vows to uncover the truth—for her and for himself.
As Konrad digs into her tragic past, he is drawn into a web of secrets, lies, and betrayal. Each revelation points to a hidden life that connects her death to a decades-old murder—and to shadows from Konrad’s own family history.
The Quiet Mother is a masterful blend of human tragedy and relentless suspense, where every discovery comes at a cost. Arnaldur Indridason once again proves why he is the voice of Nordic Noir, delivering a harrowing tale of guilt and redemption. (Credit: Minotaur)
Everyone in the Group Chat Dies by L.M. Chilton
Expected Publication Date: December 9
Kirby Cornell needs a break from everything:
– Her crumbling apartment in the sleepy town of Crowhurst (famous for its bucolic countryside and a second-rate serial killer from the ’90s).
– Her dead-end job.
– Her sleazy landlord
– Her messy roommates.
– And, most of all, the terrible thing they all did.
Luckily, that hasn’t caught up with her just yet. Until a new message on their old group chat pops up: Everyone in the group chat dies.
It’s the first text her ex-roommate Esme has sent for ages, but that’s not the really weird thing.
The really weird thing is, Esme died twelve months ago… (Credit: Gallery/Scout Press)
Murder in Manhattan by Julie Mulhern
Expected Publication Date: December 9
This writer just found her next scoop . . . and it’s deadly.
New York, 1925 – Freddie Archer frequents speakeasies and wild parties with her friends Dorothy Parker and Tallulah Bankhead. And the best part is that it’s all in a day’s work. Freddie loves her job writing the nightlife column for Gotham Magazine.
But Freddie’s latest piece just won her a bit more attention than she bargained for–from the police. A man mentioned in her column has been murdered. And Freddie is asked to keep an eye out for his fashionable female dinner companion. She’s told in no uncertain terms to stay out of the case herself.
So naturally, Freddie throws herself into an investigation that takes her from the elegant stores that line Fifth Avenue to the tenements south of Houston Street. Now between sipping gin rickeys with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and casting Broadway shows with Groucho Marx, she’s dodging bullets and dating a potentially dangerous bootlegger.
Freddie wanted adventure and excitement. But will she survive it? (Credit: Forever)
Metropolitan Mysteries: A Casebook of London’s Detectives edited by Martin Edwards
Expected Publication Date: December 9
Lord Peter Wimsey reads murder in the minutiae of a Bloomsbury kitchen. Dr. Gideon Fell unravels a locked-room mystery from a flat in Chelsea. Superintendent Aldgate cracks the case of the body atop Nelson’s Column.
The streets of London have been home to many great detectives since the days of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, with some of the best authors in the genre taking to the short story form to pit their sleuths against crimes ranging from murders on the Tube to heists from the capital’s finest jewellers. With contributions by Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr and Dorothy L. Sayers along with rare finds by Raymond Postgate, J. Jefferson Farjeon and many more, this anthology invites you to join some of the greatest detectives ever written on their perilous trail through London’s darker underside. (Credit: Poisoned Pen Press)
A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature by Adam Morgan
Expected Publication Date: December 9
Already under fire for publishing the literary avant-garde into a world not ready for it, Margaret C. Anderson’s cutting-edge magazine The Little Review was a bastion of progressive politics and boundary-pushing writing from then-unknowns like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Djuna Barnes. And as its publisher, Anderson was a target. From Chicago to New York and Paris, this fearless agitator helmed a woman-led publication that pushed American culture forward and challenged the sensibilities of early 20th century Americans dismayed by its salacious writing and advocacy for supposed extremism like women’s suffrage, access to birth control, and LBGTQ rights.
But then it went too far. In 1921, Anderson found herself on trial and labeled “a danger to the minds of young girls” by a government seeking to shut her down. Guilty of having serialized James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses in her magazine, Anderson was now not just a publisher but also a scapegoat for regressives seeking to impose their will on a world on the brink of modernization.
Author, journalist, and literary critic Adam Morgan brings Anderson and her journal to life anew in A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, capturing a moment of cultural acceleration and backlash all too familiar today while shining light on an unsung heroine of American arts and letters. Bringing a fresh eye to a woman and a movement misunderstood in their time, this biography highlights a feminist counterculture that audaciously pushed for more during a time of extreme social conservatism and changed the face of American literature and culture forever. (Credit: Atria/One Signal Publishers)
I Was A Fashion School Serial Killer by Doug Wagner, and illustrated by Daniel Hillyard
Expected Publication Date: December 16
Sewing together serial killer horror and college drama feels so right—like slipping into a warm blood bath.
Rennie Bethary has just been accepted into New York City’s most prestigious fashion school. Her designs are daring, edgy, and singular…and made of human flesh. Did we forget to mention Rennie is a serial killer who simply wants to be a fashion designer instead? Stupid, pesky, murderous urges! (Credit: Image Comics)
The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey
Expected Publication Date: December 30
Twelve-year-old Miv is panicking. Life has been complicated since her mom got sick, and now her dad is talking about wanting to move their family away from the town Miv has lived in her whole life–because of the murders. Young women are dying, everyone is afraid, and no one knows who the culprit might be.
But as far as Miv is concerned, leaving Yorkshire and her best friend Sharon simply isn’t an option, no matter the dangers lurking round their way; or the strangeness at home that started the day Miv’s mum stopped talking. Perhaps if she could solve the case of the disappearing women, they could stay after all?
So, Miv and Sharon decide to make a list: a list of all the suspicious people and things on their street. People they know. People they don’t. But their search for the truth reveals more secrets in their neighborhood, within their families–and between each other–than they ever thought possible. What if the real mystery Miv needs to solve is the one that lies much closer to home? (Credit: Sourcebooks Landmark)
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