TOP PICKS – January 2025
Welcome to a whole new year of Top Picks!
Every month, we like to share with you our favourite reads of the month. We’ve rounded up our contributors and asked them each to recommend just one favourite read of the month.
A big thank you to Nils for coming up with this feature, and our contributors for taking part!
Let’s find out what the team has read this month…
Nils: Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis
I’ve had a pretty good start to the year! I’m currently reading The Devils by Joe Abercrombie and Grave Empire by Richard Swan, both of which are fantastically good! However, I’m nowhere near the end of either so I will include them in February.
I read Breath of the Dragon by Fonda and Shannon Lee which had an enjoyable tournament aspect to it but did fall short a little on the characters for me personally. I also very much enjoyed A Palace Near the Wind by Ai Jiang which was an impressive genre blending novella focusing on nature vs technology. My Top Pick goes to my first buddy read of the year with Beth—Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis. This was such a cosy, uplifting read with the kind of romance I thought was well developed throughout, and it featured a magical library, so I was very happy!
Buddy read review | Pre-order here
Theo: Triggernometry Finals by Stark Holborn
I’ve made a bit of a slow start to the year. I am really enjoying Gifted and Talented by Olivie Blake. It is a gloriously chaotic trip through a week in the lives of a wonderfully dysfunctional family facing guilt, grief and the curse of their magical talents while a beautifully sardonic omniscient narrator slips in and out of the action. I’m really looking forward to what the last 80 or so of its 500 pages will bring me.
However at the other end of the weighty tome spectrum we have Stark Holborn’s slim and elegant novella Triggernometry Finals with its eye-catching prose and maths inspired inventiveness. The epigrams at the start of each chapter show “mathematical notations .. for formulas that relate (linguistically and metaphorically, if not technically mathematically) to the content or theme of each chapter. E.g “Eversion” – turning inside out.” But Stark’s tale of Mad Malago Browne & Co is not entertaining for the narrow set of fantasy readers who also love mathematics, it is entertaining for lovers of fantasy and lovers of mathematics. (Or – if I can make my own use of Mathematics notation – a book not simply for
(fantasy readers ∩ mathematicians),
but for
(fantasy readers ∪ mathematicians) Triggernometry Finals is my pick of the month.
Theo’s review | Pre-order here
Hil: The Book of Gold by Ruth Frances Long
After sliding off the book club read for the month, I was worried my reading mojo was on hiatus again. It happens. I completed most of a puzzle book of code words just to keep my brain in. And then I saw the cover for a book being read as part of another book club. Well hello you red and gold pile of deliciousness, what are you all about?
A feisty female lead, who’s larcenous to boot; a missing husband; a brooding ex; a heist to commute a death sentence, and a magic book everyone wants? Count me in. My book of the month is by Ruth Frances Long: The Book of Gold
Vinay: Lightfall by Ed Crocker
After what was a pretty intense last 2 months of the year binge-reading the Stormlight Archives, the new year is off to a good start indeed with some great books. I was fortunate enough to get some ARCs to start the year off and I had polished off the thrilling The Trial of Rooker Flynn by AR Witham, the traditionally styled The Outcast Mage by Annabel Campbell (a flashback to Trudi Canavan’s work if anyone is interested) and the atmospheric yet intimate horror of Dan Hanks in the The Way Up is Death.
My top pick of the month is Ed Crocker’s Lightfall – a book featuring Vampires, Werewolves and Sorcerers with nary a mortal in sight. This murder mystery that evolves into a sinister and centuries spanning conspiracy with an undertone of a brewing class revolution lends itself to be devoured frantically while the world-building wants you to luxuriate and be consumed slowly. It also has one heck of a payoff that leaves you exulting. Given this is the first book, I am excited to see what else Ed Crocker has in store for us
Jonathan: Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand
I’m having a slow start to the year, but what I have read has been pretty great.
Pride of place goes to Elizabeth Hand’s superlative Generation Loss, the first novel in her Cass Neary series. The book is more crime/noir than SFF. It follows Cass Neary, one of the great noir anti-heroes, who is a damaged photographer who was briefly well known for chronicling the punk movement in 1970s New York. What edges the books into the speculative is Cass’s almost psychic ability to perceive damage in others, a trait that drags her unwillingly into solving a decades long series of murders in the bleak wilds of Maine. Chilling and oddly beautiful, as all of Hand’s best work is.
Beth: Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis
So I’ve had a slow start to the year too! I generally do; looking back over my reading habits, January does often start slow for me. This particular month, as Nils has already said, I buddy read Wooing the Witch Queen with her, and we’re currently buddy reading The Devils but I haven’t finished it so I don’t think I can count it towards this month.
I also read The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers this month for book club, and I know how much of a beloved book this is for so many people, but I was left feeling a little disappointed? I think had I read it when it came out (and Ken’s first bought it for me, yes it’s been sat on my shelf for years) I’d have loved it. It just didn’t hit for me though.
I also read The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke, another one I was looking forward to but another one that disappointed me! Well, not disappointed, that might be too strong a word… I liked it, but not enough for it to be a Top Pick. I knew it would be short, and that it’s more of a sort-of experience book with the illustrations and everything; but just how short it was surprised me. It felt like a chapter in a book and I was left feeling unfulfilled, wanting more of the story.
So I don’t tend to like repeating what others have already featured, but truly nothing else this month has come close to Wooing the Witch Queen for me! Whether I’m still in the throes of the book hangover from it and that’s why I couldn’t enjoy Chambers and Clarke I’m not sure, but I loved this book and it is utterly deserving of being a double Top Pick.
What was your favourite read of the month? Share with us in the comments!
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