TOP PICKS – June 2025
Welcome to this month’s 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: Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan
June started off great for me but then ended with a DNF, so that was disappointing!
The Gryphon King by Sara Omer was a solid grimdark debut which I loved. It’s been a while since I’ve read a deeply political fantasy with two very morally ambiguous main characters and that swept me away.
I then had a buddy read with Beth, A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna which was as cosy, fun and touching as I expected it would be.
After that I read It’s Not a Cult by Joey Batey (Jaskier from The Witcher show!) but unfortunately this was my DNF. Batey’s prose is truly stunning but the amount of details on gigs, music and social media meant the plot became completely lost.
So my Top Pick goes to my first read of the month, Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan. This third installment in The Memoirs of Lady Trent was so much more personal and filled with such an array of dragons, it made my heart happy!
Cat: Codeskull by Chloe Spencer
This month has been a mixed bag for me, with a lot of short books and unfortunate DNFs (I’m always sad, every time!).
My favourite stands out all the more, then: a perfect teen summer fun slasher, Codeskull by Chloe Spencer. 90s nostalgia, an intense and smart Fear Street-style adventure with genuine heart and high stakes. I loved it! Just the thing to curl up with on a hot summer night.
Theo: Hostile by Luke Scull
I’ve had quite a good few books this month but mostly non-fiction or non-speculative fiction. There is a kind of dystopian feel to Steve Bernstein’s GRQ, with GRQ being the acronym for the crypto-currency around which the plot of stunning greed and cringe making optimistic stupidity revolve. With GRQ standing for Get Rich Quick, there is a terrible blurring of the lines between contemporary reality and horrific fiction – such that it needs the breathless pace of Bernstein’s prose to reassure you that it’s satire.
My speculative fiction pick for this month is Luke Scull’s horror debut Hostile. The book’s present, being set in the run-up to the Brexit vote of 2016, feels horrifically appropriate since that was surely the point at which the whole world started sliding into the abyss of misinformation, manipulation and unfettered greed. However, Scull’s story focuses on the people around the town of Walmer and the nearby Longleat safari park where troubled author John Sharrock and a variety of neighbours discover their pets and livestock are suddenly gripped by inexplicable hostility. Not a good trait to be spreading around when you have a whole safari pack of predatory mega-fauna on your doorstep.
Jonathan: Private Rites by Julia Armfield
This month, I read the entire 2025 Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist for a panel. The Clarke Award is by far my favourite of the genre fiction awards, and the one I follow most eagerly. This year the shortlist was, as always, a really interesting mix. There were some books that I thought were interesting experiments but didn’t quite work for me, and one I really didn’t get along with. But it seems to me the two standouts, which are remarkable works of speculative fiction in any year, were Extremophile by Ian Green and Private Rites by Julia Armfield.
Extremophile is an audacious biopunk update of cyberpunk, a book explicitly about climate change and grappling with the despair that we’ve damaged our planet so badly and how we work towards hope for a better world. It’s also a brilliant SF heist novel with great characters and a punk rock heart. I loved it.
And Private Rites is an absolutely incredible work that I have been failing to write a coherent review for ever since I read the ARC. It’s a meditation on climate change, through the perspective of three dysfunctional sisters living in the aftermath of the death of their abusive father. The novel confirms Armfield as one of the most exciting authors working today, building on the exquisite character work that defined her wonderful debut novel Our Wives Under The Sea. But Private Rites is doing something far more ambitious and challenging. It’s a work that severely rips the rug out from the reader in its final act, in a risky but powerful move that goes to show that all our current responses to climate change are simply us failing catastrophically to understand the problem facing us.
The judges apparently disagreed with me – the award went to neither of these remarkable books. But at the end of the day, what’s more important – the prestige and cash prize that comes with winning the Clarke, or to be enshrined forever in Jonathan Aesthetics? A no-brainer really.
Kat: Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove
My top pick for June is Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove, without a doubt! This is a fantastic sci-fi comedy horror mash-up about Dracula (and friends) in space, from the point of view of the spaceship, Demeter, who is disgruntled and confused about why all her passengers have died. The character arcs for the AI characters in this story absolutely made this book for me and it’s another win for Ezeekat Press over at Bindery!
Hil: Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil by Oliver Darkshire
I’ve had a mixed month of reading mainly non-SFF but have just started Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil by Oliver Darkshire. It’s cozy, and made me snort when the main problem the mandrake-leaf scattering wizard has is complaints from the villagers about mandrake-leaf poisoning. It has footnotes. It has a sarcastic grimalkin sidekick. Very reminiscent of Douglas Adams and early Terry P. Yes, I know, big boots. I’m hopeful and so far, so good.
Lucy: Kings of a Dead World by Jamie Mollart
After months of barely reading due to a new baby, I have finally started reading again!
The book that pulled me out of the slump was Jamie Mollart’s, Kings of a Dead World. Tbh the blurb didn’t really sell it to me, Aliya Whitely (author of Skyward Inn) had left a review indicating it would be a good read. Mollarts novel is a terrifying look at a future running out of resources and the government’s frantic and absurd solution… Sleep. With beautiful world building, emotional storylines that pull at your heart-strings like The Notebook, echoes of Hugh Howie’s Dust trilogy and the weird and wonderful effects of power mixed with loneliness on the human mind… this book will keep you up at night, and incapable of putting it down.
Vinay: Symbiote by Michael Nayak
June was a rather frustrating month but it still had its moments. Django Wexler’s duology capper of his Dark Lord Davi series – Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me was a lot of fun, filled with irreverent pop culture references and just the right amount of delusional crazy belief to keep the narrative engaging.
Wraith and the Revolution by AJ Calvin had a very fascinating take on RoboCop in space and revolution with a significant focus on characters. Phantom’s Favor by Marcus Fell & Jason Krumbine continues the hijinks of the previous book while charting its own path away from the Oceans comparison I heard earlier (Five Phantom Discount reviewed here).
The Source of Strife by Alex Arch had a very interesting take on the Chosen One wherein the Chosen One is almost like a battery to be tapped for people’s powers to function and is caught between 2 warring parents who imprison her to ensure that the other parent doesn’t benefit from her power. A very interesting book with some fascinating characters and was almost my top pick for the month.
However, Michael Nayak’s Symbiote has that honor for this month. The Thing meets the Contagion meets Life on a bleak Antarctic landscape of a research station, this horror thriller uses the landscape extremely effectively while hitting standard tropes in delivering a fascinating fast-paced thriller. It also helps that the microbe responsible for the contagion adapts and this helps in keeping the narrative fresh and twisty.
Emma: Two for Tea: Welcome to Azanthe by C M Nascosta
I’ve read quite a bit this month, but one book really stood out. Two for Tea: Welcome to Azanthe by C M Nascosta is definitely my top pick for June. A witch coming into her power, the cosiest of tea shops, big feelings and a shadow guy who can shape himself into any form to make her happy. Tea for Two? More like Tentacles for Two. I’ll stop, I’m sorry. I can’t help it. It’s got the heat, the heart and the happy. We meet characters from Nascosta’s other books, and it weaves itself well into the Cambric Creek series. It may be worth reading the Wheel of the Year books (Mabon and Hexennacht) before Tea for Two just to get a bit more out of it.
Beth: Elusive by Genevieve Cogman
Wow, so many brilliant recommendations this month!
So I had a super busy June reading-wise. I loved my buddy read of A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping with Nils, it was definitely worth the wait. Our buddy read review went up earlier today so do go check that out!
I also read Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and its sequel by Satoshi Yagisawa; not SFF but made me super nostalgic for being a bookseller, and has made me want to read more Japanese fiction again, so I expect it’ll feature heavily in my July.
But this month, I also finally got round to reading Genevieve Cogman’s Scarlet Revolution trilogy! She completely swept me away into revolutionary France and the world of the Scarlet Pimpernel – with added vampires. I’ll have reviews coming soon, but if you haven’t read this trilogy, I highly recommend it. The vampires don’t feature too heavily in Scarlet, but they come more into play as the trilogy progresses, which is part of the reason why I chose Elusive, the second book in the trilogy, as my favourite. I think it’s quite rare to nail that middle book, Anna Stephens did it with Darksoul in their Godblind trilogy, and Cogman has certainly done it here. Plus it features a daring escape attempt from Mont St Michael.
What was your favourite read of the month? Share with us in the comments!
