TOP PICKS – May 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…
Theo: The Wager and the Bear by John Ironmonge
Being on holiday is great for making inroads on the TBR pile and I actually managed to read 8 books since our last Top Picks deadline and three of them were fantasy.
There was Stefan Mohamed’s House on Utopia Way – which is released later this month and was an intriguingly surreal noir novel about an unnamed patchwork city with a Chandleresque detective as the unreliable narrator – a full review will follow in due course.
Then I finally got into reading John Scalzi’s Starter Villain which I had picked up in hard copy at Glasgow Worldcon. It’s a fun madcap ride through a world full of Bond like villains who owe their power to inheritance more than ‘talent’ and turn out to be very stupid – dangerously so. So pretty much capturing the zeitgeist of our times, but with cats – so many cats.
However, my pick of the month goes to John Ironmonge’s The Wager and the Bear which is an enthralling tale through 70 years of our future as two men are enmeshed in the net of an impromptu bet. While it’s a great, informative and entertaining piece of cli-fi what I particularly love about it is the fact that the protagonist gets to give a climate change denying politician a serious reality check – what I wouldn’t give for a chance to have a similar chance at Richard Tice or Farage!
Cat: The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig
I’ve had so many great reads this month, the sort of books where you absolutely lose yourself and finish gasping for air! From a long-awaited series conclusion – Damned by Genevieve Cogman – to a brilliantly unusual dark fantasy – The Starving Saints, by Caitlyn Starling – this book dragon has been dining well.
But the winner has to be The Knight and the Moth, by Rachel Gillig. This world completely enveloped me, holding me beneath the veil of its heroine as she battled through so many challenges (both human and magical) in a book that transcends the romantasy label and leaves it in the dust. The ending twists were so very unexpected too, I’m already watching for the next part! A brilliant raising of the bar for clever and imaginative medieval fantasy.
Nils: The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst
I have no idea how I read six books this month but I did! Unfortunately there were two highly anticipated sequels, The Ashfire King by Chelsea Abdullah and A Letter from the Lonesome Shore by Sylvie Cathrall that were both enjoyable but ultimately disappointing.
I then had a buddy read of The Grimoire Grammar School PTA by Caitlin Rozakis with Beth and this was a lovely story about motherhood, loneliness, fitting in and having a werewolf toddler! Great fun!
Another fun and adorable read was Wriggly Little Hands by Alex Knight which featured goblins on a quest set by the Dark Lord across the kingdom and somehow getting roped into becoming a delivery service. Everyone needs to meet Oli!
On the darker side I’ve also recently finished a thrilling grimdark book, Anji Kills a King by Evan Leikam, which follows a bounty hunter and a rather smart mouthed murderer traveling towards her execution. This book had so many interesting themes and a very cleverly played out ending that I’m still thinking about now!
My Top Pick however goes to The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst because this book completely immersed me into a magical world filled with beautiful plants, plenty of fantasy creatures (including miniature dragons!) and followed a slow burn romance between two people in need of healing. This was such an escape read for me and far surpassed the first book set in the same world.
Nils’ review | Releases 17th July, pre-order here
Kat: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
Storming to the top of my favourites this month was The Incandescent by Emily Tesh. A standalone magic school story about a no-nonsense, bisexual teacher dealing with demon-summoning teenagers, eye-watering risk assessments and an inconvenient level of gay panic. As an ex-teacher who attended an English boarding school for a while, I can confirm that Tesh nails every single aspect of this novel and had me cackling on every other page.
Emma: A Dead and Stormy Night by Steffanie Holmes
Going to cheat here and say my top read for this month was a series. Straying from my usual horns, hooves and tentacles I picked up A Dead and Stormy Night by Steffanie Holmes, the first in the Nevermore Bookshop Mysteries series. What followed was a chaotic binge through the rest of the books and I still want more. Fun, lots of twists and turns, some genuinely funny, laugh out loud moments and three insanely hot boyfriends, all plucked from classic literature. What’s not to love?
Not wanting to disappoint here (I know what’s expected of me) my favourite monstrous read was Married to the Alien Cowboy by Ursa Dax, soft, sweet and spicy, it was perfectly balanced with incredibly likable characters and I may or may not have a book crush on an alien cowboy with a cock-tail now.
Vinay: Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay
Summer is here and summer books even more so. There were a bunch of pretty awesome books that peppered May, so much so it became pretty difficult to pick a top book for the month.
As mentioned in this group already, The Grimoire Grammar School Parents Teachers Association is a fantastic cozy book that brings together the school politics of Big Little Lies with magical creatures and a coming of the prophesied Dark Lord – this is a book that’s funny and relatable in so many moments.
Death on the Caldera by Emily Paxman was a fun Murder on the Orient Express with sibling trouble and Witches. Anji Kills a King by Evan Leikam was a fabulous debut that emphasized the journey element of a Anji killing the king on the first page and having to deal with the consequences of it dealing with bounty hunters on the way.
Sean O’Boyle’s charming novella – Checks, Balances and Proper Procedure in Monster Hunting is a cozy bureaucratic winner featuring Rashomonic storytelling. Five Phantom Discount by Marcus Fell and Jason Krumbine does its best impression of Ocean’s 11 with an almost beat by beat play of the storyline and the witty charming banter juxtaposed with magic.
Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils was everything that my fellow reviewers had praised about and more – it is also his commercial book by far while still incorporating typical Abercrombie-isms all the way through. An easy contender for a book of the year.
Ultimately, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Written on the Dark is my Top Pick of the month. A GGK book is an event in itself and you need to get into a proper headspace for it. Especially following the giddy rush of The Devils, I needed something more measured and there is no book that is as luxurious and generous as what GGK can conjure. We have leads with regrets, checkered pasts with that tinge of melancholia called upon to save a city and country in the hour of greatest need. It is a gorgeous story with a lot of heart and beauty that leaves an impression long after you finish.
Beth: Paladin’s Faith by T. Kingfisher
Wow, it sounds like everyone had a super busy reading month too! I read six books, DNF’d one, and started another… As Nils said above, we had three buddy reads this month – The Ashfire King was a little disappointing, and I couldn’t continue with A Letter to the Luminous Shore simply because I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for such a gently-paced story, but The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association was definitely a highlight of my reading this month, it was great fun reading it with Nils and I related to it a lot.
The rest of my reading this month was taken up by T. Kingfisher: Paladin’s Strength, Paladin’s Hope, Paladin’s Faith and Swordheart. It’s safe to say I’m utterly besotted with the world of the Temple of the White Rat, and I’m now taking a forced reprieve until I can get my hands on copies of the Clockwork Boys duology. I chose Paladin’s Faith as my Top Pick as I simply loved the characters in this one, even more than the previous books, and their adventures were that little bit meatier. But picking it as a Top Pick is much like picking a favourite jewel for its colour; they’re all multi-faceted and valuable, but Faith simply called to me louder. There are rumours that Kingfisher will be releasing more in this series, as well as a sequel to Swordheart, and I can’t wait; I’ve found a new auto-buy author.
What was your favourite read of the month? Share with us in the comments!
