TOP PICKS – July 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: The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell
This month I had three solid great reads.
I started off with a fantasy rom-com, The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam by Megan Bannen which is the finale to the Hart and Mercy trilogy. I absolutely love this whimsical, crazy world and was sad to say goodbye to it but the story was so much fun and ended on a satisfying note.
The next one I read was Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-Il Kim, translated by Anton Hur, which is a Korean fantasy featuring three POV’s each on their separate journeys and seeking an end from oppression. The characters were fantastic and the story was so well paced that I was hooked from beginning to end.
However, my Top Pick goes to The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell which completely swept me away and had me on edge throughout. This is a historical, Gothic haunted house story that will have you questioning everything you read and leave you fearing noises in the night! As for the ending of the novel, well I have to give it a chef’s kiss!
Cat: Dead of Summer by Ryan La Sala
SO many good reads this month! Like Nils, I adored The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam, as well as brilliant asylum thriller The Graceview Patient by Caitlyn Starling and intense gothic novella Bottling his Ghosts by SH Cooper.
But the winner has to be Dead of Summer by Ryan La Sala. On the surface it’s a Resident Evil-style monster horror on a tourist island – a perfect summer beach read if you’re like me! – but the true heart of the book lies in its steady undercurrent of found family, love and hope. And a supremely badass drag queen! A new author that immediately joined my ‘Must Watch’ list.
Gray: They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran
This month, my favourite read was They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran. It is a mixture of body horror, climate sci-fi and Vietnamese mythology set in Louisiana.
It occupies a strange place between the easy reading of YA fiction and the starkness of adult horror, and expertly explores a lot of conflicting experiences of victimisation as a member of a diaspora community, exclusion from that community, and queer themes. I’d have been on board with just the plot or just the character studies, but the combination blends into something truly special.
Theo: The Water that May Come by Amy Lilwall
I’ve had a couple of speculative fiction reads this month which were both excellent in different ways.
Stark Holborn’s musically inspired novella, For the Road is a gorgeous lyrical tale of a young man at the end of his tether and the strange desolate railway station he stumbles into with its enigmatic family of wardens. Full of typically Holbornish captivating imagery and fluid prose, the narrative holds the reader’s attention like a hammock.
However, my other read Amy Lilwall’s near-future set cli-fi tale The Water that May Come covers a cli-fi theme very much after my own heart which is how it floods into my pick-of-the-month spot. As I write this the first climate refugee visas are being issued by Australia to the islanders of Tuvalu, and Icelandic volcanoes are flexing their magma muscles. This makes Lillwall’s tale of the British population driven into refugee status by an impending Tsunami-triggering icelandic eruption feel very topical. The speculative elements are perhaps a little limited – but that is the context in which Lilwall examines what it means when ‘people like us’ are turned into refugees, and how the direst circumstances exacerbate rather than flatten the differences of wealth and influence.
Theo’s review | Pre-order here
Emma: Love Bites Hard by Lola Glass
I have been absolutely devouring books by Lola Glass this July so my top pick has got to be Love Bites Hard, the second book in her Mated to the King series. We’ve got werewolves, fights to the death, siren magic, sex wars, public biting and “cough” other things. The entire series is incredibly bingable, funny and surprisingly deep, the spice is spicin’.
While this gets the winners trophy due to my passion for wolfmen (give me a flannel shirt and a growl any day), the others in the series (Vamp, Fae, Gargoyle and Dragon) are all equally great. Lola Glass is definitely one to keep an eye on if you like your romance monstrous.
Kat: Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis
My top pick for July has to be Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis.
This is a brilliant satire about a man who wakes up with amnesia and realises he’s a dark lord and all of his dark lord besties are coming over soon. Could that possibly have anything to do with the princess in the dungeon that the goblins are guarding? An incredibly fun read with fabulous goblin representation and a clever and climactic ending.
Vinay: The Bone Raiders by Jackson Ford
I loved how July went. July had a set of reads, all of which were certifiably good for different reasons. Piper’s Price by Andrew Givler, a Debt Collection novella set between books 1 and 2, is an entertaining, jaunty story that plays around with legends of mythology innovatively while adding more color and depth to the lead characters. Yuval Kordov’s Incensepunk themed Orders of Magnitude was atmospheric and heavy in an Event Horizon-inspired rescue mission to a lost colony on the Moon – the effort being led by a Vatican-sanctioned special Marine forces team & led by a man wresting with his own doubts and demons on religion and god. A fascinating, foreboding and fantastically written novella from an author whose writing style luxuriates in the setting but gets intimate internally on the MC. I have always been partial to series enders, especially when they end well.
The Execution of Rooker Flynn by AR Witham is a breath-taking, heart pounding trilogy capper which is just payoff after payoff after payoff. All the time & effort that Witham does in setting things comes to an action-packed satisfying end to the truly loathsome evil villain. David Wragg’s The Iron Road is a stunning action-packed ending to his Tales of the Plain trilogy with the last 40% of the book rocketing up to Mad Max Fury Road levels. However, at its heart, this is a book that is truly around a complicated mother-daughter relationship and what it means to be a parent. It is also about rebellion and the natural tension between a parents wish to keep their kid safe while kids wanting to break away and carve their own path. The Iron Road truly balances epic action sequences with some delightful character work and team dynamics and is strong running to feature in my end of the year list
However, my Top Pick of the month is Jackson Ford’s The Bone Raiders or as I call it “ How to Train Your Fire-Breathing Lizard”. How to Train your Dragon is an incredibly special movie and finding a book that leans into that trope while carving its own path was a great experience. The Bone Raiders is a book of interesting choices in its setting – be it a group of nomadic raiders fighting against an empire builder or the strong female agency that runs in our group of Bone Raiders, who are all women or even the found family dynamics that exist in this group, including a special character. While the setting is kind of trope-ish, the books treatment is electric, fantastically paced while not compromising on character beats. The antagonist of the book is another interesting facet given that she is a key component of the empire building and finds resistance, some personal with this group. The Bone Raiders is a fantastic series opener that is entertaining, blockbustery and fun while not compromising on character beats with quite a few surprises up its sleeve.
Hil: A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna
Top pick this month for me is easy! A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna. Nils and Beth did a buddy read, and they were spot on with the themes and highlights. It tucks you in with your favourite blanket, kisses the top of your head and delivers a powerful story of found family. At its heart it’s a story about seeing and accepting people as they are, not the space they occupy or role they play.
The most powerful resonation for me was the exploration of Luke and Posy’s autism; masking, coping and being given the freedom to exist without apology. The themes in the book are deftly handled, with sensitivity and a light touch. Is the big bad cartoonish? Yes. Does it matter? Sometimes you need to make your big bads into caricatures to reconcile what they do, so no, it doesn’t matter. This book is going on to my reread pile for next time I need a bookish cwtch. Highly recommended.
Beth: The Shadow Cabinet by Juno Dawson
This month has been incredibly busy. Well, the last two months have been, looking back. But my reading for this month has been broken up kind of into thirds. I went into the month reading A Crime Through Time by Amelia Blackwell. It started off as a buddy read last month; Nils wasn’t too keen on it but I persisted, if slowly. It took a while to sink in with me, but once it did, it was good fun.
At the start of the month, I read What You Are Looking For Is In The Library by Michiko Aoyoma. Not a fantasy or speculative book, it’s a Japanese translation, but I have to mention it because it absolutely swept me up in its heart-warming glimpses into the lives and struggles of ordinary people. I really felt it touched me and helped me see some of my own issues from another perspective.
The middle of my July was utterly consumed reading a book that I’m not sure I’m allowed to talk about… a friend (and one of my favourite authors) has a book on submission which they asked me to blurb. I was flattered beyond belief, then fell head over heels into this new world of theirs. I really hope it finds a home soon so you can all meet these incredible characters!
Finally, the latter part of my month has very much been the Season of the Witch as I complete Juno Dawson’s Her Majesty’s Royal Coven trilogy. As I’m writing this, I haven’t quite finished Human Rites yet, but more than happy to place my Top Picks crown on the second book of the threesome, The Shadow Cabinet. I love it when a Book 2 is done right, and Dawson played an absolute blinder with this one.
What was your favourite read of the month? Share with us in the comments!
