TOP PICKS – August 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 Last Vigilant by Mark A Latham
Unfortunately August started off with a fairly quick buddy read with Beth as I ended up DNFing Melissa Caruso’s The Last Hour Between Worlds. However, my other two chunkier reads were fantastic and honestly it was hard to pick a favourite between them.
King Sorrow by Joe Hill was contemporary fantasy at its best and had me utterly gripped. When Arthur Oaks finds himself entangled with some local drug dealers, in order to be rid of them, he and his other five friends decide to summon a dragon, the only thing is, the dragon now demands a sacrifice every Easter. Part coming of age fantasy and part action thriller, this book never had a dull moment.
My Top Pick has to go to The Last Vigilant by Mark A Latham which superbly combines my current two favourite genres, epic fantasy and mystery. After the disappearance of several children, Holt Hawley, a supposedly cursed Sargent, is tasked to find a True Vigilant of the old order, believed to possess magical abilities and therefore will be a significant aid in finding the children. When he finds Enelda Drake, a woman claiming to be such a Vigilant, their journey leads them to uncovering some rather sinister and corrupting plots. This was a true hidden gem of a book, I loved the characters, the medieval setting, and all the twists and turns.
Theo: Spiderlight by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I’ve had a fun trio of spec-fic books this month, mingled in with a fair bit of non-fiction.
I made myself revisit Ted Hughes The Iron Man which was the subject of my first ever book review – a homework set by my English teacher when I was 9. Long story short, I still hate it. The problems of scale (a monster the size of Australia with a head the size of Italy having a chat with an iron man the size of a house) and plot inconsistencies (Where did the iron man come from? Where did the space monster come from? How, if it was born in a star could it suffer in the Sun?) annoyed me just as much now as then.
I enjoyed Seon-ran Cheon’s Korean urban fantasy The Midnight Shift translated by Gene Png, which was a different take on vampires and what drives them, as the stories of three different women spiral around a spate of suicides in an old people’s nursing home.
However, my pick of the month has to be Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Spiderlight which takes some tropes from D&D (a mismatched squabbling party) and Tolkien (a quest to over throw a darklord) and throws in some Tchaikovsky spin with a spider fashioned into a half human and conscripted into their quest, and some sharply amusing commentary on the nature of religion and the hunger for black and white divisions between good and evil.
Theo’s review | Pre-order here
Cat: The Burial Tide by Neil Sharpson
It’s been a busy bookish month, but for once there’s a clear winner for me as to my favourite: The Burial Tide by Neil Sharpson. I went in blind and discovered an amazing folk horror tale that starts with a woman fighting her way out of a grave on an Irish island… and none of the locals seem to find that particularly odd. A mix of a whodunnit and a mystery of just what the eff is going on, this is an Irish ‘Wicker Man’ with added mythology and female rage, while somehow staying grounded amidst the weirdness. Exceptional and absolutely great.
Emma: Feathers so Vicious by Liv Zander
I’ve read a lot of average books this month. Not bad enough to DNF but not good enough to recommend to others.
Luckily there have been a few gems amongst them. My favourite being the Court of Ravens duology by Liv Zander. A dark romantasy, there are a lot of trigger warnings to consider, but if you like your romance a bit rougher, I would suggest you get stuck in. While the plot is nothing groundbreaking, it’s the romance that keeps you reading and before you know it, it’s light outside and you have to wake up in a couple of hours. The cliffhanger at the end of book one will have you grabbing the second faster than you can say Caw.
Vinay: The Blackfire Blade by James Logan
August was another terrific month of reading with a bunch of fascinating reads.
Interesting reads – Anthony Ryan’s The Feeding and GJ Terral’s The Not so Mundane Mysteries of Norman Melamourne
Charming reads – Gareth Brown’s The Society of Unknowable Objects and Phantoms in Crime by Marcus Fell and Jason Krumbine
Certifiable Bangers – In Deep Coprolite by Douglas Lumsden and Extremity by Nicholas Binge
My TOP PICK of the month goes to James Logan’s The Blackfire Blade, a fantastic follow-up to The Silverblood Promise (Reviewed here). The Silverblood Promise was a fantastic blockbuster in an almost videogame-y manner and The Blackfire Blade follows almost the same pattern. Lukan, the lead is as inept and charming as ever – solving problems that he only creates but there is also a sense of his growing up that happens through the course of the book. While there are side quests like in Book One to derail the main mission, the ending is suitably emotional providing a closure of sorts while pointing towards the next adventures. The Blackfire Blade is less chaotic (from a happenings standpoint) as compared to Silverbood Promise but it packs in right character moments to make this fun, enjoyable and memorable in a diametrically opposite setting.
Beth: Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
Although, like Nils said, my month didn’t start well with a DNF of a book I’d been looking forward to for a while, the rest of my month went very well. I squeezed in two reads for my book clubs, even though I only managed to go to one – the SFF one, where we discussed Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. It had a mixed reception, I’m discovering people don’t seem to have patience for these type of books that are open to your own interpretation. Personally I enjoyed it for that reason.
My reading also got quite hot under the collar with S. T. Gibson’s upcoming Savage Blooms, which I reviewed here if you want to hear more.
But my Top Pick of the month was, yet again, a T. Kingfisher title – her upcoming Snow White retelling Hemlock & Silver. I got quite swept up in my review talking about fairy tale retellings and philosophy and representation… and completely failed to discuss my favourite character, a talking cat called Greyling. He was precisely how I’d imagine a cat would be if one could speak.
What was your favourite read of the month? Share with us in the comments!
