And today's pick for my best new paperbacks of 2025 is Rakesfall by @vajra.me.

Defying categorisation, it's an incredible, mind-bending, @ursulakleguin.com Prize-winning tale of reincarnation and entwined souls, rooted in Sri Lanka but expanding across worlds.

#SFF
💙📚🪐

Dec 3rd:
Danielle Giles' debut novel Mere arrived in hardback in April: a wonderfully atmospheric tale of queer nuns surviving on the medieval Norfolk fens as sinister, inexplicable things start to happen, and the landscape itself seems to turn against them.

Very different and very good!
💙📚🪐

Dec 2nd's choice for my paperbacks of the year is The Mercy of Gods by James S A Corey.

This is a spectacular, intelligent start to a new series featuring overwhelming alien invasion, unlikely human resistance, and all the powerful human drama you'd expect from the authors of The Expanse!

💙📚🪐
#SFF

#2025Advent Dec 2:
Absolutely loved The Everlasting by @alixeharrow.bsky.social. She's very much on my insta-buy list now.

A time-hopping tale of a medieval lady knight, a war-scarred pistol-weilding scholar, love, betrayal, authoritarianism, and stories woven for survival.

*So good!*

#SFF
💙📚🪐

Exciting stuff, good luck!

Dec 1: @jamesbluecat.bsky.social's Pagans got my year off to a great start. it's a police procedural with a difference: set in alternative modern-day Anglo-Saxon London, complete with gods & hackers, seaxes & drones! Full of great characters, historical & imaginative details, lots of fun to read 💙📚🪐

Hyped for the paperback next year, and looking forward to waving it at all my customers!

And for my top paperbacks of 2025, Dec 1st:

I really loved The Butcher of the Forest by @premeemohamed.com, a sinister folkloric/fairytale novella of missing children with an uncanny forest setting. It gave me Labyrinth-meets-Annihilation vibes (perhaps because I loved both of those, and this!)
💙📚🪐

Dec 1: @jamesbluecat.bsky.social's Pagans got my year off to a great start. it's a police procedural with a difference: set in alternative modern-day Anglo-Saxon London, complete with gods & hackers, seaxes & drones! Full of great characters, historical & imaginative details, lots of fun to read 💙📚🪐

Good morning Womble,
I'm aiming to finish Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary this weekend (because I want to watch the film trailer but it contains spoilers!)
And just dipping a toe into On The Calculation Of Volume by Solvej Balle.

Maybe, though he should go bug his real parents about that!

I wouldn't put it past him!
He did huff and walk off when I defended myself.