2025 Releases to Get Excited About
We Do Not Part - Han Kang
Penguin - February 2025
What we know so far: Having just picked up the Nobel bloody Prize for Literature it’s fair to say Han Kang’s next book will be highly anticipated. I loved The Vegetarian and its examination of the body, human fragility, and difficult family relationships, so We Do Not Part’s synopsis definitely tickles my fancy:
We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter of Korean history. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.
The Message - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Penguin - February 2025
What we know so far: The Water Dancer is one of my favourite books of all time, and I think Coates’ work across fiction and non-fiction places him as close to being James Baldwin’s successor as anyone is going to get.
Described as part memoir, part travelogue, part writing primer in The Message Coates travels to locations of extreme injustice, including Palestine - which much of the discourse (and an excruciating CBS interview) around the book has focused on, with zionist media pretty much telling Coates to ‘stay in his lane’ and write about race.
One line from Coates was all it took to make me want to read this: ‘I was told Palestine was complicated. Visiting revealed a simple brutal truth.’
Vanishing World - Sayaka Murata
Granta - April 2025
What we know so far: Sayaka Murata’s absurdist and introspective fiction isn’t for everyone, but I love it. Her latest book sounds like another banger, exploring her usual themes of social conformity around sex, parenthood, and marriage - with a dystopian twist.
In Vanishing World, children are produced via artificial insemination and raised by parents in ‘clean’, sexless marriages. With this as the norm, the couple at the centre of the novel are caught in a radical new experiment, Eden, an isolated town where both men and women can be artificially inseminated, and children are raised en masse, with their parent anonymised.
Based on Earthings and Murata’s short story collection Life Ceremony, I’ll be going into this not ruling out aliens, cannibalism, or incest (don’t ask) as the conclusion of the novel.
Great Big Beautiful Life - Emily Henry
Penguin - April 2025
What we know so far: How could I make this list without including the new EmHen?
Having only just blessed us with the rom-com gem that was Funny Story, she’s coming back again to give us another book to read, laugh, and cry to on the sunlounger this summer.
Great Big Beautiful Life is already sounding like a triple threat: bookworms, an angsty, tall, brunette man, and forced proximity? GET THAT SHIT ON PREORDER.
Wild & Wrangled - Lyla Sage
Quercus - April 2025
What we know so far: I am already grieving the loss of the Rebel Blue Ranch series and it’s not even over yet.
Thee queen of emotionally available cowboys, Lyla Sage, is gifting us one last instalment to wrap up the series. I usually don’t love a second-chance romance because you miss all of that good first-meeting tension. But having seen the characters Cam and Dusty in the background of the other Rebel Blue Ranch books, I’m not worried about that, in fact, there may be too much tension. Yeehaw!
What Happens in Amsterdam - Rachel Lynn Solomon
Penguin - May 2025
What we know so far: Rachel Lynn Solomon captured my heart with the emotional depth and authenticity of Business or Pleasure and I am fully okay that the people of Goodreads disagree with me on that. Some of us like a flawed couple that actually communicates and goes beyond surface level insta-love okay!
Having embarked on a romantic long weekend to Amsterdam this spring, I’m very much ready for What Happens In Amsterdam, a second-chance romance/marriage of convenience romp set in the city of bikes, tulips, and Van Gogh.
The Emperor of Gladness - Ocean Vuong
Jonathan Cape - May 2025
What we know so far: Returning to fiction after a few years focused on the world of poetry, I’m already putting my money on Ocean Vuong being on a few award shortlists next year.
Vuong loves to make me cry, so I’ll be emotionally preparing for The Emperor of Gladness, which Penguin describes as ‘a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.’ If that doesn’t say ‘this book will make you sob’ then I don’t know what does.