2025 Debut Novels to get Excited About
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Happy New Year!
Welcome to 2025. We are delighted to share some new and exciting up-and-coming authors of the year! Please enjoy our list of debut novels coming out this year. We’ll keep adding to this list as we come across new authors, so be sure to keep checking back!
When All the Stars Burn Out
Finley Jackson
Okay, this book technically came out in 2024. BUT it was so late in the year that it’s getting an honorary inclusion to this list!
Andromeda’s mother passed, and her world shattered. She couldn’t fall apart, though—her younger sister is counting on her. They soon have to trade their small-town lives for big-city bustle. But Andromeda soon learns that nothing comes without sacrifice. A lot of it. How much can she give before she doesn’t recognize the reflection in the mirror?
Shots Fired
K. G. Smith
Out February 14, 2025!
Chiara Bianchi always knew her role as Donna of the Bianchi family would be anything but easy. Every day, she fights to prove her worth in the ruthless, male-dominated, violent underworld of Saint Marin. But her greatest battle isn’t fought over territory—it’s over her heart. Torn between her duty to her family and her forbidden love, Emilia, Chiara must toe a dangerous line. One where a misstep could mean the end of her family and herself.
As the violence escalates, Chiara must make sacrifices. But as she makes her decisions, a bigger problem comes up: can she hold onto the pieces of her shattered heart AND the woman who’s always owned it?
A Desert of Bleeding Sand
by Lucia Damisa
Expected release date March 27, 2025!
In this inventive fantasy debut perfect for fans of Dance of Thieves and The City of Brass, West African Mr & Mrs Smith collide in a magical desert palace.
Mercenaries are raiding academies and taking students. A traitor in the palace might be the mercenaries’ source of intel. Zair, a half-aziza and elite military student, is sent to infiltrate the coronation ceremony under disguise to find the traitor. Zair is desperate to succeed and save her little sister from the mercenaries, and maybe also prove worthy of the elite soldiers’ badge, despite the hatred against her tribe and their magical abilities. But then she encounters Dathan, a clever rival spy also after the traitor for intentions unknown.
A threat to each other’s goals, Zair and Dathan begin working against each other in a game of wits, desperate to find the traitor first while avoiding the consequences of spying in the sentient palace. When courtiers start to turn up dead, however, both realize their individual skills might be no match for the traitor’s. In a glittering Sahara Desert palace where hunger is for power and night magic guards its halls, Zair and Dathan must find the kingdom’s greatest traitor, or watch everything they love burn.
The Blood Runner
by Erin Rose - aka best friends Katie Erin and Katie Rose
Expected release date April 30, 2025!
Writhing under Chicago's glitz and glam is an underbelly as dark as night.
With the secrets of gangsters and brawlers scribbled in her notebook, journalist Evelyn Mills has met her fair share of monsters. But whispers and rumors, traded over spirits in boisterous gin joints, are best left for the gossip columns. And Evelyn isn't a gossip column kind of woman—she's after the front page. Together with her brother, Laurence, Evelyn boards a bootlegger's ship, intent on getting the inside scoop and blowing the operation wide open.
Captain Asher DuCarmont has a tenuous truce with the local vampires. He provides them with barrels of blood; they leave his pack alone and remain hidden from humanity. When a delivery goes awry, Laurence is abducted, and Asher is forced into a deal with a horrified Evelyn: he returns her brother unharmed, or she exposes the supernatural to the world.
Desperate to save her only sibling, Evelyn must trust Asher as he leads her away from Chicago's glittering lights and deep into Michigan's dark forests. As they protect each other time and again, the lines blur between liar and lover, and Evelyn questions in which world she truly belongs.
The One and Only Vivian Stone
by Melissa O’Connor
Expected release date July 22, 2025!
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo meets Fiona Davis in this enchanting novel about a pair of estranged lovers reconnecting over mysterious tapes found in an attic and the old Hollywood secret hidden within them.
After her grandmother’s death, thirty-year-old Margot DuBois returns to her childhood home to sort through the attic of things left behind and comes across a set of eight unlabeled cassette tapes. Unable to use the damaged tape player, she calls in a favor from a long-lost ex, Leo, and they strike a he’ll fix the player if he can hear what’s on the tapes. When they finally manage to listen, the two are shocked to hear the voice of old Hollywood film star Vivian Stone. Why did Margot’s grandmother have these tapes and where did they come from?
As they continue to listen, Vivian’s story unfolds from her early auditions for major studios, to meeting her costar-turned-husband Kit, to the struggles of being a woman in Hollywood. Margot is inspired by Vivian’s tenacity and courage to keep fighting for the life she wants but everything changes when she finally uncovers Vivian’s ties to her family in this moving exploration of how it’s never too late to start over.
We are the Match
by Mary E. Roach
Expected release date July 29, 2025!
In this glittering, sapphic reimagining of Helen of Troy set in modern day mobster Greece, Helen is the daughter of a powerful crime lord and Paris is the woman hellbent on destroying her—if they don’t fall for each other first.
They’re thrown together in an opulent world of privilege, power, and cover-ups—and the closer they grow, the more the fragile balance of power in the world of crime lords begins to fray.
Because if Helen doesn’t choose to abandon her newfound connection with Paris and marry into the alliance her father arranged, they could all go to war.
And Helen and Paris might just be ready to let them.
A Fae in Finance
Juliet Brooks
Miri is an investment banker who finds herself trapped in Faerie by one of her clients, the Princeling of the realm. Her boss isn’t perturbed. After all, the wifi is excellent, so she can still log in. So she does whatever a 20-something would do: cry, eat cake, and worry about her cat.
But Miri knows fantasy books. She knows there are workarounds to magic—she just needs to find them.