December 2025 list by Holly Whistler |
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Polybius
by Collin Armstrong
October, 1982. Forced to move to the quiet seaside town of Tasker Bay by her mother, the only thing on high schooler Andi's mind is saving up enough money to return to her old stomping grounds in Silicon Valley. Her self-taught skills with all things electronic make her a perfect fit for a job at the dingy local arcade where she can tune out from life and bankroll her eventual escape. Seemingly overnight, a virus-like epidemic grips Tasker Bay while a violent coastal storm rolls in, isolating it from the outside world. People begin experiencing fits of anger, paranoia, and hallucinations-no one can be trusted. After a grisly act of violence goes unsolved, the town descends into chaos. Is the arrival of this mysterious game and the disorder in Tasker Bay a coincidence?
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One of Us
by Dan Chaon
A playfully macabre and thrilling tale, from a master of literary horror. about orphaned twins on the run from their murderous uncle who find refuge in a bizarre traveling carnival. It's 1915 and the world is transforming, but for thirteen-year-old Bolt and Eleanor--twins so close they can literally read each other's minds--life is falling apart. When their mother dies, they are forced to leave home under the care of a vicious con man who claims to be their long-lost uncle Charlie, the only kin they have left. During a late-night poker game, when one of his rages ends in murder, they decide to flee.
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A Land So Wide
by Erin A. Craig
Like everyone else in the settlement of Mistaken, Greer Mackenzie is trapped. Founded by an ambitious lumber merchant, the village is blessed with rich natural resources that have made its people prosperous--but at a cost. The same woods that have lined the townsfolks' pockets harbor dangerous beasts: wolves, bears, and the Bright-Eyeds--monsters beyond description who have rained utter destruction down on nearby settlements. But Mistaken's founders made a deal with the mysterious Benevolence: the Warding Stones that surround the town will keep the Bright-Eyeds out--and the town's citizens in. Anyone who spends a night within Mistaken's borders belongs to it forever..
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The Wilderness
by Angela Flournoy
An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife--in the much-anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy. Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning of their careers. As these friends move from the late 2000's into the late 2020's, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another--amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.
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Circle of Days
by Ken Follett
Seft, a talented flint miner, walks the Great Plain in the high summer heat, to witness the rituals that signal the start of a new year. He is there to trade his stone at the Midsummer Rite, and to find Neen, the girl he loves. Her family live in prosperity and offer Seft an escape from his brutish father and brothers, within their herder community. Joia's vision of a great stone circle, assembled by the divided tribes of the Plain, will inspire Seft and become their life's work. But trouble is brewing among the hills and woodlands of the Great Plain. As drought ravages the earth, mistrust grows between the herders, farmers and woodlanders - and an act of savage violence leads to open warfare.
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The Gun Man Jackson Swagger: A Western
by Stephen Hunter
In the frying pan of a drought-scorched 1890s Southwest, an old man shows up at the region's only prosperous spread, the Callahan ranch, seeking work. He knows a sharpshooter would be valuable to Colonel Callahan and head gun man Tom Voth. But he has his own mission. Aware that a young cowboy on the ranch has died mysteriously, Jack begins to investigate. He soon realizes that the death and the source of the Callahan wealth are dangerously entwined and that many of the dark forces of the American West are at play on the ranch.
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The Wayfinder
by Adam Johnson
A grand historical novel about a girl from a remote Polynesian island who goes on an epic journey to the heart of the Tongan Empire, from a Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author.
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The Lost Baker of Vienna
by Sharon Kurtzman
In 2018, Zoe Rosenzweig is reeling after the loss of her beloved grandfather, a Holocaust survivor. She becomes obsessed with finding out what really happened to her family during the war. Vienna, 1946: Chana Rosenzweig has endured the horrors of war to find herself, her mother, and younger brother finally free in Vienna. Despite the danger, Chana sneaks out most nights to return to the hotel kitchen where she works as a dishwasher, using the quiet nighttime hours to bake her late father's recipes and finds herself caught in a dangerous love triangle, torn between the black-market dealer who has offered marriage and protection, and the apprentice baker who shares her passions.
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The Name on the Wall
by Hervé Le Tellier
This poignant World War II historical fiction unearths and honors the life of a young French Resistance fighter. Struck by a name written on a facade of his new home, acclaimed author Hervâe Le Tellier embarked on a quest to recover the history of Andrâe Chaix, a resistance fighter, killed at the age of 20 in August 1944. Deftly combining historical fragments into a vivid narrative, Le Tellier invites us on a journey through one of the most troubled times: the inexhaustible Second World War. While avoiding simplistic, romantic tropes, he evokes the courage of a young man taking up arms, like many others, in what is also the story of a magnificent love with an equally impressive young woman, Simone.
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When They Burned the Butterfly
by Wen-Yi Lee
In this fierce, glamorous adult fantasy debut, Silvia Moreno-Garcia meets Fonda Lee, with the feverish intensity of R.F. Kuang's Poppy War trilogy. Singapore, 1972: Newly independent and grappling for power in a fast-modernizing world. Here, gangsters in Chinese secret societies are the last conduits of their ancestors' migrant gods, and the back alleys where they fight are the last place magic has not been assimilated and legislated away. Loner schoolgirl Adeline Siow has never needed more company than the flame she can summon at her fingertips. But when her mother dies in a house fire with a butterfly seared onto her skin and Adeline hunts down a girl she saw in a back-alley barfight--a girl with a butterfly tattoo--she discovers she's far from alone.
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The Hong Kong Widow
by Kristen Loesch
In 1950s Hong Kong, Mei is a young refugee of the Chinese Communist revolution struggling to put her past in Shanghai behind her. When she receives a shocking invitation--to take part in a competition in one of the city's most notorious haunted houses, pitting six spirit mediums against one another in a series of six séances over six nights, until a single winner emerges--she has every reason to refuse. Except that the hostess, a former Shanghainese silent film star, is none other than the wife of the man who once destroyed Mei's entire life.
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Workhorse
by Caroline Palmer
At the turn of the millennium, Editorial Assistant Clodagh Clo Harmon wants nothing more than to rise through the ranks at the world's most prestigious fashion magazine. There's just one problem: she doesn't have the right pedigree. Instead, Clo is a workhorse surrounded by beautiful, wealthy, impossibly well-connected show horses who get ahead without effort, including her beguiling cubicle-mate, Davis Lawrence, the daughter of a beloved but fading Broadway actress. Hilariously observant and insightful, Workhorse is a brilliant page-turner about what it means to be in thrall to wealth, beauty, and influence, and the outrageous sacrifices women must make for the sake of success.
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Psychopomp & Circumstance
by Eden Royce
Phee St. Margaret is a daughter of the Reconstruction, born to a family of free Black business owners in New Charleston. Coddled to within an inch of her life by a mother who refuses to let her daughter live a life other than the one she dictates, Phee yearns to demonstrate she's capable of more than simply marrying well. When word arrives that her Aunt Cleo, long estranged from the family, has passed away, Phee risks her mother's wrath to step up and accept the role of pomp-the highly honored duty of planning the funeral service. Traveling alone to the town of Horizon and her aunt's unsettling home, Phee soon discovers that visions and shadows beckon from every reflective surface, and that some secrets transcend the borders of life and death--
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Slashed Beauties
by A. Rushby
Seoul, present day. Antiques dealer Alys's task is nearly complete. She has at last secured Elizabeth, the third and final Anatomical Venus. Crafted in eighteenth-century London and modeled after real-life sex workers to entice male medical students, these eerie wax figures, known as slashed beauties, carry unsavory lore. Legend has it that the figures are bewitched, and come to life at night to murder men who have wronged them. Now Alys embarks for England, where she knows what she must do: sever her cursed connection to the Venuses once and for all. London, 1763. Abandoned and penniless in Covent Garden, wide-eyed Eleanor and another young woman, Emily, are taken under the wing of beautiful and beguiling Elizabeth, one of the city's most highly desired courtesans among the rich and powerful. But as Eleanor is seduced deeper into a web of money, materialism, and men, it seems that Elizabeth may not be the savior she appears to be.--
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House of Two Pharaohs
by Wilbur Smith
Since becoming Nomarc, Piay has thrown himself into pulling the city of Memphis back from the brink. The once starving inhabitants have been fed, a new school for Royal Princes and the sons of aristocrats has been established, and Piay has been recovering the many riches looted by the Hyksos. But when the heavily-guarded vault is found locked with the body of a murdered scribe inside--the mark of Anubis, god of death scrawled in his own blood--panic sweeps the city. Only the wisest man in all Egypt can solve this mystery: Piay's mentor, the great Mage Taita--
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