10 Books From Debut Authors That Are Being Published In 2025

Temperance gets thrown into the lake after she’s accused of being a witch by the town’s new pastor. Maybe he was right; maybe she is a witch, but that doesn’t make it right to throw a woman into a lake where a monster lives in the depths!

Luckily for Temperance, Jenny Greenteeth doesn’t kill her when she crashes into the water. The two quickly discover that the pastor isn’t just a small-minded man; he’s way worse than that. He’s not only wicked but also a formidable foe.

Necromancers aren’t supposed to exist in Anchor. The gods ripped the continents from the world’s surface to save humanity, using their bones to keep the land tethered, but Azul del Arroyo doesn’t care about this.

Azul is a necromancer responsible for her sister’s death and is determined to retrieve her remains before they’re destroyed, even if that means entering into a cat-and-mouse game with the Emissary of the Lord Death.

Benigno Caldera is a Puerto Rican migrant working as an ironworker in Brooklyn. When he’s commissioned by a Coney Island side-show proprietor to make an aquatic tank for the newest exhibit in Morgan’s Menagerie of Human Oddities, Benny thinks his life is starting to look up. Or he did until he got roped into also hunting the newest exhibition piece: a merman, stolen out of the East River.

Now Benny’s a part of this show family whether he likes it or not. The crew and performers are nice enough, but he keeps finding himself drawn back to the tank where Río’s being held captive.

This standalone romantasy is for any fans of Brigid Kemmerer and Lexi Ryan. In this story, we follow Elia, whose path-making magic is linked to her dying father. Desperate to provide for her siblings, she’s forced to tether her father to life so she can continue using her magic.

But evading death has its own consequences—a soul for a soul—and Elia quickly faces the consequences of her action when the god of death claims her youngest brother as a servant.

Cat Li’s new job writing the love storylines for the upcoming game “Compass Hollow” combines the two things she loves most in life: video games and swoony romances . This is her dream job, and she’s not going to let anything get in her way—not even Andi Zhang, her boss and resident happily-ever-after hater. It doesn’t matter how hot Andi is; Cat’s here for a job, and she’s going to see it through.

Andi Zhang is Compass Hollow’s creative director with a chip on their shoulder. Internet trolls doxxed them years ago, and they’ve spent all their time since then trying to prove that they’re a game dev meant to be taken seriously.

Rochelle Coleman has three goals: become valedictorian, get into Wharton, and take down her (charismatic) academic rival Amira Rodriguez. In need of a job to round out her college applications, Rochelle ends up working at Horizon Cinemas, a Black-owned movie theater. The only problem is, she never expected Amira to be her boss!

As the two work together, Rochelle realizes that Amira might not be as bad as she’d thought… she might even like her.

Antonia’s father set fire to her family house while she was still inside. La Casona has never been a comforting home. It looks out over the Salto de Tequendama waterfall, and a malevolent spirit haunts their family’s nightmares. After Antonia’s mother falls into El Salto, her father can’t take it any longer… the house must go.

Even though she almost died there, Antonia finds herself drawn back to the house three years after the fire. The nightmares from La Casona have returned. It seems her mother’s death may not have been an accident after all but instead caused by something in the estate Antonia once called home.

Every thirteen years when the cicadas emerge from the ground in Carrion, Georgia, people go missing. This year the only evidence of Dawson Sumter’s disappearance is a smattering of blood left in a motel owned by Neera Singh’s family.

Dawson’s only meant to be a name on a list of unfortunate accidents that plague Carrion. It’s simply a fact of life here: some people die. Others disappear without a trace.

After being integrated into society in a futuristic reunified Korea, robots are second-class citizens. Sure, they act as surrogates, servants, children, and lovers… but you mustn’t mistake their intelligence for humanity.

Morgan and Jun know that all too well after their adopted robot brother Yoyo is lost, leaving the two siblings estranged. They learned to deal with their grief in their own ways, but they’ll never forget Yoyo’s influence on their lives.

CW: Animal Death, Death

When Julieta Villarreal enlists in Cometa, a private space mission meant to establish Earth’s first extraterrestrial settlement, she doesn’t think she’s leaving anything important behind. After all, she has nothing important left. Not only is Florida feeling the brunt of the climate disaster that is sending people out into space, but Juli has lost her best friend, aka her twin sister, in a tragic hit-and-run.