There are so many books written by my favorite authors coming out next year, so I figured I would make a list!!
The main characters in Emily Austin’s books are filled with mentally ill queer people, and as a mentally ill queer person I find her books all too relatable. I devoured We Could Be Rats in a day, and I think about the ending of Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead at least once a month.
Is This a Cry For Help? will follow librarian Darcy as she suffers a mental breakdown in the wake of her ex-boyfriend’s death. Along with this grief, she will have to deal with protestors at her library wanting to ban books. A very timely novel, and filled with subjects I’m very passionate about (I’m (trying) to write a novel that deals with book bans as well). With this book being the soonest to come out, I won’t have to wait long to read it!
Thor’s Steph’s Story was one of my favorite books of 2023, and the discussions of being asexual and feeling left out and alone when your friends are in relationships was so devastatingly relatable, and I think about it often. Thor’s Life is Strange: True Colors tie-in novel was the perfect prequel to the 2021 game (technically a prequel to the 2021 DLC to the game), and I, like many members of the Life is Strange fandom, have been eagerly anticipating the possibility of the author returning to the franchise.
Out of Focus will follow Steph’s ex, Izzie Margolis, who had a brief voice cameo in True Colors and was a minor character in Wavelengths, as well as being a main character in Steph’s Story. “With a drummer who can’t keep time, debts that won’t stop piling, and a new manager who seems more troubled than the band, can Drugstore Makeup reach the next level–or has Izzie Margolis bitten off more than she can chew?” According to Titan Books. I’m so excited to see where Izzie’s story leads!
At the time of writing this blog post, I have read 184 books in 2024 and 2025 combined. In my reading journey, I’ve learned what genres I prefer, and what sources I trust for book recommendations. While I don’t go to “Bookstagram” as much as I used to, one account I do still follow is Lesbrarycard, aka Mallory Pearson (who is an author as well, and I found a copy of her 2024 novel We Ate The Dark during my recent trip to Portland!). She posted about Levene’s Greasepaint back in 2024, and while on a trip to a local bookstore in Los Angeles I picked up a copy. You can read my review of the book here. Long story short, it quickly became one of my favorite books of last year. Levene’s prose and experimental storytelling was enchanting and addicting.
A Pizza Hut, a Pizza hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a Pizza Hut promises to be “a playful, smart, and electric novel about a scruffy bunch of queers in Watford that asks: what if we never left the suburbs? Writing against the narrative imposed upon the suburbs as a place queers leave, the novel asks where should a person be? And plays out the radical implications of staying put. With drama at cafe Nero, butch football, video games, epic translation projects, and a high femme roboteer, this novel is as radical as it is wild.” (Cipher Press).
A few of the books I’ve read this year involve queer people making the choice to stay in their hometowns (We Could Be Rats by Emily Austin and We Ate the Dark by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta), and while I personally wanted to leave my hometown, I can understand the desire to stay at the place you’ve called home. I feel like this book is going to break my heart like Greasepaint did, and I am so excited for it.
I discovered Gabrielle Korn’s work after seeing the Autostraddle article detailing a TikTok influencer who “wrote” a “spicy sapphic romance,” however it turned out that she used a ghostwriter. That ghostwriter being Korn herself. You can read the article for yourself here. After reading the article, I immediately went on the search for Korn’s novels, her duology Yours for the Taking and The Shutouts, and promptly became obsessed with them.
Long Island Girls tells a story of “first love and second chances set in the indie music industry, featuring a queer woman from Long Island who works at a small record label in the early 2000s and the complicated love interest from back home she encounters three life-altering times over the next 20 years” (Publishers Magazine).
While I have never been to Long Island, much less New York as a whole (I was there for a layover in…2016? I didn’t even visit the city), I am excited to read another heart-wrenching (and possibly emotionally damaging and thought provoking) work from Korn! Long Island Girls (< another article providing more information on the upcoming novel).
One of my all time favorite authors is releasing a new book! I quite literally have every Jaclyn Moriarty book and have read them all. Her writing feels so satisfying, no matter what genre of hers I’m reading. This novel, aimed at adults, follows “three strangers whose lives are forever changed when they are all drawn to a mysterious shop claiming to have unlocked the secret to time travel” (Publishers Marketplace).
The pitch reminds me a bit of Moriarty’s 2019 adult novel, Gravity is the Thing, about a woman who goes to a self-help group, the leader of which promises to teach the members how to fly. I’m so excited for this new entry to Moriarty’s bibliography!
Another favorite author coming out with a new book! My friends know that Station Eleven is one of my favorite books, maybe even my favorite of all time. I even spent the last two years reading Mandel’s entire bibliography (mainly the three books of her I have not read–Last Night in Montreal, The Singer’s Gun, and The Lola Quartet) to get an idea of her storytelling style before Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, and Sea of Tranquility.
Publisher’s Lunch describes Exit Party as a novel of “doubles, shadow worlds, and fractured timelines, in which a man disappears from a glittering Los Angeles party and a woman–a gunrunner, an art collective, an operative of the state–searches for answers.” I anticipate we’re going to be combining the science fiction that Mandel has become known for, and the crime fiction of her roots.
E. A. Young Writes 