Here it is, our final list of most anticipated books for 2025!🪩 As our days slow down and we take a moment to unwind and reflect, consider picking up any of these December releases for the final read of the year. ( If you’re still completing your holiday shopping, make sure to check out this and all our monthly lists for the perfect gift.🎁) Happy reading!
Marayrasu by Edgardo Rivera Martínez | Translated by Amy Olen | SHORT STORIES
The stories in Marayrasu stage fantastical, mysterious encounters that belie the characters' often harsh economic and political realities as they seek belonging in modern Peru through art, music, and relationships. Depicted in poetic prose, these characters are loners, orphans, and outcasts experiencing quiet, tender encounters with other people and animals, the creative arts, and the land they find themselves depending on. Living vibrantly within these stories, the leviathan of Inca lore considers its own form, a young boy moves to a mining town and gets involved with a local union leader's fight for worker rights while feeling the powerful pull of a large mountain overlooking the town, and a Persian cat captures the attention of a family down on its luck. Amy Olen's translation smoothly captures Rivera Martínez's impressive stories, offering a unique lens into the region at the heart of this canonical author's inimitable work.
The Jaguar's Roar by Micheliny Verunschk | Translated by Juliana Barbassa | ADULT FICTION
In 1817, two German scientists traveled across Brazil and into the Amazon gathering flora and fauna to study and display in Europe. Among the collection they brought to the Bavarian court were two Indigenous children.
The children's images became widespread, satisfying European curiosity about the distant land they came from. But little was known about the children themselves. Despite the scientists' detailed records about many of the plant and animal specimens, they only noted the children's tribes: the girl was a Miranha, and the boy, a Juri. After a few months, the children died in Germany, far from anyone who knew their names.
The Jaguar's Roar, a spellbinding poetic novel told in many voices, imagines the children's journey and a modern Brazilian woman's effort to counter their disappearance from history.
In her award-winning fifth novel, Micheliny Verunschk inhabits the fictional perspective of the Miranha girl, of the jaguar she conjures for protection, of the German scientists who determine her fate, and of the two rivers that frame her life. Intertwined in this narrative is a story of Brazil's suppression of its Indigenous history, and of a young woman named Josefa, a newcomer unmoored in the megacity of São Paulo, who identifies with the girl after seeing her image in an exhibit and tries to recover the child's voice and story.
In Juliana Barbassa's vivid translation, Verunshuk's lyrical sentences carry the reader through a powerful exploration of memory, colonialism, and belonging, and make a lasting contribution to world literature.
Galápagos by Fátima Vélez | Translated by Hannah Kauders | ADULT FICTION
Lorenzo is a painter who doesn’t paint. He spends his days watching Jeanne Moreau films, luxuriating in his partner Juan B’s bed, and swapping letters with his lovers. Then, one day, his nail falls off. Then another nail, then all of them. Thus begins a journey of decomposition that carries him from Colombia to Paris, from Paris to the French countryside, and on a final journey to the Galápagos Archipelago.
As they cruise the islands on a custom-made ship, Lorenzo and his friends and lovers drink, swap stories, and feast gluttonously, even as their bodies succumb to an unspeakable disease. In this contemporary plague novel, rife with pathos and humor, ailing bodies are torn between desire and decay, lust and friendship, creativity and destruction. Vélez revolutionizes the novel form, pushing language to its extreme as she tests the limits of how we understand illness, sexuality, the body, and what it means to make art in the face of our own mortality.
We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope Edited by Malka Older, Annalee Newitz, Karen Lord | SHORT STORIES
In this collection, editors Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older champion realistic, progressive social change using the speculative stories of writers across the world. Exploring topics ranging from disability justice and environmental activism to community care and collective worldbuilding, these imaginative pieces from writers such as NK Jemisin, Charlie Jane Anders, Alejandro Heredia, Sam J. Miller, Nisi Shawl, and Sabrina Vourvoulias center solidarity, empathy, hope, joy, and creativity.
Each story is grounded within a broader sociopolitical framework using essays and interviews from movement leaders, including adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha, charting the future history of protest, revolutions, and resistance with the same zeal for accuracy that speculative writers normally bring to science and technology. Using the vehicle of ambitious storytelling, We Will Rise Again offers effective tools for organizing, an unflinching interrogation of the status quo, and a blueprint for prefiguring a different world.
Sea Salt and Coffee Beans by Grace Santamaria | ADULT FICTION
When Sofia loses her coveted job, her American dream is on the line. With her U.S. work visa hanging by a thread, a job interview at a top Miami marketing firm is her last shot at staying in the country. But as she navigates the high-stakes competition, she finds herself irresistibly drawn to her chief rival for the position—charming and ambitious Esteban.
Esteban embodies the glamorous Miami lifestyle Sofia has always admired, and he's unbothered by their rivalry. But for Sofia, everything is at stake. She can’t bring herself to tell him how much this job means to her, nor that her future depends on securing it. With her visa expiring, mounting family pressures, and bills piling up, Sofia faces an impossible choice: win the job, or risk returning to a life she fought so hard to leave behind.
Can Sofia claim the career—and the love—she longs for, or will her dreams slip through her fingers just as they're within reach?
