Resource Alert: 2025 Locus Recommended Reading List

Each February, Locus Magazine comes out with their Recommended Reading List. It is an exhaustive list of all the best Speculative Fiction of the last year. Literally it is one stop shopping for your Speculative Fiction readers...all of them.

This is an excellent resource to help readers and develop your collections for a variety of reasons. 

First, take the list itself, and check your collections. Do you own these books? You should. These are some of the best titles in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror from 2025-- I personally reviewed quite a few of them.

Second, use it to help readers who want books in these genres, but also, to help readers who want to give these genres a try-- the stories and novellas categories are especially helpful here. These are proven winners, titles you can suggest with ease as they were vetted by a group of experts. [see below for a list of those experts]

Third, especially in the collections, anthology, and all of the shorter fiction categories, pay attention to the authors producing these stories. Many will become the novelists whose books you will be clamoring to get soon. I know this because...

Fourth, they make this list every single year, so there is a great BACKLIST! You know I love the backlist. Seriously though, you need to assess your collection, you want a suggestion that is on the shelf, you want to discover a newer voices in the genres, you want to make a display? For all of these things and more, you need to look back more than just one year. Don't worry. I made it easy on you.

Click here to pull up a list of each year's list beginning with the new 2025 list and going backward. Or you can click here to bring up my posts about this resource in the same order. Both links are RA and Collection Development gold. 

This is one of my favorite resources. One I eagerly anticipate every single February. Bookmark it and use it for guaranteed crowd pleasing suggestions for your speculative fiction fans all year long.

Below is the intro to the 2025 list by the editors of Locus Magazine. And please note, as mentioned below, they added a brand new category for translated novels this year.

Welcome to the Locus Recommended Reading List… 

We saw some fabulous books come out last year and are so pleased to let you know about them! Our recommendations are compiled annually by the Locus reviewers, editors, and columnists; outside reviewers; and other professionals and well-known critics of genre fiction and non-fiction. This year we looked at over 1,000 titles between short and long fiction.

Note: we know there will be books you loved that didn’t make it; any one of our voting group would have a different exact list, of course. The list we share is our combined sum of opinions, assessed with a great affection and care for the field. We did not see everything that came out last year (though we tried!) and there will always be books that didn’t make it. No one in the group is allowed to vote for any titles they worked on or acquired.

This year we had recommendations from Liza Groen Trombi, reviews editor Jonathan Strahan; Locusreviewers Liz Bourke, Jake Casella Brookins, Alex Brown, Paul Di Filippo, Paula Guran, Niall Harrison, Rich Horton, Paul Kincaid, Russell Letson, Archita Mittra, Ian Mond, Colleen Mondor, Abigail Nussbaum, Alexandra Pierce, Wole Talabi, Gary K. Wolfe, and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro; staffers Bob Blough, Tim Melody Pratt, and Eleanor Trombla; and outside critics James Bradley, Cheryl Morgan, and Graham Sleight. Input for the non-fiction section also came from Eugen Bacon and Farah Mendlesohn. The art book section had advice from Arnie Fenner, Karen Haber, and Locus senior editor Francesca Myman. Short fiction recommendations added in anthologists and reviewers John Joseph Adams, Sean Dowie, Maria Haskins, Allan Kaster, Charles Payseur, Nisi Shawl, Bogi Takács, and A.C. Wise.

This year we are adding a new category for Translated Novels! For those recommendations we had input and assistance from Gautam Bhatia, Rachel Cordasco, Jukka Halme, Cristina Jurado, Roseanna Pendlebury, Carlos Arturo Serrano, Alex Schvartsman, and Jared Shurin.

You can let us know what your favorites were by voting in the 2025 Poll & Survey. The Poll decides the winners of the Locus Awards, to be held May 30, 2026 during the Bay Area Book Festival (early-bird tickets available now), and is open to all to vote on. The Survey helps us to be a better magazine; thank you for participating!

Click here to see the entire list. And consider voting in the Poll & Survey as linked in the paragraph above this one. Promote the link to your readers so they can participate as well. They will love to have the chance to advocate for their own favorites and they will remember that you were the one that brought them that joy.