Must-Have Monday is a feature highlighting which of the coming week’s new releases I’m excited for. It is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all books being published that week; only those I’m interested in out of those I’m aware of! The focus is diverse SFF, but other genres sneak in occasionally too.
TWELVE books this week!
(Books are listed in order of pub date, then Adult SFF, Adult Other, YA SFF, YA Other, MG SFF.)
Genres: Adult, Sci Fi
Published on: 18th March 2025
Goodreads
From bestselling authors Darkly Lem comes Transmentation | Transience, the first book in a sweeping multiverse of adventure and intrigue perfect for fans of Jeff VanderMeer and The Expanse series.
Over thousands of years and thousands of worlds, universe-spanning societies of interdimensional travelers have arisen. Some seek to make the multiverse a better place, some seek power and glory, others knowledge, while still others simply want to write their own tale across the cosmos.
When a routine training mission goes very wrong, two competing societies are thrust into an unwanted confrontation. As intelligence officer Malculm Kilkeneade receives the blame within Burel Hird, Roamers of Tala Beinir and Shara find themselves inadvertently swept up in an assassination plot.
Meanwhile, factions within Burel Hird are vying for greater control over their society in a war of cutthroat machinations—at a heavy price. Elsewhere, two members of rival societies lay their own plans for insurrection—with ramifications that will ripple across the Many Worlds ...
Darkly Lem is the penname for several authors writing together, and Transmentation | Transience is a book that goes hard; there are multiple worlds/dimensions involved, all of which have their own cultures (as they should!), and the writing is of the keep-up-or-die approach – we hit the ground running and there is no telling-not-showing, you have to learn what everything is, what it means, and how it relates to everything else as you go. I wouldn’t call it beginner-friendly, but my gods is it impressive!
Genres: Adult, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Ojibwe MCs, gay MC
Published on: 18th March 2025
Goodreads
A darkly humorous thriller about the ghosts that haunt the temples of excess we call casinos, and the people caught in their high-stakes, low-odds web
For decades, a dark force has terrorized the Languille Lake reservation. Spoken of only in whispers as “the sandman,” he lurks in the Hidden Atlantis Lake Resort and Casino, the reservation’s main attraction and source of revenue, leeching its patrons’ dreams and preventing the ghosts that linger there from moving on. Fleeing a breakup, Marion Lafournier, a midtwenties Ojibwe, seeks solace in the slot machine’s siren song. Here he falls afoul of the sandman, an encounter he barely escapes through the timely intervention of his cousins Alana and Cherie, who both work at the casino and are intimately aware of the sandman’s power. Meanwhile, Glenn Nielan, recently out of the closet and an aspiring documentarian, hopes to capture the faces of the Ojibwe land while experiencing the casino’s thrills. But he will learn that all who choose to play the sandman’s games are in danger of falling into his grasp.
Marion and Alana are members of the Bullhead clan, a family with ties to a sacred past and a fierce determination to ensure their future. Alana, with her sevenfire sight, is the only person to fully understand the danger the sandman poses. Aware of Marion’s occasional ability to navigate the spirit world, she enlists his aid in defeating this wraith. But the power and reach of the sandman go far beyond Alana’s worst fears. Soon she and Marion find themselves in a battle for their lives and for the souls of the reservation’s residents, both the living and the dead.
I’ve been intrigued by the premise of this one since I first heard about it, and it definitely doesn’t hurt that most of the early reviews describe the writing as ‘fever dream’!
Genres: Adult, Horror
Representation: Blackfeet MCs
Published on: 18th March 2025
Goodreads
A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.
A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.
I read horror very rarely, but how exactly am I supposed to resist that title or premise???
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Chinese-Canadian sapphic MC, secondary Indigenous Canadian character, F/F
Published on: 18th March 2025
Goodreads
From debut author Emily Yu-Xuan Qin comes a snarky urban fantasy novel inspired by Chinese and First Nation mythology and bursting with wit, compelling characters, and LGBTQIA+ representation
Readers of Seanan McGuire, Ilona Andrews, and Ben Aaronovitch will devour this gory story—and the sweet-as-Canadian-maple-syrup sapphic romance at its monstrous heart
Tam hasn’t eaten anyone in years.
She is now Mama’s soft-spoken, vegan daughter — everything dangerous about her is cut out, repressed. Medicated.
But when Tam’s estranged Aunt Tigress is found murdered and skinned, Tam inherits an undead fox in a shoebox and an ensemble of old enemies.
The demons, the ghosts, the gods running coffee shops by the river? Fine. The tentacled thing stalking Tam across the city? Absolutely not. And when Tam realizes the girl she’s falling in love with might be yet another loose end from her past? That’s just the brassy, beautiful cherry on top.
Because no matter how quietly she lives, Tam can’t hide from her voracious upbringing, nor the suffering she caused. As she navigates romance, redemption, and the end of the world, she can’t help but wonder…
Do monsters even deserve happy endings?
With worldbuilding inspired by Chinese folklore and the Siksiká Nation in Canada, LGBTQIA+ representation, and a sapphic romance, Aunt Tigress is at once familiar and breathtakingly innovative.
I did end up DNFing this one, but lots of other early readers have loved it, so it’s a very clear case of YMMV. I wouldn’t recommend this for fans of Ilona Andrews or Seanan McGuire, personally, whatever the blurb says, but if you’d like urban fantasy that draws from mythologies we don’t see very often, this might be for you!
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Published on: 18th March 2025
Goodreads
In the first book of this touching and darkly comic duology, a paladin, a forger, an assassin and a scholar ride out of town on an espionage mission with deadly serious stakes.
When forger Slatee is convicted of treason, she faces a death sentence. But her unique gift for sniffing out magic (literally) earns her a reprieve—of sorts.
Along with a paladin, Caliban, possessed by a demon, her murderous ex-lover, and an irritating misogynist scholar, Slate sets off on a mission to learn about the Clockwork Boys, deadly mechanical soldiers from a neighbouring kingdom who have been terrorising their lands. If they succeed, rewards and pardons await, but they must survive a long journey through enemy territory to reach Anuket City. And Slate has her own reasons to dread returning to her former home.
Slate and her crew aren't the first to be sent on this mission. None of their predecessors have returned, and Slate can't help but feel they've exchanged one death sentence for another. Her increasing closeness to Caliban isn't helping matters: for the first time in a long time, Slate might actually care about surviving.
Chronologically the first book in the (incomparable) World of the Rat universe, Clockwork Boys is getting a gorgeous trad-pub edition this week! (Possibly UK-only?) It and its sequel is set most directly before Swordheart, so if you’re looking for background on that one – or if you just want an utterly marvellous read, which a Kingfisher book always is! – then you should pounce!
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Representation: Sapphic MC, secondary M/M, queernorm setting
Published on: 18th March 2025
Goodreads
A Memory Called Empire meets Miss Marple in this cozy, spaceborne mystery, helmed by a no-nonsense formidable auntie of a detective.
Welcome to the HMS Fairweather, Her Majesty’s most luxurious interstellar passenger liner! Room and board are included, new bodies are graciously provided upon request, and should you desire a rest between lifetimes, your mind shall be most carefully preserved in glass in the Library, shielded from every danger.
Near the topmost deck of an interstellar generation ship, Dorothy Gentleman wakes up in a body that isn’t hers—just as someone else is found murdered. As one of the ship’s detectives, Dorothy usually delights in unraveling the schemes on board the Fairweather, but when she finds that someone is not only killing bodies but purposefully deleting minds from the Library, she realizes something even more sinister is afoot.
Dorothy suspects her misfortune is partly the fault of her feckless nephew Ruthie who, despite his brilliance as a programmer, leaves chaos in his cheerful wake. Or perhaps the sultry yarn store proprietor—and ex-girlfriend of the body Dorothy is currently inhabiting—knows more than she’s letting on. Whatever it is, Dorothy intends to solve this case. Because someone has done the impossible and found a way to make murder on the Fairweather a very permanent state indeed. A mastermind may be at work—and if so, they’ve had three hundred years to perfect their schemes…
Immensely fun; I’m hoping for many, many sequels!
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: M/M
Published on: 18th March 2025
Goodreads
A timely and timeless reimagining of the story of Dionysus, Greek God of ecstasy and madness, revelry and ruin, for readers of The Song of Achilles and Elektra.
Raised in a Greek legion, Phaidros has been taught to fight for the homeland he’s never seen and to follow his commander’s orders at all costs. But when he rescues a baby from a fire at Thebes’s palace, his commander’s orders cease to make sense: Phaidros is forced to abandon the blue-eyed boy at a temple, and to keep the baby’s existence a secret.
Years later, after a strange encounter that led to the death of his battalion, Phaidros has become a training master for young soldiers. He struggles with panic attacks and flashbacks, and he is not the only one: all around him, his fellow veterans are losing their minds.
Phaidros’s risk of madness is not his only problem: his life has become entangled with Thebes’s young crown prince, who wishes to escape the marriage his mother, the Queen, has chosen for him. When the prince vanishes, Phaidros is drawn into the search for him—a search that leads him to a blue-eyed witch named Dionysus, whose guidance is as wise as the events that surround him are strange. In Dionysus’s company, Phaidros witnesses sudden outbursts of riots and unrest, and everywhere Dionysus goes, rumors follow about a new god, one sired by Zeus but lost in a fire.
In The Hymn to Dionysus, bestselling author Natasha Pulley transports us to an ancient empire on the edge of ruin to tell an utterly captivating story about a man needing a god to remind him how to be a human.
Dionysus is a god whose mythology I find absolutely fascinating, so I’m crossing my fingers this’ll be great!
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists
Published on: 18th March 2025
Goodreads
A bold intervention in the philosophical concepts of gender, sex, and self
Beyond Personhood provides an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity. Until now, trans experience has overwhelmingly been understood in terms of two reductive frameworks: trans people are either “trapped in the wrong body” or they are oppressed by the gender binary. Both accounts misgender large trans constituencies while distorting their experience, and neither can explain the presentation of trans people as make-believers and deceivers or the serious consequences thereof. In Beyond Personhood, Talia Mae Bettcher demonstrates how taking this phenomenon seriously affords a new perspective on trans oppression and trans dysphoria—one involving liminal states of “make-believe” that bear positive possibilities for self-recognition and resistance.
Undergirding this account is Bettcher’s groundbreaking theory of interpersonal spatiality—a theory of intimacy and distance that requires rejection of the philosophical concepts of person, self, and subject. She argues that only interpersonal spatiality theory can successfully explain trans oppression and gender dysphoria, thus creating new possibilities for thinking about connection and relatedness.
An essential contribution to the burgeoning field of trans philosophy, Beyond Personhood offers an intersectional trans feminism that illuminates transphobic, sexist, heterosexist, and racist oppressions, situating trans oppression and resistance within a much larger decolonial struggle. By refusing to separate theory from its application, Bettcher shows how a philosophy of depth can emerge from the everyday experiences of trans people, pointing the way to a reinvigoration of philosophy.
Queer philosophy is, maybe not that surprisingly, an interest of mine, and I’m very curious about Bettcher’s interpersonal spatiality theory!
Genres: Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists, YA
Representation: M/M
Published on: 18th March 2025
Goodreads
Two gay men—one young, one ageless—sink their teeth into reclaiming their lives and identities from those who would silence them in this insatiable romantic horror novel from Hugo and Nebula Award–nominated author Kellan McDaniel.
Howard is biding his time until he can finally leave for college, where he has been promised it gets better. The last thing he expected was to meet a boy. But George reminds Howard of the movie stars from the 1960s he’s obsessed with. Plus, George is endearingly formal and well-read, and his grandpa fashion is super authentic.
After over twenty years together, George is about to lose his life partner. He met James when they were teenagers then lost track of him until they reconnected in their early sixties. Now, James is going somewhere beyond George’s reach—because George is a vampire, forever trapped in the body of a nineteen-year-old.
As the two grow closer, George begins to see a future beyond losing his first love, and Howard stops imagining himself always being alone…even if companionship comes at the cost of his mortality. When the discrimination the men have suffered their whole lives rears its ugly head to take away their happy ending, they finally strike back at the world that’s done its best to subdue them their entire lives.
This sounds like it might have more teeth (pun absolutely intended) than most vampire stories, and I’m cautiously excited!
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists, YA
Representation: Brown F/F
Published on: 18th March 2025
Goodreads
In a world where the shadow-like 'daayan' stalk the night, the mages of Agraal are the only ones able to defend the realm. So, when Princess Thiya discovers she has the extraordinary powers of a healing mage, she captures the attention of earth mage Isaac. In order to lure Thiya to the frontline to help defeat the daayan, Isaac does the unthinkable, he takes Thiya's true love Amara hostage.
I haven’t heard much about this one, but I’m hopeful!
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Gay MC, bisexual MC, M/M, queernorm matriarchal setting
Published on: 20th March 2025
Goodreads
Secrets and danger stalk the streets of Astreiant…Point of Hearts, Astreiant’s pleasure district, is being disrupted by an influx of scheming nobles who have descended upon the city for an aristocratic wedding. Mysterious carts smuggling something unknown through the night time streets and civil unrest are creating suspicion and turmoil. Adjunct Point Nicolas Rathe and his lover, Philip Eslingen, captain in the City Guard, are keeping an eye on an aristocrat under self-imposed house arrest when Rathe is injured during a riot. Pursued by false accusations, Eslingen takes him on the run to Point of Knives while they try to unravel a plot against the queen and her government that could destroy the city they love. Can they count on alliances from their pasts to keep them safe long enough to solve the mystery?
NEW ASTREIANT NEW ASTREIANT AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! This is SO GREAT: we get to see so much more of Rathe and Philip’s relationship than we have in other books, and the stakes end up very high indeed! SO WORTH WAITING FOR!
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: F/F
Published on: 21st March 2022
Goodreads
Hunger, yearning lesbians, and monstrous love.
Monsters are real, and Ryann is one of them. Chosen as a weapon in a war that is not her own, she finds an outlet for her anger in the fighting pits beneath Toronto, and on the hunt for the vampires that changed her. Whatever the cost, she’ll take back her life, her control—or make them fear the hunger they’ve roused in her.
Burdened by monstrosity, Meg, assassin of the Scorching Dawn, drowns her pain in the blood of her enemies. When the call comes to slay the monster whipping the city’s beasts into a frenzy, she welcomes the hunt. And in Ryann, she finds a violent thirst for blood—and the opportunity to feed her own.
Shadows surround the city. The beasts within cower as the foundations writhe. Drawn to one another by a mutual hunger, Ryann and Meg must learn to trust each other—or perish in the dark.
Yesss, give me all the badass lesbians and dark magic!
Will you be reading any of these? Did I miss any releases you think I should know about? Let me know!
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