The Nebula Awards are soon to be announced, but you have a little over a month to do some reading if you still want to make up your mind before the results are in. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association will announce the winners on June 7, 2025, at the SFWA’s 60th Annual Awards Conference in Kansas City, Missouri (June 5-8 2025). You can actually attend if you want to–in person or online.

The SFWA gives awards to different types of speculative fiction in various categories–novels, short fiction, novellas, and so on, with the awards going to the best of the best published in 2024, as judged by their membership. I set myself the task of reading all the novels short-listed for this year’s awards. Then I reviewed them all in this series of posts. Now that I’ve read them all and thought about them all, which novel would I choose if I were choosing the winner? Full disclosure: I’m not! But if I were?

Here are the short-listed books nominated for best novel:

• Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, Yaroslav Barsukov (Caezik SF & Fantasy)
• Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom; Solaris UK)
• Asunder, Kerstin Hall (Tordotcom)
• A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher (Tor; Titan UK)
• The Book of Love, Kelly Link (Random House; Ad Astra UK)
• Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell (DAW; Arcadia UK)

For various reasons (see my reviews here), I would not choose Barsukov’s or Chandrasekera’s novels, and that’s in spite of my enthusiastic review last year for Chandraskera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, which went on to win–deservedly–both a Nebula and a Locus award.

The other four novels are all wonderful books. Do read them! (Well–read Chandrasekera’s if you have a lot of patience and/or a lot of political/cultural knowledge of Sri Lanka. It’s certainly the most serious book on the list.) Asunder has an amazing system of magic, amazing world-building, and a really interesting relationship between the two main characters. A Sorceress Comes to Call is incredibly good fun, and if you are a Bridgerton or Jane Austen fan, and if you love English country house murder mysteries, you will probably love this book. See my reviews here.

The two I love most, though, are Kelly Link’s The Book of Love and John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build a Nest In. Both are very ingenious. Both are heart-warming but not in a sappy way. I think the writing and character motivations of Link’s novel are maybe slightly better, so I guess I’d go for that one. But Wiswell’s is just great, too. See my reviews here.

A reminder: ALL of these novels have their ardent fans, or they wouldn’t be on the short list. You may love even the ones I don’t love, or don’t love as much as the one I chose. You may love them–or not love them–for reasons I don’t share. And that’s just fine. De gustibus non est disputandem. Or as my old mother would put it, “Everyone to her own taste, said the old woman who kissed the cow.”