The 2025 award for Best Novel goes to one of my own two favorites from the short list, John Wiswell’s wonderful Someone You Can Build a Nest In. What a great choice! See my review of that novel here.
Not only is it an amazing fantasy take on a very real life problem, but it has a sly wit I adored. Favorite quote, as Shesheshen the monster thinks about her new life in a human village:
What the laborers got out of it that kept them from eating the rich, Shesheshen didn’t understand. She was a mere monster.
For more about the 2025 Nebula Awards, including all of the other award-winners, go HERE. I don’t have time in this blog to review the other categories, or read those entries in addition to all the novels I have read this spring, which pains me. I’m sure there are some great reads in the short story and novella categories, and all the rest. I did watch the Ray Bradbury Award winner for best dramatic production, the film Dune: Part Two–I must admit, with mixed feelings.
And now, on to the novels of the Hugo Awards short list . . . with more mixed feelings, since the Hugos, as in other years, are plagued with controversy. Two novels on the Hugos short list were also on the Nebula short list, including Wiswell’s. Watch for my first reviews soon.
I am lucky enough to spend part of my life in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and was extra-lucky to be here last night, May 15, 2025, to attend the Albuquerque session of Joe Abercrombie’s book tour for his newly-published dark fantasy novel, The Devils. What a treat! We fans got to see Abercrombie in conversation with George R. R. Martin at Albuquerque’s funky, historic KiMo Theater. The proceeds benefited one of my favorite causes, the Albuquerque Public Libraries. Public libraries are a national treasure under attack here in the U.S., and I was thrilled to participate. Plus, a copy of The Devils signed by Lord Grimdark himself! I can’t wait to read it.
It was fun to hear GRRM, too–he is a resident of nearby Santa Fe and a contributor to many literary and creative endeavors in this area of the U.S.
If you are in the U.S. and near a city hosting one of these sessions, plan to attend. Here’s the list. Abercrombie will appear “in conversation” with a number of fantasy luminaries–the Albuquerque appearance happened to include GRRM, but other cities feature other participants. Hurry, because the U.S. tour takes place during these two weeks in May.
I understand there’s a U.K. book tour as well.
I got to the tour just in the nick, because tomorrow I head back to Minneapolis, the other city where I live, and poor Minneapolis–no Abercrombie book tour appearance there.
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:
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.”
Fantastes 
You must be logged in to post a comment.