The Most Anticipated Books of 2025, BIPOC Edition

This book is starting 2025 with a buzz. In it, Suchi’s and Haiwen’s childhood friendship sweetens into teenage love in 1940s Shanghai, and it seems like their futures are laid out in tandem. But then Haiwen secretly signs up for the army to spare his brother from the draft, and that shared future is fractured. Their lives diverge for decades, except for one day when Haiwen is grocery shopping in L.A., looks up, and sees Suchi. It feels like they have a second chance at what should have been, but all of the living they’ve done weighs on them, and it’s not clear that they will be able to make something new and worthwhile.

I’ve noticed a trend on social media where people talk about essentially becoming disillusioned with their grandparents’ relationships. Suddenly, 30+ years of marriage aren’t as much of an accomplishment when they find out the circumstances surrounding how their grandmothers were courted (if you can call it that), and how few options they had. Too Soon seems to be an exploration of this trend—or is calling it a trend too flippant?—both in name and in content.

In it, Arabella is 35 and feels like opportunities surrounding her love life and career are becoming fewer and farther between. As a director, she gets offered a chance to direct a gender-bent rendition of a Shakespeare play in the West Bank, and her grandmother Zoya is hoping to set something up between her and Aziz, a Palestinian American doctor volunteering in Gaza. Then Zoya is reminded of how she really wanted to be with Aziz’s grandfather back in the day but was instead paired with another man by her father. She then married her younger daughter Naya off—who gave birth to Arabella at 16—who also had other plans for her future (which involved the Jackson 5). But it’s a new day, and each of the women must reckon with what it means to be Palestinian, American, and women in their own ways.

This is the follow-up release to Garza’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2024 nonfiction Liliana’s Invincible Summer, and I have to say that the name of the main character in it had me doing a double take. She’s a professor, and her name is…Cristina Rivera Garza. Which just makes me think, like okay, where are we going with this? Because it doesn’t seem like this is meant to be autofiction or anything—though Garza’s 2024 release was true crime-minded and this new novel is a mystery/thriller—but I digress.

So, one day, Professor Garza comes across a dead man in an alley, and the crime scene is a hot mess. The man’s body is mutilated and there is a poem scrawled on a wall nearby. After the police get involved, the case’s lead detective—and the good professor Garza—become obsessed with what turns into a slew of men’s bodies being found all over the city. As they try their best to solve the mystery, we get another perspective on the nature of violence—specifically how gendered it is.

Reading the title, I assumed Akkad was referring to Palestine, and I was right. The blurb for this nonfiction book mentions how, just a few weeks after October 7, 2023, he tweeted: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” 

In this book, he explores he promise of the American Dream and Western ideals in general, and how disillusioned Black, Brown, and Indigenous Americans have become in them. He also looks at what it means for so much of the world to be ran by a select few (white) countries, and how he even grew up believing in the meritocracy espoused by the West.

Now, I have to say that Black Americans have never, in general, believed in the American Dream and the so-called value of merit it spouts. We grow up being told we have to be twice as good, etc., but I am still very interested in reading Akkad’s viewpoints here.

Wei is taking it back in her debut, to turn-of-the-millennium Singapore. It’s then that Genevieve Yang’s existence as an only child comes to a halt once Arin appears. Now, Arin is there because of a trifling grandfather, but soon, the two girls grow so close they end up blocking others out. As they both contend with the pressures of achievement—in school and life in general—they enclose themselves in a grind-minded bubble. Then it pops. A betrayal changes everything between them and leads Genevieve to reassess what family, success, and self means to her in a quickly modernizing world.

I mentor through a writing-focused nonprofit, and my mentee, told me how she’d love for her writing career to mirror that of R.F. Kuang’s. Sis isn’t even 30 yet, and is already an inspiration. She’s also an autobuy for me, especially when her new book promises Dante’s Inferno, Piranesi, and dark academia realness.

Today I learned that “katabasis” is ancient Greek for “descent” or “journey to the underworld.” And that’s exactly what Alice Law does. Let’s rewind a bit first, though, because if you think having to journey to literal Hell is perhaps unfair, it kind of sounds like ole girl Alice might have deserved it. She did, after all, sacrifice everything to become the best in the field of Magick, which involves working with the greatest magician in the world, Professor Grimes. But then he dies in a magical accident and it’s looking like it’s her fault, and to rescue him, Alice and her rival Peter Murdoch will use all of the pentagrams, spells, and academia at their disposal to guide them to and through hell…which, as it turns out, only include tales of Orpheus and Dante. Yeesh.

I have to say that the past few years have been granting us outstanding dark academia novel after dark academia novel, and I am living.