
The Most Anticipated Books of 2025, BIPOC Edition
The year has only just started, and my 2025-specific TBR cup already runneth over. I mean, January alone has so many releases by highly acclaimed and buzzy debut authors, but then there’s February, and March, and so on. I say all that to say that, while yes, this list looks at some of the most anticipated books by BIPOC authors coming out in 2025, I’m going to keep it real and say that I didn’t (couldn’t) make it much past the first half of the year. There are just so many great releases coming out, so I only have one book listed here that is scheduled for release after June.
But that’s a good thing! We are eating all year long, friends—especially if you are looking to follow our 2025 Read Harder Challenge, starting with Task 1: Read a 2025 release by a BIPOC author.
Again, the list I’ve compiled of 2025 BIPOC releases has some titles left out—there just wasn’t enough time in the day—but what I do have are among the buzziest books (fiction and nonfiction) coming out this year by BIPOC authors, award-winning and debut alike. In them, women brave icy horrors in Korea, young lovebirds seek home in 1940s Shanghai and beyond, we see what the color blue means to Black Americans, and much more.
We Do Not Part by Han Kang (Jan. 21)
I have to say that Kang’s timing with this release—after having just won the Nobel Prize in Literature—is A++. We Do Not Part is like The Vegetarian in that it’s also surrealist horror steeped in social issues and history. In it, Kyungha gets a call from her friend who’s been injured and is in a hospital in Seoul. She wants Kyungha to go to her home on Jeju Island to save her pet bird, Ama, but a snowstorm greets Kyungha once she gets to the island. The terrible wind slows Kyungha from getting to her friend’s house, and the cold becomes all-encompassing. What’s more, there is an abject darkness that awaits Kyungha once she gets to the house and then reality starts to blur.
Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry (Jan. 28)
Perry has followed up the 2022 National Book Award-winning South to America with a look at the color blue and its relationship with Black folks. She looks at the blue cloths of West Africa that were traded for human beings in the 16th century, the Blues, as a genre and general feeling, and even at the more personal—the blue flowers she planted while grieving.
Now, we do have bills (see: people) to pay, being one of the few independent literary-focused media outlets and all, so the first two books above are visible to everyone, while the rest below are visible to people subscribed to our All Access Content.
Homeseeking by Karissa Chen
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.
Too Soon by Betty Shamieh (January 25)
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.
Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza (Feb. 25)
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.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Feb. 25)
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.
The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei (May 6)
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.
Katabasis by R.F. Kuang (Aug. 28)
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.
What book do you recommend for this task? Let’s chat in the comments!
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