This is one of the easiest tasks of the challenge this year, so let’s highlight one of the overall most-anticipated books of 2025!

After Babel and Yellowface, it’s clear that anything R.F. Kuang releases is going to be fire. This book is no exception. Two students desperate for academic success go rogue, traveling into the underworld to retrieve their advisor, an acclaimed professor, to ensure that all their torturously hard work was worth it and their needed recommendation letters come through. It’s unhinged in all the best ways, exposing the brightest and worst of the academic world, all while giving intriguing characters, a magical system based on crafting paradoxes, and an impeccably shivery version of hell. —Liberty Hardy

Check off two tasks at once using this queer mystery that’s also genre-blending. When police officer Su-Yeon learns that four elderly people have died from jumping out a sixth story window at a hospital, she takes the case personally: Grandma Eun-Shim lives on that floor, and Su-Yeon is determined to stop her from facing the same fate. The rest of the police force dismisses the deaths as suicides, but as Su-Yeon investigates, she meets Violette, who claims to be a vampire hunter looking for her ex-girlfriend, Lily. When the next body is found drained of blood, Su-Yeon begins to believe Violette. It’s a vampire murder mystery!