The start of a new year can feel a bit overwhelming—but your reading doesn’t have to be! These novellas are the perfect bite-sized escapes to kick off 2025 with a sense of accomplishment and adventure. Check em’ out!
When Among Crows by Veronica Roth
PAGE COUNT: 176
When Among Crows is swift and striking, drawing from the deep well of Slavic folklore and asking if redemption and atonement can be found in embracing what we most fear.
We bear the sword, and we bear the pain of the sword.
On Kupala Night, Dymitr arrives in Chicago’s monstrous, magical underworld with a perilous mission: pick the mythical fern flower and offer it to a cursed creature in exchange for help finding the legendary witch Baba Jaga. Ala is a fear-eating zmora afflicted with a bloodline curse that’s slowly killing her. She’s just desperate enough to say yes to Dymitr, even if she doesn’t know his motives. Over the course of one night, Ala and Dymitr risk life and limb in search of Baba Jaga, and begin to build a tentative friendship. . . but when Ala finds out what Dymitr is hiding, it could destroy them both.
Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher
PAGE COUNT: 144
From New York Times bestselling author T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge is the tale of a kind-hearted, toad-shaped heroine, a gentle knight, and a mission gone completely sideways.
There’s a princess trapped in a tower. This isn’t her story. Meet Toadling. On the day of her birth, she was stolen from her family by the fairies, but she grew up safe and loved in the warm waters of faerieland. Once an adult though, the fae ask a favor of Toadling: return to the human world and offer a blessing of protection to a newborn child. Simple, right?
But nothing with fairies is ever simple. Centuries later, a knight approaches a towering wall of brambles, where the thorns are as thick as your arm and as sharp as swords. He’s heard there’s a curse here that needs breaking, but it’s a curse Toadling will do anything to uphold…
Wolf Moon, Antler Moon by A.C. Wise
PAGE COUNT: 32
In one small town, the delicate balance between predator and prey is threatened when five girls are murdered on prom night.
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
PAGE COUNT: 176
A gripping and atmospheric reimagining of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” from Hugo, Locus, & Nebula award-winning author T. Kingfisher
*A very special hardcover edition, featuring foil stamp on the casing and custom endpapers illustrated by the author.*
When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania. What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves. Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.
Equoid: A Laundry Novella by Charles Stross
PAGE COUNT: 128
Charles Stross’s “Equoid” is a dark fantasy tale from the Hugo-winning author of Rule 34, Halting State, The Atrocity Archives, and many others.
The “Laundry” is Britain’s super-secret agency devoted to protecting the realm from the supernatural horrors that menace it. Now Bob Howard, Laundry agent, must travel to the quiet English countryside to deal with an outbreak of one of the worst horrors imaginable. For, as it turns out, unicorns are real. They’re also ravenous killers from beyond spacetime.
Vigilant by Cory Doctorow
PAGE COUNT: 32
In a new Little Brother story from Cory Doctorow, when schools make war on their own students, something has to give. . .
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