Coming out in August, a story of a powerful Chinese family’s fall from grace by the fabulous Zhang Yueran and the latest surrealist horror masterpiece from Chuck Tingle. Enjoy 5 Wonderful New Books for August 2025
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5 Wonderful New Books for August 2025
Moderation by Elaine Castillo
Thirty-something Girlie Delmundo works a day job as a content moderator, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She’s one of the best at it, too – dispassionate, unflinching, maybe because she learned by necessity to wall off all her emotions when she was still a kid – so it’s no surprise to anyone when the social-media company for which she works offers her a big salary rise and an office to start moderating its new venture: virtual-reality theme parks, lush and near-perfect simulations of civilizations long since dead.
Girlie takes the job, and getting paid to spend her days wandering the crowds of medieval jousts or exploring romantic Left Bank Paris seems too good to be true. Almost. Sure, she signed up for having to deal with the sordidness of pretty much any virtual space, but as she begins to explore the intricate worlds that she moderates, she notices two deeply troubling things: that there might be something much darker built into the very code of the company, and that William, technically her new boss, a man whose barriers are as mighty as her own, might just be that long-forgotten thing… Girlie’s type.
Women Seated by Zhang Yueran
Enter the world of an elite Chinese couple: a life of luxury, wealth, and around-the-clock service, which includes their trusted nanny, Yu Ling. Slipping in and out of the shadows, meticulous in her care of their only son, she has served the family for years and knows their secrets. But little do they suspect that Yu Ling has secrets of her own.
In the pressure-cooker political environment of China, the fates of even the most powerful families can reverse overnight. When the family becomes the subject of a government investigation, their fortunes crumble, and the nanny is left to make a series of life-changing choices. How far will she go to claim her due?
Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
Healer Anja regularly drinks poison.
Not to die, but to save – seeking cures for those everyone else has given up on.
But a summons from the King interrupts her quiet, herb-obsessed life. His daughter, Snow, is dying, and he hopes Anja’s unorthodox methods can save her.
Aided by a taciturn guard, a narcissistic cat and a passion for the scientific method, Anja rushes to treat Snow – but nothing seems to work. Nothing, that is, until she finds a secret world hidden inside a magic mirror. This dark realm may hold the key to what is making Snow sick.
Or it might be the thing that kills them all…
Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle
A statistics professor tries to a survive a series of gruesome and impossibly unlikely disasters linked to a supernaturally lucky Vegas casino, while dealing with her own erasure as a bisexual, in this chilling and quick-witted horror novel.
Vera, a bisexual statistics professor, is one of the survivors of a global disaster of a new kind – the Low Probability Event. What should have been a simple family lunch turns into an absurd catastrophe raining fish, parade balloons, exploding manholes and brutally violent animal attacks.
Washed up the aftermath, it’s only when the handsome, but problematic, government agent Layne knocks on her door that she is offered a glimpse of meaning to life. Layne is investigating the Low Probability Event, and believes the deadly absurd events may be linked to an improbably lucky casino.
As they hit the road to try and make sense of the meaningless chaos of life, only one thing is clear – what happens in Vegas isn’t staying there…
Sunbirth by An Yu
As the sun starts slowly disappearing, the residents of a remote town in the desert find themselves undergoing shocking transformations in this dazzlingly eerie and bewitching novel
In Five Poems Lake, a town surrounded by impenetrable deserts, the sun is slowly disappearing overhead. A young woman keeps an apprehensive eye on the sky above as she tends her family’s pharmacy of traditional medicine. She has few customers, and even fewer visitors. Her father was found dead by the lake twelve years ago, in unexplained circumstances. Her elder sister, Dong Ji, works at a wellness parlour across town for those who can afford it – which, during these strange and difficult days, is not many.
The town fell on hard times long before the sun began to shrink. But now, as the temperature drops and the lake freezes over, the inhabitants of the town realise there is no way they can survive. When the Beacons appear – ordinary people with heads replaced by searing, blinding light, like miniature suns – the residents wonder if they may hold the answer to their salvation, or if they are just another sign of impending ruin. Soon, Dong Ji and her sister will uncover a photograph which may offer a clue in the mystery of the Beacons, and finally help them learn what happened to their father.
If you enjoyed 5 Wonderful New Books for August 2025, check out our Book of the Month July 2025 Strange Pictures by Uketsu