Seattle Staff Faves 2025: Fiction, Part 1
Every year we ask our staff across the system for their favorite books published in a given year. Like last year, we needed two parts to accommodate all of the adult fiction our staff read! Enjoy this variety of fiction staff favorites, with annotations by staff members or as noted. (Created November 2025)
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Overgrowth
Since she was three years old, Anastasia Miller has been telling anyone who would listen that she's an alien disguised as a human being, and that the armada that left her on Earth is coming for her. (NoveList Plus)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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When We Were Real
An unlikely group of travelers take a tour of glitches in the simulation that is the world. (Kirkus Reviews)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Confidential
Grynberg expands on a short story from his collection, I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To, for this deeply humane portrait of a Polish Jewish family in the decades after WWII. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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A Language of Limbs
Hardcastle's stunning debut follows a 15-year-old girl in 1972 Australia across two alternate timelines: one where she embraces her queerness and one where she rejects it. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Amity
A gripping story about a brother and sister, emancipated from slavery but still searching for true freedom, and their odyssey across the deserts of Mexico to finally reunite, all while escaping a former master still intent on their bondage. (NoveList Plus)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Problematic Summer Romance
Maya Killgore is 23 and still figuring out her life. Conor Harkness is 38, and Maya cannot stop thinking about him. (NoveList Plus)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke
Aurora runs a risky underground women’s clinic in Paris while finding herself drawn to the new Duke of Annan as he protects her from danger in the third novel of the series following An Island Princess Starts a Scandal. (NoveList Plus)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Culpability
Set at a summer rental on the Chesapeake Bay, a riveting family drama about moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence. (NoveList Plus)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Kakigori Summer
When music idol Ai is embroiled in scandal, her sisters, ambitious Rei and single mother Kiki, pause their lives and spend the summer with Ai in their childhood home on the Japanese coast so they can rescue their baby sister. (NoveList Plus)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Hurricane Envy
"A surprising, sharply-told collection of short stories that start out feeling familiar but quickly veer off into unexpected territory."--Abby B.
Format: Book
Availability: On order
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