Could this be the most magical month of the year? Maybe — at least if the best fantasy books of October 2025 have anything to say! It’s not just spooky mayhem, either. We’ve got witches and slayers, gods and mortals, and worlds built on magical power that everyone wants a piece of.
Time to add more titles to your TBR! Check out our top picks for the best fantasy books of October 2025 below.
The Women of Wild Hill by Kirsten Miller
Release date: October 7
Read it if: You want the best fantasy books of October 2025 to have very timely themes. A family of witches must reunite to turn the tide for all of humanity.
Publisher’s synopsis: There are places on earth where nature’s powers gather. Girls raised there are bequeathed strange gifts. A few have powers so dark that they fear to use them. Such a place is Wild Hill, on the tip of Long Island. For centuries, the ghost of a witch murdered by colonists claimed the beautiful and fertile Wild Hill…until a young Scottish woman with strange gifts arrived. Sadie Duncan was allowed to stay.
Five generations of Sadie’s descendants called Wild Hill home, each generation more powerful than the last. Then, in the aftermath of a terrible tragedy, the last of the Duncans, once prophesized to be the most powerful of their kind, abandoned their ancestral home.
One of them, Brigid Laguerre moved to California and turned her dark gift into fame and fortune. Her sister, Phoebe, settled on a ranch in Texas, where women visit in secret for her tonics and cures. Phoebe’s daughter, Sybil, has become a famous chef. Seemingly powerless, Sibyl has never been told of the Duncan bloodline.
Now Brigid, Phoebe, and Sibyl have been brought to Wild Hill to discover their family legacy. The Old One, furious at the path mankind has taken, has chosen three powerful witches to turn the tide. The Duncans will fulfill their destinies—but only if they can set aside their grievances and come together as a family.
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
The Ordeals by Rachel Greenlaw
Release date: October 7
Read it if: You love dark academia and themed types of magic. A desperate illusionist enters a deadly competition in hopes of earning her freedom.
Publisher’s synopsis: Twenty-year-old Sophia DeWinter has only known life bound to her cruel uncle, the Collector, thanks to a blood bond he exacted from her as a child. When she learns of Killmarth College, an elite academy for magic wielders outside of the Collector’s control, she knows it is her only chance to finally break free. But to gain entry, she will have to compete against other illusionists, masquiers, botanists, and alchemists in a series of brutal trials that many hopefuls don’t survive—the Ordeals.
Sophia knows her skills as an illusionist are weak; she only makes it through the first challenge by teaming up with a powerful (and insufferably sexy) botanist, Alden Locke. To make it out alive, she will have to hone her magic and learn to identify who is a rival, who could be an ally, and who is a murderer.
Because now, not only does she have to protect her heart but her very life. Hopefuls are being viciously picked off one by one between the challenges. In her haste to escape the Collector’s trap, Sophia may have fled straight toward her own death sentence.
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
Red City by Marie Lu
Release date: October 14
Read it if: You’d like complex urban fantasy among the best fantasy books of October 2025. Two alchemists face off in a world where crime syndicates control magic.
Publisher’s synopsis: Alchemy is the hidden art of transformation. An exclusive power wielded by crime syndicates that market it to the world’s elites in the form of sand, a drug that enhances those who take it into a more perfect version of themselves: more beautiful, more charismatic, simply more.
Among the gleaming skyscrapers and rolling foothills of Angel City, alchemy is controlled by two rival syndicates. For years, Grand Central and Lumines have been balanced on a razor’s edge between polite negotiation and outright violence. But when two childhood friends step into that delicate equation, the city―and the paths of their lives―will be irrevocably transformed.
The daughter of a poor single mother, Sam would do anything to claw her way into the ranks of Grand Central in search of a better life. Plucked away from his family as a boy to become a Lumines apprentice, Ari is one of the syndicates’ brightest rising stars. Once, they might have loved each other. But as the two alchemists face off across opposite sides of an ever-escalating conflict, ambition becomes power, loyalty becomes lies, and no transformation may be perfect enough for them both to survive the coming war.
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
When They Burned the Butterfly by Wen-yi Lee
Release date: October 21
Read it if: You want the best fantasy books of October 2025 to have a noir-ish twist. After her mother’s murder, a schoolgirl discovers a dangerous world of magic, gods, and rival gangs.
Publisher’s synopsis: Loner schoolgirl Adeline Siow has never needed more company than the flame she can summon at her fingertips. But when her mother dies in a house fire with a butterfly seared onto her skin and Adeline hunts down a girl she saw in a back-alley barfight―a girl with a butterfly tattoo―she discovers she’s far from alone.
Ang Tian is a Red Butterfly: one of a gang of girls who came from nothing, sworn to a fire goddess and empowered to wreak vengeance on the men that abuse and underestimate them. Adeline’s mother led a double life as their elusive patron, Madam Butterfly. Now that she’s dead, Adeline’s bloodline is the sole thing sustaining the goddess. Between her search for her mother’s killer and the gang’s succession crisis, Adeline becomes quickly entangled with the girls’ dangerous world, and even more so with the charismatic Tian.
But no home lasts long around here. Ambitious and paranoid neighbor gangs hunt at the edges of Butterfly territory, and bodies are turning up in the red light district suffused with a strange new magic. Adeline may have found her place for once, but with the streets changing by the day, it may take everything she is to keep it.
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
Slayers of Old by Jim C. Hines
Release date: October 21
Read it if: Some part of your fandom personality was shaped by the Buffy-verse. Three retired “Chosen Ones” have their peaceful lives disrupted by locals summoning ancient evils.
Publisher’s synopsis: Three former Chosen Ones have joined together to spend their retirement in peace and quiet, running Second Life Books and Gifts in Salem, MA. A calm, peaceful, tourist-filled oasis, where they never have to worry about saving the world. Until some of the locals start summoning ancient creatures best left where they were . . . and they discover that their bookstore basement just may be the portal to the underworld. These ex-heroes may have thought they were done . . . but if they want to finish their retirement in peace, they’ll have to join together to save the world one last time.
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
The Things Gods Break by Abigail Owen
Release date: October 21
Read it if: You need some good old-fashioned “shadow daddy” romance from the best fantasy books of October 2025. A mortal woman must escape from ancient monsters, while Hades himself fights to save her.
Publisher’s synopsis: You’d think I’d have learned by now:
Don’t mouth off to deities. Don’t fall for the King of the Underworld.
And definitely don’t get dragged into a divine death match where I’m the cursed mortal prize.
But here I am―trapped in Tartarus, humanity’s worst pit stop, squaring off against monsters who make the gods look merciful. Titans, twisted by centuries of rage and ruin, are sealed behind seven ancient locks.
And guess what? I’m the key.
To escape, I’ll have to survive every horrifying trial they throw at me.To win, I might have to become something the gods never saw coming.
Oh, and Hades? He’s about to break every rule the gods ever wrote. Because to save me…the god of death will burn the world.
But if I break free? So do the Titans. And the world won’t just suffer―it’ll beg for the end.
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri
Release date: October 21
Read it if: You’ve cried over the Hadestown cast recording. A witch and a knight fall in love time and time again, but an assassin is out to destroy their story.
Publisher’s synopsis: In an England fuelled by stories, the knight and the witch are fated to fall in love and doom each other over and over, the same tale retold over hundreds of lifetimes.
Simran is a witch of the woods. Vina is a knight of the Queen’s court. When the two women begin to fall for each other, how can they surrender to their desires, when to give in is to destroy each other?
As they seek a way to break the cycle, a mysterious assassin begins targeting tales like theirs. To survive, the two will need to write a story stronger than the one that fate has given to them. But what tale is stronger than The Knight and the Witch?
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
Witches of Dubious Origin by Jenn McKinlay
Release date: October 28
Read it if: You’re in the mood for cozy, bookish fantasy among the best fantasy books of October 2025. A small-town librarian discovers her witch heritage and investigates her family’s past.
Publisher’s synopsis: Zoe Ziakas enjoys a quiet life, working as a librarian in her quaint New England town. When a mysterious black book with an unbreakable latch is delivered to the library, Zoe has a strange feeling the tome is somehow calling to her. She decides to consult the Museum of Literature, home to volumes of indecipherable secrets, some possessing dark magic that must be guarded.
Here, among their most dangerous collection, the Books of Dubious Origin, Zoe discovers that she is the last descendant of a family of witches and this little black book is their grimoire. Zoe knows she must decode the family’s spell book and solve the mystery of what happened to her mother and her grandmother. However, the book’s potential power draws all things magical to it, and Zoe finds herself under the constant watch of a pesky raven, while being chased by undead Vikings, ghost pirates, and assorted ghouls.
With assistance from the eccentric staff of the Books of Dubious Origin department—including their annoyingly smart and handsome containment specialist, Jasper Griffin—Zoe must confront her past and the legacy of her family. But as their adventure unfolds, she’ll have to decide whether or not she’s ready to embrace her destiny.
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
Release date: October 28
Read it if: You like lyrical stories about how stories evolve over time. A legendary lady knight and a failed soldier-turned-scholar become entwined in a cycle of storytelling through time.
Publisher’s synopsis: Sir Una Everlasting was Dominion’s greatest hero: the orphaned girl who became a knight, who died for queen and country. Her legend lives on in songs and stories, in children’s books and recruiting posters―but her life as it truly happened has been forgotten.
Centuries later, Owen Mallory―failed soldier, struggling scholar―falls in love with the tale of Una Everlasting. Her story takes him to war, to the archives―and then into the past itself. Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs.
But that story always ends the same way. If they want to rewrite Una’s legend―if they want to tell a different story—they’ll have to rewrite history itself.
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
An Unlikely Coven by AM Kvita
Release date: October 28
Read it if: You’re hoping for as much family drama as magic in the best fantasy books of October 2025. An outcast daughter returns home, only to immediate get tangled up with new magic and a dangerous spell.
Publisher’s synopsis: After seven long years Joan Greenwood is finally returning home. Unfortunately, her family totally forgot about it.
Joan’s homecoming is lukewarm at best, but soon turns disastrous when news hits that someone has created a spell that can turn an ordinary human into a powerful witch, threatening the balance of the magical world and the Greenwood’s place at the top of it.
When her best friend confesses that he has secretly, accidentally, saved this human-turned-witch from an uncertain fate, Joan is thrust headfirst into a desperate race to undo the spell before it does permanent damage to its unwilling host.
Soon, Joan finds herself drawn deeper into the heart of the city’s magic, into an uncertain alliance with a (very attractive) family rival, and far beyond the limits of everything she thought her own magic capable of.
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
The Book of Autumn by Molly O’Sullivan
Release date: October 28
Read it if: You like murder mysteries and magic schools. An estranged pair of magical partners reluctantly reunite to investigate a death at their alma mater.
Publisher’s synopsis: Try as she might, anthropologist Marcella Gibbons can’t escape the fact that she’s a dimidium, one half of a formidable pair of Magicians, forever tied together to enable the other’s powers. After a tumultuous final year at Seinford and Brown College of Agriculture (and Magic) in rural New Mexico, Cella felt more than a little uneasy about returning to the sun-drenched desert campus ever again. She’d cut ties with her other half—the charming and rugged rancher Max Middlemore—and sworn off Magic, academia, and heartache for good.
Until Max turns up at her door, grinning under his cowboy hat for one last favor. Something is shifting at her alma mater, something bigger than anyone understands. One student is dead. Another is floating midair in the infirmary, growling guttural nonsense and terrifying the staff. Their best, perhaps only, chance to intervene requires Cella and Max to work together. But the origins of the disturbances lie centuries ago. To unravel them, Cella will have to confront the truth about her past—and Max. Because she might be challenging a power she could never rival alone…
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
