There’s something magical about this time of year, so it definitely feels like the perfect time to read a fantasy book or two. The best fantasy books of December 2025 feature everything from slick, steamy romantasy to grittier, more grounded magical worlds. It’s the best of everything — in other words, the perfect way to end a great year for fantasy reads.
End the year on a magical note! Here are our favorite picks for the best fantasy books of December 2025.
The Wondrous Life and Loves of Nella Carter by Brionni Nwosu
Release date: December 1
Read it if: You want a historical element to the best fantasy books of December 2025. An enslaved woman strikes a bargain with Death to prove the worth of humankind and becomes immortal in turn.
Publisher’s synopsis: Most humans cower in the face of Death. Not Nella May Carter. She sees him. She doesn’t hide. Instead, she bargains.
Born enslaved in eighteenth-century Georgia, Nella still believes in the will to survive amid the most untenable of conditions, in the glory of life, and in the ultimate goodness of the human race. She asks that Death, doubtful and curious, allow her to live long enough to prove it. He’s giving Nella all the time in the world.
Challenged, Nella embarks on an epic journey across the globe and centuries. Each new incarnation records the joys and losses, and the friendships and heartbreaks, throughout her lifetimes. When she meets handsome and passionate professor Sebastian Moore—the first man to whom she has ever revealed her secrets—Nella yearns for the mortality that escapes her. She can’t bear to leave this love behind.
As Death keeps watch, has Nella’s journey come to an end? Or is a new one just beginning?
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher
Release date: December 1
Read it if: You want the best fantasy books of December 2025 to juxtapose ordinary settings and supernatural elements. A woman flees to her late aunt’s desert home, only to find herself tied to an ancient god.
Publisher’s synopsis: With only a few dollars to her name and her beloved dog Copper by her side, Selena flees her past in the city to claim her late aunt’s house in the desert town of Quartz Creek. The scorpions and spiders are better than what she left behind.
Because in Quartz Creek, there’s a strange beauty to everything, from the landscape to new friends, and more blue sky than Selena’s ever seen. But something lurks beneath the surface. Like the desert gods and spirits lingering outside Selena’s house at night, keeping watch. Mostly benevolent, says her neighbor Grandma Billy.
That doesn’t ease the prickly sense that one of them watches too closely and wants something from Selena she can’t begin to imagine. And when Selena’s search for answers leads her to journal entries that her aunt left behind, she discovers a sinister truth about her new home: It’s the haunting grounds of an ancient god known simply as “Snake-Eater,” who her late aunt made a promise to that remains unfulfilled.
Snake-Eater has taken a liking to Selena, an obsession of sorts that turns sinister. And now that Selena is the new owner of his home, he’s hell-bent on collecting everything he’s owed.
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
Something Wicked by Falon Ballard
Release date: December 2
Read it if: You think Moulin Rouge + Shakespeare sounds like a perfect pairing. An ambitious prince seeks the aid of a magical courtesan for a dark purpose.
Publisher’s synopsis: The Uprising has overthrown Avon’s monarchial rulers, and a decree has been issued. Candidates for the first presidential election will be selected by the completion of a special task: to kill the former monarch of their home province.
Callum, the son of the recently dethroned king, is determined to be in the running. But coming to terms with patricide will require the help of Lady Caterine, a Gifted courtesan at La Puissance, Avon’s premiere sex club.
Lady Caterine has always had the magical ability to manipulate the emotions of anyone who experiences an orgasm in her presence. If Callum can only open up to Cate, he will be able to commit the newly fated murder without suffering the guilt and take his place as the rightful candidate from his province. But Callum has a deep-seated mistrust of the Gifted. And the last thing he expects is to be confronted with an undeniable connection with Cate that neither of them understands or wants.
With the fate of the country at stake, Callum and Cate search for ways to bare themselves to each other. They discover a darker force building within La Puissance, one that might ruin the future of Avon forever. To stop Avon from falling to ashes, they must sacrifice everything they have . . . even if it requires betraying each other.
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
The Rebel and the Rose by Catherine Doyle
Release date: December 2
Read it if: You want angsty romance alongside magic in the best fantasy books of December 2025. A pair of rivals must work together as rebellion brews in their magical land.
Publisher’s synopsis: From a remote hilltop haven, far from the city of Fantome, Seraphine Marchant and her Order of Flames plot to eradicate shade magic with lightfire. But as Sera struggles to control her blooming powers, destiny calls her back to Fantome—and to the assassin who haunts her dreams.
Ransom Hale can’t get Sera out of his head. As their rivalry grows and he grapples with the responsibility of leading the Order of Daggers, he feels himself slipping further from who he wants to be. Is he doomed to a life in the shadows? Or can he forge another path?
Meanwhile, rebellion is stirring in the kingdom, and a dangerous prince grows in power. Forced to work together by order of the king, Sera and Ransom’s conflicted hearts are tested to their limits. And all the while, an ancient prophecy is unfolding that will change the fate of Valterre forever…
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
The Library of Fates by Margot Harrison
Release date: December 2
Read it if: You love the idea of a strange, magical library. After the death of the library’s keeper, two exes must track down a powerful (and missing) book.
Publisher’s synopsis: The Library of Fates was designed to show you who you are—and who you could become. Its rarest book, The Book of Dark Nights, holds a secret: when you write an intimate confession on its pages, you’ll receive a prediction for your future, penned in your own handwriting.
For Eleanor, whose childhood was defined by a senseless tragedy, the library offers a world where everything makes sense. She’s spent most of her life there as an apprentice to the brilliant librarian, showing other people how to find the meaning of their lives in stories.
But when her mentor dies in a freak accident and The Book of Dark Nights goes missing—along with the secrets written inside—Eleanor is pulled out of the library and into a quest to locate it with the last person she expects: the librarian’s estranged son, Daniel, who Eleanor once loved.
Together, as they hunt down clues from Harvard to Paris, Eleanor and Daniel grow closer again, regaining each other’s trust. But little do they know that they’re entangled in a much larger web. Someone else wants the book, and they’ll go to dark lengths to get it…
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
Fallen Gods by Rachel Van Dyken
Release date: December 2
Read it if: You love want romantasy tropes and Norse-tinged mythology in the best fantasy books of December 2025. The daughter of a god falls for her fated enemy while on a dangerous quest.
Publisher’s synopsis: They said the Gods were myth. That the Giants were only stories told around dying fires. They lied.
The Gods aren’t dead―they’re only sleeping, locked in mortal bodies, scattered across the world, waiting for the right spark to wake them. And my father is the most ruthless of them all.
He raised me to obey. To bleed. To be his blade when the time came. Now he’s sending me to Endir University, a place filled with ancient bloodlines and deadly secrets, to steal back Mjolnir, the hammer of legend. If I fail, everyone I love dies.
But Aric Erikson wasn’t part of the plan. He’s the enemy’s heir. Distant. Dangerous. And…the one person I can’t afford to fall for. He’s closed himself off completely behind a wall of ice, but the more I’m ordered to unravel him, the harder it becomes to remember where the lies end and I begin.
There’s only a mission I never chose―and a man I was never meant to love―standing between me and a war that will decide the fate of the world.
But if I’m the spark, maybe he’s the fuse. And the Gods? They’re about to wake up angry.
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
Dawn of the Firebird by Sarah Mughal Rana
Release date: December 2
Read it if: You want to read about fierce, vengeful women in the best fantasy books of December 2025. A deposed emperor’s daughter prepares to reclaim her throne, but new discoveries give her pause.
Publisher’s synopsis: Khamilla Zahr-zad’s life has a foundation of violence and vengeance. Every home she’s known has been destroyed by war. As the daughter of an emperor’s clan, she spent her childhood training to maintain his throne. But when her clansmen are assassinated by another rival empire, plans change. With her heavenly magic of nur, Khamilla is a weapon even enemies would wield—especially those in the magical, scholarly city of Za’skar. Hiding her identity, Khamilla joins the enemy’s army school full of jinn, magic and martial arts, risking it all to topple her adversaries, avenge her clan and reclaim their throne.
To survive, she studies under cutthroat mystic monks and battles in a series of contests to outmaneuver her fellow soldiers. She must win at all costs, even if it means embracing the darkness lurking inside her. But the more she excels, the more she is faced with history that contradicts her father’s teachings. With a war brewing among the kingdoms and a new twisted magic overtaking the land, Khamilla must choose between two impossible choices: vengeance or salvation.
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
The Curse of the Cole Women by Marielle Thompson
Release date: December 2
Read it if: You prefer gothic, multigenerational tales over epic battles in fictional lands. Three generations of women fight against a curse placed on their ancestors.
Publisher’s synopsis: The Cole women are cursed. Each generation will birth a daughter, lose their love, and, as surely as the tide beats against the rocky shore, take her own life by giving herself to the sea. For generations, the Cole women have lived as outcasts, maintaining a lighthouse on a small island off the coast of New Hampshire. Ever since their ancestor was accused of witchcraft and cast into the sea hundreds of years prior, the islanders have ostracized the Coles, distrusting their rumored magic and their control of the lighthouse.
Despite their mistreatment, the Cole women are compelled to remain on the island. They know that if a Cole woman does not light the beacon on Juniper Island, anyone who is out at sea will drown. Out of guilt and obligation, the Cole women live out their solitary lives on the island, knowing someday their recompense for protecting the people from the sea will be to die in the sea themselves.
Told in three interwoven timelines in the late twentieth century, The Curse of the Cole Women unravels the lives of three women who struggle with their relationships with each other as they contend with the reality of their fates. Is it truly a curse, or is it generational madness that drives Cole women to the sea?
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole
Release date: December 30
Read it if: You want an eerie dark academia setting for the best fantasy books of December 2025. At a university with occult ties, a new student can’t escape a creeping sense of déjà vu.
Publisher’s synopsis: Warren University has stood amongst the ivy elite for centuries, built on the bones―and forbidden magic―of its most prized BIPOC students…hiding the rot of a secret society that will do anything to keep their own powers burning bright. No matter who they must sacrifice along the way.
Ellory Morgan is determined to prove that she belongs at Warren University, an ivy league school whose history is deeply linked to occult rumors and dark secrets. But as she settles into her Freshman year, something about the ornate buildings and shadowy paths feels strangely…familiar. And, with every passing day, that sense of déjà vu grows increasingly sinister.
Despite all logic, despite all reason, despite all the rules of reality, Ellory knows one thing to be true: she has been here before. And if she can’t convince brooding legacy student Hudson Graves to help her remember a past that seems determined to slip through her fingers as if by some insidious magic…this time, she may lose herself for good.
Get it on Amazon or support your local bookstores through Bookshop.org.
