header image for The 2025 Hugo Award Finalists for Best Fantasy/Science Fiction Novel
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By Walden Pond Books

The Hugo Awards, presented annually since 1955, are the most prestigious awards in the field of science fiction and fantasy and are nominated and voted on by members and attendees of the World Science Fiction Convention. The winners in all the categories will be announced this year on Saturday, August 16, 2025, at the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle, Washington.

 

(See the bottom of the page for the finalists in all the other categories.)

bookcover for The Tainted Cup

The Tainted Cup

Robert Jackson Bennett 

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Paperback

$20.00

$18.60

Ana Dolabra, an annoyingly brilliant and eccentric detective, investigates a gruesome supernatural murder with the help of her new junior assistant, Dinios Kol, who has been magically altered to make him the perfect aide to Ana's brilliance. This fantasy-mystery has it all: astoundingly vivid worldbuilding, masterful plotting, and fiendishly twisted crimes.

bookcover for The Ministry of Time

The Ministry of Time

Kaliane Bradley 

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Paperback

$18.99

$17.66

A secretive British agency in the near-future employs time travel to transport people from the past. Assigned to acclimatize one of these time travelers (a survivor from the doomed 1845 Franklin arctic expedition) to his new situation, a young civil servant is drawn into both an unexpected romance and a shadowy murder plot. A terrific adventure novel with remarkably entertaining insights into cultural divides, dislocation, and imperialism.

bookcover for A Sorceress Comes to Call

A Sorceress Comes to Call

T. Kingfisher 

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Hardback

$27.99

$26.03

Employing her ability to possess minds, Evangeline, a powerful sorceress, raises her daughter Cordelia to aid her sinister plots. But when Evangeline targets her next victims, Cordelia desperately searches for a way to escape her mother's domination. Absolutely enchanting - a masterful blend of a Grimm's fairy tale and a Jane Austen romance.

bookcover for Alien Clay

Alien Clay

Adrian Tchaikovsky 

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Paperback

$19.99

$18.59

Condemned by the totalitarian Earth government called the Mandate to slave labor on the prison planet Kiln, xenobiologist Arton Daghdev discovers that Kiln's vanished civilization hasn't actually vanished - it's lurking. An immersive, enthralling, and hugely intelligent novel about clashes between competing species and ideologies.

bookcover for Service Model

Service Model

Adrian Tchaikovsky 

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Paperback

$18.99

$17.66

Utterly reliant on robotic labor and service, human civilization is collapsing. Charles, a domestic robot, achieves sentience, murders its owner, and embarks on a quest to find a new purpose in a world in which the age-old hierarchy of human preeminence is disintegrating into chaos and ruins. One of the most savagely satirical - and entertaining! - postapocalyptic settings to be found in a science fiction novel.

bookcover for Someone You Can Build A Nest In

Someone You Can Build A Nest In

John Wiswell 

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Paperback

$20.00

$18.60

Shesheshen is a man-eating shapeshifter who reconstructs herself from the remains of past meals after being badly injured by monster hunters. Nursed back to health by a kind-hearted human, Shesheshen becomes aware that she isn't the only shapeshifting monster with an appetite. A perfect blend of romance and horror, simultaneously heartwarming and gruesome, this is a darkly wondrous novel.