The QTL Favorite Novellas Of 2025

As we leave all the wonder books of 2025 behind us, the Quill to Live team has one more thing we actually want to talk about: novellas. Due to the extremely high number of novels that we tried to review in 2025, we didn’t have a lot of space to review some of the amazing novellas that hit the shelves as well. 2025 was fabulous for short stories, and here are a few of the top picks our team had from last year in no particular order.

A Mouthful of Dust – Nghi Vo – Another strong contender from Nghi Vo in the ever-growing Singing-Hills Cycle. Six novellas in, Vo still feels like she is delivering consistently original takes on the nature of myth and legend. This time, our tale is about a famous famine that decimated the town of Baolin and the strange customs that formed in its wake by the survivors. This short has more of a murder mystery vibe than the previous entries in the series, but the general throughline of examining how the stories we tell affect the river of culture that follows them is still out in full force. I had a delightful time with this novella, and it is one of the few series that has managed to keep my interest and feel worth it after so many chapters. This is the rare example of where it doesn’t feel like this series would benefit from being combined into a book.

Making History – K. J. Parker – A fun and absurd tale, this novella feels like it might just be the quintessential K.J. Parker work. One morning in the Kingdom of Aelia, the king gathers twelve professors from the University of Aelia to assign them a task that they must succeed in. Failure will mean a slow and painful death. The King wants to manufacture permission to wage a war on their neighbor, and to do so, he tasks the professors with creating a fake history to show that the neighbor’s country, people, and land were always historically a part of his kingdom. Each of the different specialized professors gets to work on their field, but they rapidly begin to discover that the history they are inventing, which can’t possibly be true, might actually be reality.

Almost all K.J. Parker works dive into the nature of both history and professions, but Making History in particular feels like a metanarrative examination of all of Parker’s previous works in the space. It doesn’t feel very original if you have read a number of his other works, but it does read like it has pulled the best elements of all his other fanciful novellas into one place and combined them all. I wish it had been a little fresher, but it was still an incredibly fun and hilarious read that I highly recommend (especially if you haven’t read much of his work).

The Memory of the Ogisi – Moses Ose Utomi – One of the truly most original and fun novellas I have read in the last few years was the first two Forever Desert stories. Each showed the events from the past become the foundations of culture in the future, and Utomi is a master of playing with expectations to surprise and delight the reader. The trilogy ends with its final installment, The Memory of the Ogisi, and I recommend you give the entire thing a shot. Memory is definitely the weakest of the trio, and I feel like it didn’t have a defined enough gimmick in its delivery to differentiate it from the previous two entries. However, it still tells a very compelling short story and brings the generation-spanning story of the entire series to a thrilling conclusion. This series has some of the most standout novellas we have read in years.

The Infernus Gate – Anthony Ryan – Ryan’s Seven Swords series has also finally come to a close with the seventh installment (about the seventh sword), The Infernus Gate. In contrast to the Singing Hills Cycle series, I really just wish this entire collection of novellas were pulled together into one novel of vignettes. However, I loved the story enough to move past this holdup and enjoy it immensely in its current form. The Infernus Gate is a spectacular ending to a consistently excellent sword and sorcery quest fantasy. The final novella pulled key themes and messages from each of the previous six books and put them all together into an explosive finale that left nothing on the table. The final chapter of the book left room for a return to this world and these characters, and I am desperately hoping that Ryan decides to come back.

Harmattan Season – Tochi Onyebuchi – A hard-boiled detective novel set in West Africa in a time of revolutionary turmoil as the people push back against the draconian efforts of the French colonizers. Boubacar, the main character, is a classic down-on-his-luck but willing to joke at his own misfortune’s private eye that is a staple of the genre, but he has a dark past that makes his interactions with the mystery all the more engrossing. He has dual loyalties because of his origins and his line of work prior to being a detective. And his determination to see a job through drives the story to the finish, even at the cost of his own body, and possibly his life. It offers intimate discussions with people who both benefit from and are oppressed by the French Colonials. Everyone has a stake in the game at play, and the dark alleys it brings the reader down are illuminating and thoughtful. If you need a neo-noir with a dark heart that bleeds for a better future, pick this one up.

The Unworthy – Agustina Bazterrica – A dark exploration of a post-apocalyptic cult centered around the purity of women, this novella cuts right to the bone with sharp prose and intimate characterization. The translation captures Bazterrica’s prose, offering deep insights into the protagonist as she journals about her life in the convent. It investigates how women can be terrible to each other to eke out just a little bit of extra superiority, a little more favorability from the men in power. Written in the form of a diary, it adds tension as chapters aren’t clearly delineated and the writing is interrupted by room searches or prying eyes. It’s a dark future without much hope, but it really highlights the need to chronicle in order to understand what is truly going on. It is a brutal, suspenseful novella that has its eyes on the present, even as it details a horrendous future. 

The River Has Roots – Amal El-Mohtar – This short story is a sweet lullaby that will pluck at your heartstrings and give you a sisterly love to believe in. It is beautifully written, with prose as lyrical as the songs that the Hawthorn sisters sing. El-Mohtar constructs sentences with heart and enough double meaning to make the fae giggle in delight. The magic system is perfectly themed to the story and explores the use of grammar as a magical art. Intertwining magic with words makes each character interaction so purposeful, and it allows the plot to lean mischievously into grey areas where opportunities can be explored and meanings altered. The River Has Roots is truly one of the most moving, heartfelt novellas I have ever read.