What is speculative fiction? Here’s what it means (and what to read first).

by Tim Weed

🎧 Audiobook

If you want a single book that captures everything thrilling about speculative fiction, look no further than Tim Weed's The Gatepost. 

This new novel, out May 26, follows Esme Weatherhead, a woman who quit her law career in San Francisco, moved back to her family's 300-acre Vermont farmstead, and set out to write a book about her father's mysterious disappearance 20 years earlier. What she finds instead is a hidden field journal, a lost cave deep in the forest, and evidence of psychedelic experiments that suggest her father may have crossed the boundary between this world and something far stranger.

Part adventure, part mystery, part philosophical journey, The Gatepost blends modern science with ancient cosmology in a way that will leave you questioning what you think you know about reality.

by R. F. Kuang

🎧 Audiobook

R. F. Kuang has earned a reputation for writing books that feel impossible to categorize. Drawing heavily on classical literature (we're talking Dante's Inferno, Greek epics, Paradise Lost), this novel takes the genre-bending ambition Kuang is known for and turns it up several notches. BookTok discussions around this title went deep into its mythological and philosophical roots, and for good reason. This is the kind of book that rewards attentive readers. 

My recommendation: try an immersive experience with this one and listen to the audiobook while following along with the text so you don't miss a single word of the journey. This was one of my favorite books of 2025 and a great place to start if you’re interested in speculative fiction.

by V. E. Schwab

🎧 Audiobook

V. E. Schwab's name is enough to make any speculative fiction reader stop scrolling—and this novel more than lives up to the reputation. 

Following three main characters across three separate timelines, Schwab weaves a haunting, emotionally rich story that somehow feels seamless despite its structural complexity. The audiobook, narrated by Julia Whelan, Katie Leung, and Marisa Calin, is absolutely worth your time. If you haven't explored Schwab's work yet, this is a wonderful place to start.

by Richard Powers

🎧 Audiobook

If you haven't read Richard Powers's Bewilderment yet, this is your sign. 

A deeply moving novel about a grieving astrobiologist and his neurodivergent son set against a backdrop of environmental collapse, it's exactly the kind of speculative fiction that uses an imagined near-future to say something urgent and true about the world we already live in. Quietly devastating and beautifully written.

by Margaret Atwood

🎧 Audiobook

If there's one speculative fiction novel that has proven more enduring—and more unsettling—than almost any other, it's this one. 

Set in the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian theocracy built on the ruins of the United States, The Handmaid's Tale follows Offred, a woman stripped of her name, her family, and her freedom, forced to serve as a handmaid to a powerful commander. What makes Atwood's novel so extraordinary is that nothing in it feels purely invented—every horror in Gilead is drawn from something that has actually happened somewhere in human history. If you've only seen the TV series, the book is a different and equally essential experience.

by Emily St. John Mandel

🎧 Audiobook

If Station Eleven captured your heart, Sea of Tranquility will sweep you completely off your feet. 

This time-jumping novel connects characters across centuries—from a man exiled to Vancouver Island in 1912 to a novelist on a book tour during a pandemic to an investigator in a lunar colony in the far future—asking profound questions about time, fate, and what it means to be human. It's one of those books that makes speculative fiction feel like the most important genre there is.

by Susanna Clarke

If you're new to speculative fiction and want a book that eases you in gently before absolutely pulling the rug out from under you, Piranesi is it. 

Short, strange, and utterly unlike anything else you've ever read, this novel follows a man living in a house that contains the entire world—infinite halls, tidal seas, and statues beyond counting. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction and has introduced countless readers to the magic of literary speculative fiction. Do yourself a favor and go in as blind as possible.