10th March-16th March: The second week of March features some exciting new stories as apart of the 2025 book releases.

This week’s 2025 book releases feature interesting fantasies, including a gothic lush world with interesting mythlogies and monsters, to a bloody war that has brought a fire god to the doorsteps of a kingdom, delivering a powerful conclusion to a popular trilogy.

Readers who prefer their fiction more grounded in reality will be interested in historical stories that include a magical realism tale about a dust storm that ravages a small fictional town, a Civil War story about a wife of a missing Confederate soldier discovering a wounded Yankee officer, and a true story of feminine resistance and resilience that reminds us all of where we started—and how far we still have to go.

Readers who love mysteries with suspense will be interested in mystery thrillers that include a debut novel about a mother’s determination to prove her son’s innocence and a woman’s shocking revelation that her fiance isn’t who she thought he was. Unpacking his deception leads her to face her own troubled past.

Last but not least, for readers who love a bit of a spicy romance, will be interested in the three new additions to this week’s 2025 book releases: a cozy, slow-burn romance, about a single dad and a newly hired nanny, a spicy small town romance between an author and an eligible contractor, to a enemies-to-lovers LGBT+ romance.

Fantasy

Title: What Wakes The Bells
Author: Elle Tesch
Publisher:  Feiwel & Friends
Publication Date: 11th of March, 2025
Pages: 336

Inspired by an ominous Prague legend, What Wakes the Bells is a lavish gothic fantasy by debut author Elle Tesch. Lush worldbuilding, a unique setting, and interesting mytholgies.

The book’s synopsis;

Built by long-gone Saints, the city of Vaiwyn lives and breathes and bleeds. As a Keeper, Mina knows better than most what her care of Vaiwyn’s bells means for the sentient city. It’s the Strauss family’s thousand-year legacy―prevent the Vespers from ringing, or they will awake a slumbering evil.

One afternoon, to Mina’s horror, her bell peals thirteen times, shattering the city’s tenuous peace. With so much of the city’s history and lore lost in a long-ago disaster, no one knows the danger that has been unleashed―until the city begins to fight back. As the sun sets, stone gargoyles and bronze statues tear away from their buildings and plinths to hunt people through the streets. Trapped in Mina’s bell, the soul of a twisted and power-hungry Saint festered. Now free of his prison, he hides behind the face of one of Vaiwyn’s citizens, corrupting the city and turning it on itself.

Time is running out, and the only chance Mina has to stop the destruction and horrific killings is finding and destroying the Saint’s host. Everyone is a suspect, including Mina’s closest loved ones. She will have to decide how far she’ll go to save her city―and who she’s willing to kill to do it.

---

Title: Faithbreaker
Series: Fallen Gods (3)
Author: Hannah Kaner
Publisher:  Harper Voyager
Publication Date: 13th of March, 2025
Pages: 415

In the epic finale to the number 1 internationally bestselling Fallen Gods trilogy that started with Godkiller, the fate of Middren hangs in the balance as mighty gods and mortal heroes clash in a final battle for supremacy.The finale masterfully weaving together love and sacrifice, loyalty and betrayal, and the true meaning of faith.

The book’s synopsis;

War has come. The fire god Hseth is leading an unstoppable army south, consuming everything in her path. Middren’s only hope of survival is to unify allies and old foes against a common enemy.

Elo navigates an uneasy alliance with Arren; his friend, his enemy, and his king. Now they each must decide how much they’re willing to sacrifice to turn the tides of war.

Meanwhile, Inara joins her mother on their ship, the Silverswift, to seek aid. Still grappling with her powers, Inara must reconcile who she is and where she belongs, while Skediceth has to question if their bond will be enough to keep them safe.

Kissen has no allegiance to the old ways of Middren. But, as she tries to find her family, she is forced to question what, and whose, future she is fighting for.

---

Historical Fiction

Title: The Antidote
Author: Karen Russell
Publisher:  Knopf
Publication Date: 11th of March, 2025
Pages: 432

From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. A gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town. Russell’s novel is, above all, a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities.

The book’s synopsis;

Opening on a Black Sunday, a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. Following a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

---

Title: The Jackal’s Mistress
Author: Chris Bohjalian
Publisher:  Doubleday
Publication Date: 11th of March, 2025
Pages: 336

In this Civil War love story, inspired by a real-life friendship across enemy lines, the wife of a missing Confederate soldier discovers a wounded Yankee officer and must decide what she’s willing to risk for the life of a stranger, from the New York Times bestselling author of such acclaimed historical fiction as Hour of the Witch and The Sandcastle Girls.

The book’s synopsis;

Virginia, 1864—Libby Steadman’s husband has been away for so long that she can barely conjure his voice in her dreams. While she longs for him in the night, fearing him dead in a Union prison camp, her days are spent running a gristmill with her teenage niece, a hired hand, and his wife, all the grain they can produce requisitioned by the Confederate Army. It’s an uneasy life in the Shenandoah Valley, the territory frequently changing hands, control swinging back and forth like a pendulum between North and South, and Libby awakens every morning expecting to see her land a battlefield. 

And then she finds a gravely injured Union officer left for dead in a neighbor’s house, the bones of his hand and leg shattered. Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the Vermont Brigade is her enemy – but he’s also a human being, and Libby must make a terrible Does she leave him to die alone? Or does she risk treason and try to nurse him back to health? And if she succeeds, does she try to secretly bring him across Union lines, where she might negotiate a trade for news of her own husband? 

---

Title: The Women on Platform Two
Author: Laura Anthony
Publisher:  Gallery Books
Publication Date: 11th of March, 2025
Pages: 336

In 1970s Dublin, all forms of contraception are strictly forbidden, but an intrepid group of women will risk everything to change that in this sweeping, timely novel inspired by a remarkable and little-known true story. A haunting, powerful story of feminine resistance and resilience that reminds us all of where we started—and how far we still have to go.

The book’s synopsis;

Dublin, 1969: Maura has just married Dr. Christy Davenport and they look forward to growing their family. But as her husband’s vicious temper emerges, Maura worries that her home might never be safe for a child. Meanwhile, her close friend Bernie, a mother of three, learns the devastating news that if she conceives again, her health complications could prove fatal.

Dublin, 2023: A close call makes Saoirse realize that she may never want to be a mother. Little does she know that only a few decades ago, a group of women made this option possible for her. And she’s about to meet one of them…

---

Mystery/Thriller

Title: All the Other Mothers Hate Me
Author: Sarah Harman
Publisher:   G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Publication Date: 11th of March, 2025
Pages: 384

In her debut, author Sarah Harman delivers a well-written and suspenseful narrative that has perfect dry humor, smart sarcasm, and brilliant characterization. Ideal read for fans of amateur detectives, heavily flawed characters, moments of thrillers, and a bit of mystery.

The book’s synopsis;

Florence Grimes, age thirty-one, always takes the easy way out. Single, broke and unfulfilled after the humiliating end to her girl-band career, she has only one reason to get out of bed each day: her ten-year-old son Dylan. But then Alfie Risby, her son’s bully and the heir to a vast frozen-food empire, mysteriously vanishes during a class trip, and Dylan becomes the prime suspect.

Florence, for once, is faced with a task she can’t quit: She’s got to find Alfie and clear her son’s name or risk losing Dylan forever—never mind that she has no useful skills (let alone investigative ones) and that all the other school moms hate her. Oh, and she has a reason to suspect Dylan might not be as innocent as she’d like to believe.

---

Title: Claire, Darling
Author: Callie Kazumi
Publisher: Bantam
Publication Date: 11th of March, 2025
Pages: 288

In the aftermath of a shocking breakup, a woman’s desperate quest for answers ignites a psychological inferno that will consume her past, present, and future in this hair-raising debut from an exciting new voice in suspense. A promising debut!

The book’s synopsis;

Claire is excited to drop off a surprise workday lunch for her fiancé, Noah. It’s their anniversary, after all. But when the receptionist tells her that no one with Noah’s name works there, Claire thinks there must be a mistake.

Noah isn’t picking up her calls. Her texts go unanswered. It turns out Noah has a different life . . . one with a beautiful girlfriend, a beautiful house. Claire was never really in the picture.

Desperate to unpack all of Noah’s lies, Claire plunges into a nightmarish journey of obsession that submerges her deeper into the murky waters of her own past—a past dominated by a manipulative mother who shattered her sense of self.

Will Claire break free from the ghosts that haunt her? Or will they become more costly than any of Noah’s lies?

---

Romance

Title: The Strawberry Patch Pancake House
Series: Dream Harbor (4)
Author: Laurie Gilmore
Publisher: Harper Collins
Publication Date: 13th of March, 2025
Pages: 384

Fall in love with the brand new spring romance set in Dream Harbor, from the bestselling author of The Pumpkin Spice Café. The fourth instalment brings a slow-burn romance about a single dad and a newly hired nanny. Ideal read for fans of cozy romances and forced proximity/ opposites attract tropes.

The book’s synopsis;

As a renowned chef, single-dad Archer never planned on moving to a small town, let alone running a pancake restaurant. But Dream Harbor needs a new chef, and Archer needs a community to help raise his daughter, Olive.

Iris has never managed to hold down a job for more than a few months. So when Mayor Kelly suggests Archer is looking for a nanny, and Iris might be available, she shudders at the thought. But in need of money she reluctantly agrees.

As Archer and Iris get used to their new roles, is it possible that they might have more in common than they first thought, or is Olive just determined to play match-maker…

---

Title: Story of My Life
Series: Story Lake (1)
Author: Lucy Score
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Publication Date: 13th of March, 2025
Pages: 605

The all-new, fictional, small-town romance from a New York Times bestselling author. A romance author moves to a small town to find the time and space she needs to write her next book before she gets the sack from her publisher. Her new home, a real fixer-upper, needs a contractor, and, funnily enough, the local contractor is a sexy, eligible bachelor. Described as Gilmore Girls meets Schitt’s Creek, it is an ideal read for fans of small-town romances and fake dating tropes.

The book’s synopsis;

Hazel is given a one-two punch when she’s forced to move out of her Upper East Side apartment and is given a final warning from her publisher.

If she doesn’t turn in a book by her next deadline, they’re cutting her loose.

Hazel rashly decides to leave what’s left of her city life behind and impulse buys a house in rural Pennsylvania sight unseen. How better to entertain the loyal readers she still has and rediscover her writing mojo than immersing herself in small-town life?

Too bad this town looks to be on its last legs. At least she’s finding swoon-worthy inspiration from her hot, grumpy contractor Cam and his animal-rescuing, community-involved family. It’s all just research. What could go wrong?

---

Title: Go Luck Yourself
Series: Royals and Romance (2)
Author: Sara Raasch
Publisher:  Bramble
Publication Date: 11th of March, 2025
Pages: 320

From the author of The Nightmare Before Kissmas comes the second instalment in the Royals and Romance series. This is an enemies-to-lovers romance in a sexy and delightful holiday mash-up that pairs the spare prince of Christmas with the crown prince of St. Patrick’s Day. It is an ideal read for fans of LGBT+ romances and exploring family trauma.

The book’s synopsis;

Someone has been stealing Christmas’s joy, and there’s only one clue to the culprit—a single shamrock.

With Coal busy restructuring Christmas—and their dad now having a full midlife crisis in the Caribbean—Kris volunteers to investigate St. Patrick’s Day. His cover: an ambassador from Christmas to foster goodwill. What could go wrong?

Everything, it seems. Because Prince Lochlann Patrick, Crown Prince of St. Patrick’s Day, happens to be the mysterious student that Kris has been in a small war with at Cambridge. They attempt to play nice for the tabloids, but Kris can’t get through one conversation without wanting to smash Loch’s face in—he’s infuriating, stubborn, loud, obstinate, hot—

Wait—hot?

Kris might be in some trouble. Especially when it turns out that the mystery behind Christmas’s stolen magic isn’t as simple as an outright theft. But why would a Holiday that Christmas has never had contact with, one that’s always been the very basis of carefree, want to steal joy? Can a spare prince even hope to unravel all this, or will Kris lose something way more valuable than his Holiday’s resources—like his heart?

---

Conclusion

This second week of March 2025 features 10 new book releases with exciting new stories ranging from gothic fantasies to Civil War tales, mysterious vanishings, and slow-burn romances. The releases explore themes of sacrifice, loyalty, resilience, love, possibilities, determination, secrets, and deception.

Stay tuned, as I will be posting an article next week about the latest 2025 book releases for the third week of March’s monthly line-up. Additionally, if you are interested in more book-related articles, check out my book section page for reviews, recommendations, details, and discussions.