Welcome to Season Six of Inside Voices!

Everyone got a chance to add titles to a communal list of suggestions and after whittling it down, we’ve aspirationally chosen 11 books to read for the rest of 2025. Check out our exuberant discussion full of book-pitching & multiple rounds of voting that got us to this year’s (final) selections!

We open the season with The Jasmine Throne, an epic fantasy from Tasha Suri and the first volume in the Burning Kingdoms trilogy. In March, we turn to the ocean depths, exploring the many creatures of the watery world alongside Sabrina Imbler. For a change of pace in April, Jordy Rosenberg takes us to eighteenth-century London in a rollicking, shape-shifting tale.

We’re always looking for joy, humor, and verve in the stories we read, of course, but in the next two novels I also hope to find beauty and resilience alongside the sorrow, the grief, and the tears. Slated for May is Tommy Orange’s second novel – the brilliant, devastating Wandering Stars. (If you’ve read his first book, check out our discussion of There There there!) Novels by poets hold a special place in our podcast after the first season’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. This year we chose Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! & we can trust that our emotions will be all over the place in the summer. After Martyr! we’ll be reading book one of another fantasy series (Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education) and then a slim novel chronicling the journeys of three siblings orphaned by war (Cecile Pin’s Wandering Souls).

We chose several books with a strong environmental theme, so in September and October we’ll be reading A Darker Wilderness and No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies back-to-back. November’s pick is Happiness by Aminatta Forna, a book to weave together many of year’s themes and messages. The goal is to finish 2025 with a book from a Milwaukee-based author. Nghi Vo is a sumptuous storyteller and I look forwarding to savoring her novel, A City in Glass, in the waning days of the year.