Like most industries, publishing relies on trends. Here at Book Riot, we run the yearly bookish trend predictions to see what genres the industry will likely heavily cater to in the year or even years to come. One consistent trend is romantasy, which has stayed relevant for years. In years past, there were steampunk, dark academia, and other microgenres that dominated many sectors of publishing—this industry moves through many reading trends.
In fact, there’s a new one that has recently emerged on TikTok, no less: weird girl fiction, or weird girl lit. Weird girl fiction is commonly defined as books that elicit “unhinged female rage” and “transgress social norms.”
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Based on many BookTokers’ recommendations, the books under this label explore issues that women face today in a patriarchal society: women’s rights, sex work, and motherhood, among many other pressing issues. Characters should also possess unconventional behaviors to be able to fit the label. It’s expected that this falls under literary fiction, which usually explores the human condition. Weird girl fiction doesn’t seem to care about when the books were published: they can be classics, contemporary, or even recently released, as long as they contain the same core elements.
Weird girl fiction trended in late 2024, but many claim the trend started back to the pandemic days. “One reason that the label is cropping up at the moment could be that the world is feeling increasingly oppressive and when that happens, women fight back with stories that employ metaphor, surrealism, allegory and ‘weirdness’ to talk about it,” according to Claire Mabey, The Spinoff’s Books Editor.
Weird Girl Fiction Books
The label’s boom was fueled by the success of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which explores the character’s strong desire to sleep for a year, and Bunny by Mona Awad, which examines the character’s complex and strange relationship with a cultish friend group in her MFA program.
Other frequently recommended weird girl fiction titles include Milk Fed by Melissa Broder, which features a character exhibiting odd behaviors, such as extreme food restriction and obsessive food rituals; The Vegetarian by Han Kang, which follows a character who experiences vivid dreams that affect her life, including shunning meat and becoming estranged from people around her; and Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, wherein a woman steals her friend’s literary career following the friend’s death.
The label “weird girl fiction” itself is controversial—what counts as “weird”? While the terms can be problematic, these novels exhibit an unconventional, unhinged, or dark tone. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, isolation and self-destruction are the central themes. The character in Milk Fed struggles with an eating disorder and body dysmorphia, while the character in The Vegetarian fights for the autonomy of her body. In Yellowface, the character is fueled by a strong ambition to be published and abandons her ethics, whereas the character in Bunny sacrifices her individuality in order to be accepted in a group.
Where to Find Weird Girl Fiction Books
Not recognized as a formal subgenre, bookstores haven’t caught on with shelf labels for weird girl lit yet. Recently, however, some libraries have started to create plenty of staff-curated lists, which include titles such as Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield, Sky Daddy by Kate Folk, and Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, among many others.
The primary readers of this trend are difficult to identify, since it can fall under classics, literary fiction, and other genre fiction, but plenty of Gen Z and millennial women read them.
How is the Publishing Industry Responding?
Aside from some libraries, digital storefronts such as Kobo and Audible have followed suit to include curated lists of weird girl fiction. Publishers are also responding by putting out more of these books across many genres. This year, Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, Boring Asian Female by Canwen Xu, Hemlock by Melissa Faliveno, and Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer were among the most anticipated releases.
As the trend gains traction in many reading communities, how has it affected book sales? I looked at the overall top 25 bestsellers of Publishers Weekly, which draws on data from Circana BookScan, from January 2025 to the present, when the trend was at its peak, and found no frontlist titles that achieved bestseller status. As for the backlist titles, such as My Year of Rest and Relaxation, it’s inconclusive without hard historical sales data.
These books may not be moving the financial needle now, but it’s too early to tell whether the trend is going to fade or stick around; it hasn’t even peaked yet. Publishers typically plan book projects a year in advance of publication, so we’ll likely see more of these in the coming months.
To predict the next bestsellers, commercial publishing houses shift their editorial strategies, produce profit and loss statements, forecast sales data, and match market demand. First, there were romantasy, dark academia, and steampunk; now, there’s weird girl fiction.
What will it be next?
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