Annihilation along with the other books in the Southern Reach series certainly qualify as surreal and weird.

Thanks for this thread! It’s a little less absurd but my immediate thought was The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins. Phenomenal read.

I’d say for me magical realism has been 2025’s “Genre of the year” so I have a few recommendations.

If you like Murakami you might like Sayaka Murata - I particularly liked Earthlings, it’s a bit less magical realism but definitely quirky and surreal.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt was another book that stood out to me this year. It’s an emotional story with a young man and an older woman which uses a very smart octopus as the main character and anchor for the story (even though I wouldn’t consider the story is about the octopus).

Black Girl Unlimited by Echo Brown is firmly magical realism, and also quite good.

Nothing To See Here by Kevin Wilson is about a young woman who gets roped into babysitting two kids that spontaneously combust from time to time. It’s lighthearted but emotional, and I was laughing out loud about once every 5 pages. I had a blast with this one.

I would also class Jandy Nelson’s books as magical realism so I would say you might enjoy that too.

Then there’s This Is How You Lose The Time War, which I didn’t like at all, but has many good reviews so I won’t discredit it. It’s… Space fantasy? There’s no “science” in the fiction, but it has time travel, and weirdness galore.

This is my list of books I’ve read in 2025, in case you find anything inspiring:

And my storygraph profile in case you want to take a look (or not, I won’t be able to know!).

It’s probably a bet more comedic than the authors you listed, but Douglas Adams is quite absurd, surreal and incredibly funny. Particularly the “trilogy in five parts”; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Everything Thomas Pynchon!!!

The Dart by Alice Oswald is mindblowing.

László Krasznahorkai.

Lydia Davis

Experimental Fiction by Thalia Fields

Ducks, Newburyport

If you’re not already familiar with Christopher Moore, I really liked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_the_Sequined_Love_Nun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb:_The_Gospel_According_to_Biff,_Christ’s_Childhood_Pal

This is very much not my genre so I’m not sure my suggestion is valid; maybe others can chime in if I’m way off base. But this year I read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke and it felt pretty surreal to me.

• Kazuo Ishiguro - The Unconsoled

I’ve read most of his books, but this was the most magical for me. Knowing nothing about it was important, and it gave me a feeling of unease almost from the beginning.

• Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon

Someone else mentioned Pynchon, and I absolutely loved this book. It’s huge and absurdly ambitious and I learned a lot about astronomy, but it’s also an all-time great bromance and there’s a talking dog.

You might give the scp wiki a go, not a book, but a collective fiction about a agency that keeps things ‘normal’, along with the stuff it contains. At least one of the of the authors there, qntm, has parlayed it into a few books.

Pynchon. Surreal, paranoid, extremely zany and hazy. Start with Inherent Vice or Lot 49.

A Game In Yellow by Hailey Piper

You can read the blurbs, or just go in with no preconceptions. I suggest the later

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck.

It’s short, it’s brilliantly weird, and I’ve never felt so viscerally forced to stare eternity in the face.

Christopher Moore

China Miéville in general, suggest start with “Perdido Street Station”

Death and the Penguin by Andrej Kurkov