The Must-Read Books of 2026 (So Far)

The New York Times’ Best Books of the Year (So Far)

It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t. With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.

A “spectacular” (Los Angeles Times) novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next.

When your life flashes before your eyes, where would you stop? No one can change the past, but the Midnight Train can take you there. The chance to re-live the moments that meant most. To see what kind of person you really were … A magical, time-traveling love story, from the world of The Midnight Library.

In this gripping thriller, truth and justice are called into question when a Black man is gunned down in cold blood — the first novel in a riveting series from renowned civil rights attorney Ben Crump.

The New York Times’ Best Books of the Year (So Far)

From the bestselling, prize-winning author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, a spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London’s glittering surface.

The New York Times’ Best Books of the Year (So Far)

From the iconic crime writer who “inspires cultic devotion in readers” (The New Yorker) and has been called “incandescent” by Stephen King, comes the third and final book in the million-copy-bestselling Cal Hooper trilogy.

A man must fight for his planet against impossible odds when gamers from Earth attempt to remotely annihilate it in this epic, fast-paced novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the smash-hit Dungeon Crawler Carl.

A woman’s desperate flight from an Apache raid unfolds into a sweeping tale of the Mexico-U.S. border wars. Part epic, part alt-Western, Now I Surrender is Álvaro Enrigue’s most expansive and impassioned novel yet. It weaves past and present, myth and history into a searing elegy for a way of life that was an incarnation of true liberty — and an homage to the spark in us that still thrills to its memory.

The inspiring story of how we overcame a history of infectious disease, poisonous environments, and early death and unlocked an explosion in human potential — and a vision for the work ahead to optimize human flourishing in the twenty-first century.

Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less, showcases his wit, sophistication, and deep knowledge of focaccia in this tale of a young man who takes an unspecified job with a charismatic elderly Baronessa at her crumbling villa in the Tuscan hills.

Two lifelong peace activists and guides to Israel/Palestine, both of whom have lost family in the conflict, take readers on a revealing life-changing journey across this holy, bloodstained land and discover the mythic, political, and personal history that divides but also binds them and their peoples.

The New York Times’ Best Books of the Year (So Far)

Award-winning author and journalist Wil Haygood explores how the Vietnam War became a mirror for the struggle of Black Americans — fighting for freedom abroad while demanding equality at home — and a powerful lens through which to understand the racial and political divides that continue to shape American life.

The New York Times’ Best Books of the Year (So Far)

A traditional American woman, a “tradwife” influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855 — where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.

The posthumous memoir of Rev. James Lawson Jr., peer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., mentor to Congressman John Lewis and the Freedom Riders, and a principal architect of a nonviolent resistance movement that changed the world. Nonviolent is a riveting historical narrative from a central figure in global liberation and a testament to compelling a nation to live up to its founding ideals of liberty and justice for all.

The author of The Soul of America unites centuries of essential American voices to understand our national debates and divisions from 1619 to the present, with his signature commentary on the consequential speeches, letters, and essays that led us to this moment.

The New York Times’ Best Books of the Year (So Far)

In this dazzling new biography, Richard Holmes, critically acclaimed author of The Age of Wonder, discovers in Young Tennyson an astonishingly magnetic and mercurial personality, a secretly expressive and highly emotional man haunted by the great intellectual and scientific issues of his time.

The New York Times’ Best Books of the Year (So Far)

A stunning new work from universally acclaimed Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose debut short story collection won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Intimate and epic, elegiac and profoundly moving, This Is Where the Serpent Lives is a tour de force destined to become a classic of contemporary literature.

The highly anticipated biography of one of the world’s most treasured literary voices, showcasing a life as triumphant and inspiring as the stories she crafted. Oppenheimer peels back the curtain to reveal the woman behind the literary empire in all her complex, multifaceted glory — a true gift for anyone who grew up reading and loving these extraordinary books.

When you lose your way in life, the Elsewhere Express just might find you. Step on board the train that may take you to your life’s purpose in this wistful, Ghibli-esque fantasy from the bestselling author of Water Moon.

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lords of Finance, a magnificent and timely reckoning with the first truly global financial calamity and the famous banking family at the center of the whirlwind. 1873 is a bird’s-eye reckoning with the full dimension of the crisis, from its buildup to its long aftermath. The Rothschilds and a cast of other witnesses give us the human perspective. And we have a brilliant financial historian’s grasp of the larger forces at play, resulting in a global narrative with thrilling explanatory power.

The award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger. Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times and for all time.

From historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands comes an inspiring portrait of George Washington that examines his unrivaled leadership in the birth of America. American Patriarch casts Washington as the icon of American virtue who wrested America free from British control, gave credibility to the Constitution, and crafted the norms that would steady America as a nation for generations to follow.

In a haunting debut novel that reads like true crime, told through a kaleidoscope of perspectives, a private tragedy thrusts one family into the court of public opinion as the media — and their own community — dissect every aspect of their lives. Like a literary game of ping-pong, Good People compels the reader to reconsider what might have happened even on the previous page. It’s a riveting, provocative story of family — sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, and the communities that claim us as family in difficult times.

In this rowdy, frank reflection on illness, fame, sex, and everything in between, the remarkable mind behind the hit series Girls and the bestselling author of Not That Kind of Girl asks whether fulfilling her creative ambitions has been worth the pain.

The acclaimed author of How to Be an Antiracist and the National Book Award winner Stamped from the Beginning charts how “great replacement theory” has become a dominant political idea of our time and ushered in an antidemocratic age.

Read alone, each story in Lauren Groff’s electric collection is an individual triumph, bold, agile, and packed with power. Read together, they hum in exhilarating resonance. Precise, surprising, and provocative, anchored by profound insight into human nature, Brawler reveals the repeated, sometimes heartbreaking turning points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and what it takes to survive.

The New York Times’ Best Books of the Year (So Far)

An illuminating, electrifying exploration of the work of Toni Morrison by an award-winning novelist and Harvard professor — “a revelatory encounter with the Nobel laureate’s oeuvre” (The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice). At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of all time but also on how to read great works of literature in general.

The sexual assault that stunned the world. A courageous woman’s rallying call for shame to “change sides.” For the very first time, Gisèle Pelicot tells her story. Part memoir, part act of defiance, A Hymn to Life is a moving story of survival, testimony, and courage, and an unforgettable portrait of a woman who broke her silence, reclaimed her voice, and forced a reckoning.

The New York Times’ Best Books of the Year (So Far)

In this masterful, groundbreaking work, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson shines surprising new light on an infamous 1984 New York subway shooting that would unveil simmering racial resentments and would lead, in unexpected ways, to a fractured future and a new era of rage and violence.