Best Books of 2026

Hooked

Asako Yuzuki · translated by Polly Barton · 2026

The follow-up to Butter — Waterstones Book of the Year 2024 — is, if anything, more precise and more unsettling than its predecessor. Eriko is a successful woman at a large trading company: devoted parents, spotless apartment, a characteristically ambitious new project reintroducing the Nile perch to the Japanese market. What she does not have is friends. She has been reading the blog of Shoko — an unconventional housewife whose chaotic, warm domestic life is everything Eriko’s is not — and she engineers a chance encounter. What follows is a slow-burn psychological portrait of female friendship curdling into fixation, written in prose that Oprah called “razor-edged” and the Irish Times described as staying with the reader for weeks.

If you read Butter for the obsession and the food and the sharp attention to what it costs women to want things openly, Hooked gives you more of that — but quieter, more interior, more interested in the specific loneliness of a woman who has optimised everything except connection. Yuzuki is one of the most interesting novelists writing about womanhood right now, and this confirms it. For context: Butter is also on my books about obsession list.

Light and Thread

Han Kang · translated by Deborah Smith & Anton Hur · 2026

Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024 — the first South Korean writer to do so — and this is her first nonfiction work published in English translation. Light and Thread collects her Nobel acceptance lecture alongside essays, poems, photographs, and diary entries. The Nobel citation praised “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” and this book shows the thinking and the living underneath the fiction: the observations that become novels, the grief that becomes form, the moral seriousness that is present in everything she writes.

If you read The Vegetarian or Human Acts and felt like you were in the presence of a writer who takes suffering seriously without using it sentimentally, this book shows you where that comes from. Han Kang writes about literature, about what it means to write about violence and trauma without aestheticising it, about what writing asks of a person who cares about getting it right. It is essential reading for anyone who has been following her work, and a good introduction to her thinking for anyone who hasn’t.

→ Han Kang is on my complete Nobel Prize in Literature list

London Falling

Patrick Radden Keefe · 2026

Patrick Radden Keefe — the New Yorker staff writer behind Say Nothing and Empire of Pain — turns his attention to London. When nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler falls from a luxury apartment building, his parents assume suicide. What follows, as they search for answers, is an investigation that exposes danger, corruption, and the specific violence of a city’s dark underworld. Keefe is the last writer you want looking into your personal life: he finds what is buried and makes it legible without losing the human weight of it. His is the most reliable voice in longform investigative journalism working today.

Keefe does what the best true crime does, which is to use a specific tragedy to open up something much larger: how systems fail, who gets protected, how money and power determine whose death gets investigated and whose gets filed away. If you have read Say Nothing (about the Troubles) or Empire of Pain (about the Sackler family and OxyContin), the method is the same — precision, patience, and an extraordinary ability to make complex institutional stories feel personal. This is the most anticipated nonfiction of the year for a reason.

→ More investigative nonfiction on my best memoirs & biographies list

John of John

Douglas Stuart · 2026

Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize in 2020 for Shuggie Bain, a novel about a boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow with an alcoholic mother, and one of the most painful accounts of class, shame, and love I have read. John of John is set in Scotland’s remote Hebrides and returns to the landscape of the margins — the places and people that are not seen until a writer decides to see them. Stuart’s prose is physical and specific and tender in the way that only writers who are writing from close to the bone can be.

Shuggie Bain was a book that asked what it meant to love someone who cannot be saved, and to keep loving them anyway. If John of John asks anything like the same question — and the early accounts suggest it does — it belongs on any list of books worth reading this year. Stuart is one of the most important literary voices to emerge in the last decade, and this is the book that will tell us whether Shuggie Bain was an anomaly or the beginning of something even larger.

→ More literary fiction on my best fiction list

Land

Maggie O’Farrell · 2026

Maggie O’Farrell wrote Hamnet — the reimagining of Shakespeare’s son’s life and death, told from the perspective of his mother Agnes — and it remains one of the most formally beautiful and emotionally devastating historical novels of recent decades. Land is set in nineteenth-century Ireland and returns to O’Farrell’s central concern: the interior lives of women in times and places that left no record of them. Her method is to enter that silence and find what is there — the love, the fury, the calculation, the grief — and give it form.

What O’Farrell does better than almost anyone writing historical fiction today is to make the past feel inhabited rather than reconstructed. Her characters do not feel like they are being written about — they feel like they are living, inside their own moment, without access to the distance we have from it. Land arrives in summer 2026 as one of the most anticipated novels of the year. If you loved Hamnet, this is the natural next read.

A Hymn to Life

Gisèle Pelicot · 2026

In September 2024, a French court convicted Dominique Pelicot of drugging his wife Gisèle over nearly a decade and inviting strangers — 51 of them — to rape her while she was unconscious, while filming the acts. Gisèle Pelicot waived her right to anonymity and insisted the trial be held in public. Her decision — that she would not carry the shame, that the shame belonged to the perpetrators — turned the trial into an international event and her into a figure of extraordinary moral courage. A Hymn to Life is her account of that ordeal, that decision, and what comes after.

This is the most difficult book on this list and the most important. What Gisèle Pelicot did — the refusal to accept invisibility, the insistence on public accountability, the way she held her own dignity intact through something designed to destroy it — is an act of a kind we rarely see. Her memoir belongs on the same shelf as the books that are about what it costs to tell the truth, and what it means to refuse the role of victim without pretending the harm did not happen. Essential.

Vigil

George Saunders · 2026

George Saunders won the Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo in 2017, a novel set in a graveyard over the course of one night in which Abraham Lincoln’s son has just died — formally eccentric, funny, devastating. Vigil is his return to long fiction and is described by early readers as the most intellectually ambitious novel of 2026: a deeply philosophical narrative about mortality, consciousness, and the fragility of human existence, built not on plot momentum but on introspection, layered symbolism, and emotional accumulation. Critics have praised its originality while noting it demands active engagement from readers.

Saunders is one of the few contemporary American fiction writers whose work is genuinely philosophically serious without being dry or difficult in the wrong way. His stories are always, underneath their formal inventiveness, about the same question: what do we owe each other? How do we justify our failures of attention and care? Vigil pushes that question further than any of his previous books. Not a light read — but not a book that asks more of you than it gives back.

Whistler

Ann Patchett · 2026

Ann Patchett — the author of Bel Canto and The Dutch House — returns in June 2026 with Whistler, described by early readers as quiet, character-driven, and precisely observed: a novel about unexpected connections and what draws people together across the distances they have placed between themselves. Patchett is a writer who does not need dramatic plot machinery to create tension; she finds it in the way people misunderstand each other and occasionally, improbably, do not. She is consistently one of the best novelists working in American literary fiction.

Patchett writes about love — the family kind, the friendship kind, the kind that does not have a clean name — with more clarity and less sentimentality than almost anyone. Whistler is her first novel since The Dutch House in 2019, and the anticipation reflects something real: there is a particular kind of reader, thoughtful and patient, who trusts her completely and has been waiting. If you are that kind of reader, this is your book of the year.

→ More on what love looks like in fiction on my Books About Love list