Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1926
1926 produces one of the strangest pairings in publishing history: a spare, disillusioned novel about a generation that survived a war only to lose its capacity for belief, and a gentle children’s book about a bear who is afraid of very little and loves honey very much. Ernest Hemingway, twenty-seven and recently divorced from the marriage that produced him as a writer, publishes the novel that defines the Lost Generation in prose stripped down to its bones. A.A. Milne, almost as an afterthought to his career as a playwright, publishes the book that will outlive every other thing he ever wrote. Agatha Christie publishes the novel that breaks one of detective fiction’s oldest unspoken rules and causes a minor scandal among critics for doing it. And two years after his death, Franz Kafka’s unfinished final novel finally reaches readers, its protagonist still, eternally, trying to gain entry to a castle he will never enter.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Memoir · Updated June 2026
The Sun Also Rises
Jake Barnes, an American journalist left impotent by a war wound, and Lady Brett Ashley, the Englishwoman he loves and cannot have, move with a small circle of expatriates from the bars of 1920s Paris to the bullfighting festival of Pamplona, drinking heavily and saying very little about what is actually wrong with any of them. Hemingway draws on his own circle of expatriate friends and his own failed infatuations to construct a generation defined less by what the war did to their bodies than by what it did to their capacity for sincerity. The prose is famously spare: short sentences, minimal commentary, almost everything that matters left unsaid beneath the surface of food, drink, and bullfights.
The Sun Also Rises is the novel that gave the Lost Generation its name and its voice, and it remains the clearest demonstration of Hemingway’s iceberg theory in practice: the emotional content of the novel lives almost entirely below the visible surface of the prose. Jake’s wound is never explained in detail and doesn’t need to be; the entire group’s drinking, bickering, and bullfight tourism is a structure built to avoid talking about loss directly. Read it as the rulebook for an entire mode of understated American prose that writers are still working within a century later.
Winnie-the-Pooh
In the Hundred Acre Wood, a bear of very little brain spends his days thinking mostly about honey, accompanied by Piglet, Eeyore, Owl, and the rest of the toys belonging to a small boy named Christopher Robin, modelled directly on Milne’s own son. The stories were developed from games Milne played with his son and the boy’s actual stuffed animals, illustrated by E.H. Shepard in a style so closely associated with the characters that no subsequent illustrator has fully escaped its influence. Milne, who had built his career primarily as a playwright and essayist, resented in later years that this children’s book overshadowed everything else he wrote, including work he considered more serious.
Winnie-the-Pooh earns its place not as a curiosity but as a genuinely well-constructed piece of writing: Milne’s dialogue has real comic precision, and the gentle melancholy underneath characters like Eeyore gives the book an emotional range that purely sentimental children’s writing rarely achieves. It has outlasted every other book on this page in terms of cultural reach, has never gone out of print, and continues to be read by adults who recognise something genuinely wise in its account of friendship, anxiety, and simple contentment. The rare children’s book that improves rather than diminishes on adult rereading.
The Castle
K. arrives in a village beneath a castle and spends the entire unfinished novel trying, and repeatedly failing, to gain access to the castle’s authorities or even to establish whether he has actually been appointed to the land-surveyor position he believes he holds. The bureaucracy governing the village is never explained, never fully visible, and never directly hostile; it simply absorbs every attempt K. makes to understand it, redirecting him endlessly without ever quite refusing him outright. Kafka left the novel unfinished at his death in 1924; his friend and literary executor Max Brod, defying Kafka’s own instructions to destroy his unpublished manuscripts, edited and published it in 1926.
The Castle is the most purely Kafkaesque of Kafka’s novels, in the sense that the word now describes: not nightmare in the conventional sense, but an endless, exhausting, bureaucratic deferral that never resolves into either access or outright rejection. K.’s struggle has been read as religious allegory, as a critique of modern bureaucracy, and as a portrait of the immigrant or outsider’s experience of an indifferent institution, and the novel’s unfinished state, breaking off mid-sentence, only intensifies the sense that no resolution was ever actually possible. This is the most patience-testing book on this list and one of the most important.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Roger Ackroyd is found stabbed to death in his study on the night he was due to learn the identity of the person blackmailing his fiancée, and Hercule Poirot, recently retired to the village, is drawn into the investigation through Dr. James Sheppard, who narrates the novel and assists Poirot throughout. The solution, when it arrives, broke a convention that detective fiction had until then largely treated as sacred, provoking immediate and heated debate among critics and fellow mystery writers about whether Christie had played fair with her readers. The Detection Club, of which Christie was a founding member, debated the novel’s fairness for years afterward.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the novel that proved detective fiction’s formal rules were conventions rather than laws, and that breaking them deliberately and carefully could produce one of the most genuinely surprising solutions the genre has ever managed. The controversy it provoked, about what a mystery writer owes the reader in terms of narratorial trust, is still cited in discussions of unreliable narration generally, well beyond genre fiction. This is the Christie novel that crime writers themselves tend to point to first when asked which of her books they admire most as a piece of construction.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Lawrence’s account of his role advising and fighting alongside Arab forces during the 1916 to 1918 revolt against the Ottoman Empire, written in a literary, often anguished prose that moves between military narrative, desert landscape, political analysis, and Lawrence’s own deepening guilt over the gap between the promises made to Arab leaders and the postwar settlement Britain and France actually imposed. Lawrence had the manuscript privately printed in a tiny subscriber edition in 1926 before a heavily abridged public version, Revolt in the Desert, appeared the following year. The full text was not widely available until after his death in 1935. The book later formed the basis of the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the rare work of military memoir that reads as genuine literature, written by a man whose own psychological complexity, his guilt, his self-mythologising, his real strategic brilliance, is inseparable from the events he describes. Lawrence’s account of the broken promises made to the Arab revolt’s leaders remains a foundational document for understanding the colonial machinery that produced the modern Middle East. Difficult and demanding, but one of the essential firsthand accounts of the First World War’s final theatre.
The Weary Blues
Hughes’s debut poetry collection, written when he was twenty-four, drew directly on the rhythms and cadences of blues and jazz music to create a new poetic form rooted in Black American vernacular speech and musical structure rather than in conventional English verse. The title poem describes a piano player on Lenox Avenue performing a blues song late into the night, and the collection as a whole moves between Harlem nightlife, the rural South, and Hughes’s own complicated relationship to his racial identity within a literary world that often wanted him to represent something simpler than he was willing to be. The collection helped establish Hughes as one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance.
The Weary Blues is the collection that proved Black vernacular speech and musical form could carry the full weight of serious poetry, at a moment when much of the literary establishment still treated such material as merely folkloric rather than as art. Hughes’s decision to write in the actual rhythms of blues and jazz, rather than translating Black experience into conventional English verse forms, was a genuinely radical formal choice that shaped the direction of American poetry for the rest of the century. Read the title poem aloud; it is built to be heard, not merely read silently.
Lolly Willowes
Laura Willowes, known to her family as Lolly, is an unmarried woman in her late forties who has spent two decades as an unpaid, unthanked domestic helper to her brother’s family in London, until she abruptly moves alone to a small village called Great Mop and, with no great drama, becomes a witch. The novel treats this transformation with complete deadpan seriousness, framing Laura’s decision not as madness or fantasy but as the only available form of genuine self-determination open to a woman whose entire adult life has been organised around other people’s convenience. It was the first novel selected by the American Book of the Month Club, in 1926.
Lolly Willowes is one of the sharpest early feminist novels of the twentieth century precisely because it refuses to argue its case directly; it simply shows what happens when a woman who has spent her whole life being useful finally chooses something for herself, even if that something happens to be witchcraft and a pact with the devil. Warner’s prose is dry, precise, and quietly devastating about the specific unpaid labour Victorian and Edwardian families extracted from unmarried female relatives. Read it as a strange, perfectly controlled answer to the question of what a woman is actually allowed to want.
Where to start
If you want the novel that defined an entire generation
→ Read The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway’s spare prose and his characters’ studied avoidance of saying what actually hurts them became the template for an entire mode of American fiction.
If you want the mystery that broke its own genre’s rules
→ Read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Christie’s solution caused a genuine scandal among critics and fellow writers, and it remains one of the most audacious structural surprises in detective fiction.
If you want the sharpest, strangest feminist novel of the year
→ Read Lolly Willowes. An unmarried woman in her forties decides to become a witch rather than keep serving her family, narrated with total deadpan seriousness. It is funnier and angrier than it sounds.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1926
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“Isn't it funny how a bear likes honey?” — A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
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