Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 2026
Nine months into 2026, eight books have held their place on this list. Two of them have since been longlisted for major prizes, which is a useful check on my own taste rather than the reason they are here. The list stays open: anything published before December that earns a place gets added. Which two, and which of the eight to start with, is below.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 books · Fiction · Memoir · Nonfiction · Last reviewed 14 September 2026
Hooked
The follow-up to Butter is quieter than its predecessor and more unsettling for it. Eriko is a successful woman at a large trading company: devoted parents, spotless apartment, an 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 portrait of female friendship curdling into fixation.
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 more interior, and more interested in the specific loneliness of a woman who has optimised everything except connection. The Irish Times review is headlined on exactly that return.
Light and Thread
Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, the first South Korean writer to do so, and this is her first work of non-fiction published in English. Light and Thread collects her Nobel lecture alongside essays, poems, photographs and diary entries. The citation praised “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”, and this book shows the thinking underneath the fiction: the observations that become novels, the grief that becomes form.
If you read The Vegetarian or Human Acts and felt you were with a writer who takes suffering seriously without using it sentimentally, this shows you where that comes from. It is the best available key to why her novels feel the way they do.
London Falling
Patrick Radden Keefe — the New Yorker staff writer behind Say Nothing and Empire of Pain — turns to London. When nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler falls to his death from a luxury flat at Chelsea Harbour, his parents are told it was suicide. What follows, as they refuse that answer, is an investigation into money, impunity and whose death gets looked into. A24 optioned it within weeks of publication.
Keefe does what the best true crime does: uses one specific death to open up something much larger — how systems fail, who gets protected, whose life is treated as worth accounting for. If you have read Say Nothing or Empire of Pain, the method is the same: precision, patience, and an ability to make an institutional story feel personal.
Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2026, and named by the New York Times among the ten best books of 2026 so far — the most externally corroborated book on this list.
→ More investigative nonfiction on my best memoirs & biographies list
John of John
Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize in 2020 for Shuggie Bain, and this is the first time he has written outside urban Glasgow. Cal Macleod, twenty-two and an art student in Edinburgh, comes back to the family croft on the Isle of Harris: his Glaswegian grandmother Ella is failing, and his father John is a Presbyterian sheep farmer with a fixed idea of what his son is. Cal does not fit that idea and does not say so.
Shuggie Bain asked what it means to love someone who cannot be saved, and to keep loving them anyway. This asks a version of the same question with more air around it, and the Irish Times called it his best yet.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026 on 28 July, alongside twelve others.
→ All thirteen on the Booker Prize 2026 longlist, and which one is for you
Land
Maggie O’Farrell wrote Hamnet, and Land is her tenth novel: set in Ireland in the 1860s, in the years after the Famine. It returns to her central concern — the interior lives of women in times and places that left no record of them — and her method is to enter that silence and find what is there: the love, the fury, the calculation, the grief.
What O’Farrell does better than almost anyone writing historical fiction is make the past feel inhabited rather than reconstructed. Her characters do not feel written about; they feel like they are living inside their own moment, without the distance we have from it. The Irish Times called the result breathtaking.
A Hymn to Life
Over roughly a decade, Dominique Pelicot drugged his wife Gisèle and invited men he had contacted online to rape her while she was unconscious, filming what they did. On 19 December 2024 a court in Avignon convicted all fifty-one defendants — Dominique Pelicot and fifty co-defendants. Gisèle Pelicot waived her right to anonymity and insisted the trial be held in public, saying she wanted society to witness it. Her decision, that the shame belonged to the perpetrators and not to her, turned the trial into an international reckoning. A Hymn to Life is her account of it, and of what comes after.
This is the hardest book on the list and the one I would least want left off it. What she did — the refusal of invisibility, the insistence on public accountability, holding her own dignity intact through something designed to destroy it — is of a kind we rarely get to watch happen. The subtitle is Shame Has to Change Sides, and that is the whole argument.
Vigil
George Saunders won the Booker Prize in 2017 for Lincoln in the Bardo, and Vigil is his first long-form fiction since — though at 192 pages it is closer to a novella than to that book. A spirit guide ushers the soul of a dying oil-company chief executive, and the result is supernatural, blackly funny and pointed about corporate greed and what it costs the world.
Saunders is one of the few American fiction writers who is philosophically serious without being difficult in the wrong way. Underneath the formal invention his stories always ask the same thing: what do we owe each other, and how do we justify our failures of attention? This asks it of someone who has spent a career not asking.
Picked by NPR staff among their favourite fiction of 2026 so far.
Whistler
Ann Patchett — Bel Canto, The Dutch House, Tom Lake — returns with a novel that early readers describe as quiet, character-driven and precisely observed: about unexpected connection, and about the distances people put between themselves before something closes them. Patchett does not need dramatic machinery to create tension. She finds it in the way people misunderstand each other and occasionally, improbably, do not.
Patchett writes about love — the family kind, the friendship kind, the kind without a clean name — with more clarity and less sentimentality than almost anyone. There is a particular sort of reader, patient and unhurried, who trusts her completely. If that is you, this is your book of the year.
Number one on the New York Times fiction bestseller list in the week of 21 June 2026.
Where to begin
If you want the one with the most outside corroboration
→ London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe. Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and named by the New York Times among the ten best of the year so far. Investigative nonfiction that reads like a thriller.
If you want the novel the Booker judges picked out
→ John of John by Douglas Stuart, longlisted on 28 July. If you have read Shuggie Bain, you already know whether this is for you.
If you have two evenings rather than two weeks
→ Vigil by George Saunders at 192 pages, or Light and Thread by Han Kang at 176. Short is not the same as light in either case.
If you want the one that will stay with you longest
→ A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot. Not an easy read, and not meant to be.
Last reviewed on 14 September 2026. The Nobel Prize in Literature is announced on 8 October, the Booker Prize winner on 9 November and the National Book Awards on 18 November — so this list will change before the year is out, and this line will say when it did.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2026
What are the best books of 2026 so far?
Nine months in, the eight on this list are the ones that have held their place: Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, Light and Thread by Han Kang, London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, John of John by Douglas Stuart, Land by Maggie O’Farrell, A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot, Vigil by George Saunders and Whistler by Ann Patchett. Two of them have since been longlisted for major prizes: John of John for the Booker Prize 2026 and London Falling for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
What is the best literary fiction of 2026?
Four of the eight are literary fiction: Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, John of John by Douglas Stuart, Vigil by George Saunders and Whistler by Ann Patchett, with Land by Maggie O’Farrell as historical fiction alongside them. John of John is the one carrying the most external weight, having been longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026.
What is the best nonfiction of 2026?
A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot, London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe and Light and Thread by Han Kang. London Falling is the most externally corroborated, being both longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2026 and named by the New York Times among the ten best books of the year so far.
Which book from this list should I read first?
That depends on how much you want it to ask of you. Two of the eight run under 200 pages and two run past 400, and one of them is about a crime committed against the woman who wrote it. Each entry above says what the book is and who it is for, which is a more useful answer than a single title.
Is Hooked as good as Butter?
Early readers suggest it is, and in some ways more focused. Where Butter was about a woman who used food and appetite to accumulate power, Hooked is about the loneliness of a woman who has optimised her life completely except for the one thing that would make it feel real. If you loved Butter for its attention to appetite and womanhood, this turns that attention inward.
What should I read if I want to understand Han Kang beyond her novels?
Light and Thread is exactly that book. Published in March 2026 and translated by Maya West, e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, it collects her Nobel acceptance lecture alongside essays, poems, photographs and diary entries — all of it showing the thinking that underlies The Vegetarian, Human Acts and The White Book.
Will this list still change before the end of 2026?
Yes. The Booker Prize winner is announced on 9 November, the National Book Awards on 18 November, and the Nobel Prize in Literature on 8 October. Any book published before December that earns a place here will be added, and this page says at the top when it was last reviewed.
More from the shelf
From the bookshelf
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” — George R.R. Martin
More hand-picked recommendations across all years on my personal bookshelf — for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
