The Books Are Coming! The Books Are Coming!
The 17 Most Anticipated Books of 2026
It’s the most wonderful time of the year—when we look forward to the new books that will teeter in stacks on our nightstands come January. So lo and behold, here are 17 tantalizing new books—some of which I’ve already read (the Tana French and Ann Patchett, for instance) and some of which I’m still waiting to get my grubby critic’s mitts on. If you’d like to share, I’d love to know what titles you’re most excited about, and what I left out.
1. The Renovation by Kenan Orhan (February 10; Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
A Turkish immigrant living in Italy opens the door to her bathroom-in-progress and finds, instead of fresh tile, the inside of a prison cell in Istanbul. Is it a dream, a delusion, or, most uncomfortably, a real portal back to the mayhem and terror of an authoritarian state? As the woman begins to spend more and more time in the cell, meeting the prison’s other inhabitants and digesting what’s happening in her home country, she begins to wonder where her rightful place might be. Like Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story, The Renovation is a fantastical trip through space and time that questions whether we can ever trust the contours of our world.
2. Brawler by Lauren Groff (February 24; Riverhead)
Groff’s short story "Between the Shadow and the Soul" has an old-fashioned New Yorker quality about it, with its placid setting in an old stone house and its dramatic time arc over the course of a decades-long marriage. If the other stories in her new collection have even half of this one’s deeply entrenched melancholy and careful attention to the vagaries of life, it will takes its place beside her most recent novels (Fates and Furies, Matrix, The Vaster Wilds) as essential reading.
3. Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Aging by Peter Jones (March 3; Doubleday)
Tell me how the peasants thrived! Tell me how the monks and mystics persevered! Peter Jones’ promising new title claims to be part historical lesson and part personal growth manifesto, with some memoir thrown in—he goes directly to the texts of Middle Age sages like St. Francis of Assisi and Margery Kempe to proffer the intellectual and behavioral fruits of their personal quests, and along the way illuminates how the seven deadly sins once served as pathways to fulfillment. I’ll be reading this one with a Hieronymus Bosch-tinted highlighter at the ready.
4. Nonesuch by Francis Spufford (March 10; Scribner)
Francis Spufford wrote one of my favorite historical fictions of all time—Golden Hill, a mysterious-stranger-comes-to-town narrative set in 1746 in a small village you may have heard of called New York. Golden Hill did what good historical fiction does—it turned a familiar place on its head and drew a thick connective line between the present and the past. His new novel Nonesuch, set in Blitz London, promises time travel and statues come-to-life. This one is at the top of my galley pile.
5. A Woman's Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Motherhood by Elinor Cleghorn (March 17; Dutton)
Most of the world’s labor has been long forgotten—especially the labor of mothers, who have toiled in obscurity for millennia. Elinor Cleghorn’s new book (she wrote the spectacularly informative Unwell Women) promises to right that wrong, with scholarship on over 3,000 years of history, including everything from renaissance woman Mary Wollstonecraft to the intricacies of midwifery. Expect immaculate and far-reaching research into the most common, least respected job on the planet.
6. The Keeper by Tana French (March 31; Random House)
In 2019 I called Tana French “our best living mystery writer” in New York Magazine. But by 2024 I was pulling my hair out over her most recent work, a Western-inspired trilogy set in rural Ireland that featured a former Chicago PD detective who has accidentally retired into an audaciously crime-ridden little village; in her quest to rethink how crimes novels are told, I wrote, French had flattened her writing into undistinguished origami. Well she’s back with the third and final installment and I’m here to tell you it’s a return to form—even if its plot leans toward the unlikely. The Keeper is focused on the death of Rachel Holohan, a twenty-something who is about to be engaged to the scion of the town of Ardnakelty’s most prominent family when she’s discovered dead in the river. Enter the protagonist of the series, Cal Hooper, and his band of misfit friends, all of whom must enmesh themselves ever deeper into Ardnakelty’s gossip, mysteries, and machinations in order to solve Rachel’s murder and restore peace. Expect plenty of twists, French’s exceptional Irish ambience, and one shocking death.
7. Hexes of the Deadwood Forest by Agnieszka Szpila (April 7; Pantheon)
I don’t normally do this, but I don’t think I can sum up Hexes of the Deadwood Forest any better than the jacket copy: “An explosive, jaw-dropping debut about a woman who loses her job as an oil company CEO after she’s filmed having sex with a tree in her sleep, a calamity that unravels her mind, spiraling her through history until she’s united with a centuries-old coven of ecstatically revolutionary women.” Hold on to your vulvas, ladies, this one is coming to rescue us from the doldrums.
8. On the Calculation of Volume (Book IV) by Solvej Balle (April 7; New Directions)
The first three volumes of Balle’s time-bending septology follow Tara Selter, antiquarian bookseller and otherwise unremarkable women who has found herself trapped inside the 18th of November as it repeats over and over. If Volume I traced the contours of Tara’s marriage as it groaned under the stress of her newfound stuckness-in-time, and Volume II tracked her travails across Europe in search of the satisfying fluctuations of the seasons, Volume III expanded her universe as Tara discovered four other travelers stuck in that particular day. Volume IV sees that group grow and hopefully enters into new world-building territory as one woman’s solitary journey transforms into an entire alternate universe.
9. Famesick by Lena Dunham (April 14; Random House)
While 25-year-old Lena Dunham was writing, directing, and starring in Girls, she was also regularly waiting for hours in doctor’s offices, sick and desperate for any relief. Famesick (her second book, after the essay collection Not That Kind of Girl) simultaneously chronicles her rise to a certain kind of overly scrutinized Millennial celebrity and charts the afflictions troubling her ailing body—and mind. Admittedly, I’ve never been a Girls person, but I’m eager to see Dunham through her own eyes instead of the gaze of mass media. More than perhaps any other creator of her (our) generation, Dunham knows how to turn the intimacies of confessional writing into universal stories.
10. Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein (April 14; Doubleday)
Between I, Tonya; Impeachment: American Crime Story; and the new Amanda Knox show, filmmakers and television creators have done a fair job reframing the female-centered “scandals” of the ‘90s and early aughts. Dear Monica Lewinsky, about a middle-aged woman who prays to “Saint Monica” after a bad sexual relationship from her past comes roaring back into her life, takes that a step further. Consider me down on my knees.
11. The Fullness of Time by Cathy Haynes (April 21; Riverhead)
Throw away your clocks! Or at least keep them tucked out of sight as you listen to morning birdcalls and watch flowers rise up the greet the sun. The Fullness of Time is an exploration of methods (both ancient and modern) for understanding the rhythms of time through nature, and a clarion call to move our screen-captive eyes and ears to take in the bounty of the world before us.
12. Mercy Hill by Hannah Thurman (May 5; Knopf)
I abide by the Four Sisters Rule—if a novel features four sisters as its main cast of characters (think the Marches, or the Makiokas, or the Bennetts) I’ll happily dig in. Mercy Hill sounds particularly tantalizing—set at a state psychiatric hospital, it follows JJ, Caro, Mimi, Denise, and their mother, the head of the facility, as they grow up on its grounds.
13. Offseason by Avigayl Sharp (May 5; Astra House)
Four little words: All-girls boarding school. I hear them and my ears perk up. This debut novel, about a self-destructive young woman who takes a job at one such institution, where she alternately sabotages and tries to redeem herself, has been hailed as “obscenely good and very funny” by the one and only Catherine Lacey, who I would follow into hell. I have a feeling this one will rip a hole in me that will be hard to repair.
14. Whistler by Ann Patchett (June 2; Harper)
Ann Patchett is just so damn companionable that even when I think her books will leave me tepid (like The Dutch House) they turn into genuinely moving reading experiences. Whistler begins at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Daphne Fuller unexpectedly meets a figure from her childhood, the former stepfather whose love and kinship re-engineered her entire life. As the two reconnect, we slowly learn the dramatic story of what drove their family apart almost four decades earlier. Like her most recent novel Tom Lake, Whistler takes memory—with its accompanying nostalgia and pain—as its subject.
15. The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain (June 9; Scribner)
Novels that recall the lives of our most beloved writers are hit (Susan Sellers’ Vanessa and Virginia, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet) or miss (too many to name). If this one, about the final year of Sylvia Plath’s life, manages to crack open her psyche without resorting to gaudy melodrama, it just might revolutionize the way we think about famous lives and careers cut short—and about Plath herself, whose death has cultified the poet without always giving her work its due.
16. We Were Forbidden by Jacqueline Harpman (July 7; Transit Books)
You may know Jacqueline Harpman’s work because of her recently reissued (and deservedly bestselling) 1995 novel I Who Have Never Known Men, a story about a group of women living in a mysterious underground prison who, after they are suddenly freed, set out to establish an all-female society. We Were Forbidden is a set of three novellas, but it’s also interested in confined women—a teenage girl at a “rigid French school,” a wife trapped in a passionless marriage, a woman kept captive in a forest. With shades of Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool, this collection just might solidify Harpman’s reputation as an underground Margaret Atwood.
17. Country People by Daniel Mason (July 14; Random House)
Here’s what I know about Country People: it’s set in Vermont and it follows the madcap adventures of a Ph.D. candidate who has just moved across the country with his family. After encounters with some local legends (“from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress and a photographer of snowflakes”) he sets out to determine whether a longstanding folk tale has any basis in reality. Mason’s last novel, North Woods, which traced the inhabitants of a New England house from the Puritans to the present day, delved deep into the myth-making inherent in American history. (It also earned a coveted “10 Best Books” sticker from the New York Times) Country People seems primed to do something similar.
hexes of the deadwood forest sounds exactly like the weird fiction i love. thank you for putting it on my radar!!
I love most anticipated lists! On mine: Kin, Take What You Can, Names Have Been Changed and the End of Romance