The Best Books of 2026 So Far
Nothing quite beats the thrill of a new book season. In that spirit, we present to you the best books of 2026.
At the halfway point in the year, we’re taking stock of what’s been published and what’s coming—highlighting some of the best (and most attention-grabbing) publications of recent months: Belle Burden’s divorce memoir of the year (the decade?); Madeline Cash’s Dimes Square debut; Lena Dunham’s endearing, honest memoir, just to name a few. We still have months to go, and we’ve been reading ahead to give you a sneak peek at some of the best books of 2026. As is the case in years past, this isn’t a comprehensive list—but a sample of what we’ve been loving. Read on here, then go pick up a book!
Back in 2024, I was taken with Michael Idov’s well-paced espionage debut, The Collaborators. It starred a dry-witted Millennial spy named Ari Falk who tripped all over Eastern Europe with a fetching Russian-American heiress, uncovering rot at the heart of the CIA. Fun as it was, that novel felt like a slightly offhand diversion that didn’t exactly demand a sequel, but here it is, titled The Cormorant Hunt (Scribner), and having raced through it I’m now committed to as many Ari Falk novels as Idov can muster. Idov has been a magazine journalist, the editor of GQ Russia, and a screenwriter, and I suspect these other lives have trained him in the art of keeping things moving. The Cormorant Hunt is as headlong a novel as its predecessor–a deepening of the conspiracy at the CIA, with Falk now hiding in deep cover in Tbilisi and a new pair of youngish CIA spooks, Jim Otterbeck (privileged, hapless) and Deputy Director Asha Tamaskar (ambitious, single), who draw him out when a Julian Assange-esque media figure is murdered in Prague. There’s a shadowy traitor—of course there is—high up the CIA ranks (nicknamed the “Cormorant”) that Falk is determined to unmask, and a plot afoot to derail the world order via a German right-wing populist sect. I was amazed at the pace of reversals and action sequences, buoyed by the novel’s intelligent, quippy humor, and pleased by a romance sparking between Falk and Tamaskar. Bring me the film adaptation stat. —Taylor Antrim
Not every Modern Love column needs to be a full-length book, but there are certainly some where you’d take a bit more backstory. Belle Burden’s Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage (Dial Press) falls into the latter category. Elided in her 2023 essay that appeared in the New York Times’s popular franchise was the fact that Burden is the granddaughter of Babe Paley, and so her specific divorce memoir (certainly an entry in the burgeoning genre) is inflected with assumptions of old-money decorum that lend it an anthropological appeal. The essay tells the story of the initial blow, when Burden was forced to ask herself if she was married to a man who was essentially a stranger. The book picks up in the aftermath, leading you no closer to an absolute answer but through the tangled impossibility of ever fully knowing another person. —Chloe Schama
Sydney Rende’s debut shines a light on what we’re all most concerned about these days: how we’re perceived. I Could Be Famous: Stories (Bloomsbury) is a collection of 11 quippy, relatable anecdotes from 10 female narrators, with one twisted, hotshot male actor connecting them all. Each woman shares—in their own way—their various desires and dreams yet is so hung up on the potential of failure or what other people might think about them. Rende’s short stories are brilliant, and convince readers that, with enough confidence (or potentially a lack thereof) and delusion, we all, one day, could be famous. —Kylee McGuigan
Madeline Cash’s delightful debut about family dysfunction, Lost Lambs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), calls to mind early Maria Semple with the density of its wit and the intricacies of its plot. The novel lovingly depicts a family succumbing to the pressures of an open marriage, teenage rebellion, and home ownership. Such familiar domestic conundrums don’t sound like the stuff of exciting new fiction—but Cash’s book is one of the most thrilling debuts I’ve encountered in a while. (That teenage rebellion is anything but humdrum: one daughter is dating an ex-soldier who goes by War Crimes Wes, another is deep in an online relationship with a fundamentalist terrorist, the youngest might just have uncovered a massive scam.) I’m placing bets that this will be one of the books of the year. —C.S.
A decade ago, the English novelist Ian McGuire made a name for himself with the bleak, hyperrealist 19th-century whaling adventure novel The North Water (which was adapted into a fantastic BBC series). McGuire’s new novel, White River Crossing (Crown), offers similarly rugged wintry pleasures. Set in the frozen Canadian wilderness of Hudson Bay in the late 18th century, the propulsive story follows a dangerous expedition by English traders into the subarctic wilderness in search of gold. McGuire’s goal here is entertainment (achieved), but his empathetic treatment of the indigenous tribes with whom the English come into contact and conflict gives his novel a mournful air of tragedy. —T.A.
Allegra Goodman’s utterly charming new book is carving out new territory in the genre of linked short stories. This Is Not About Us (Dial Press) is the story of a family, told by its various members, each with their own perspective and entrenched narrative. The book begins by the deathbed of an elderly sister whose two remaining sisters have a falling out over cake—the kind of domestic spat that becomes mythic and completely unspecific, the details lost in a lingering fog of resentment. Over the subsequent stories, Goodman crafts subtle investigations of the relations between siblings, the fine blend of anxiety and pride that parents feel for their offspring, and the bemused affection an aunt or uncle might feel for their aimless nieces or haphazard nephews. Unsurprisingly, as Goodman has written gorgeously about raising her own children, the book is most affecting when shifting between the points of view of parent and child. But this is a volume that builds and surprises on many fronts, the cacophony of love and discontent reifying into filigreed depictions of the familial ties that bind. —C.S.
Tales of emotionally tormented men leaving behind their families to explore the outer realms of the solar system may feel like well-worn territory, but with her exquisite and deeply felt second book, the London-based author Cecile Pin finds plenty of new emotional depths to plumb. Celestial Lights (Holt) following the journey of astronaut Ollie over multiple timelines: from his first blush of romance with a neighbor growing up in rural England, to his recruitment by a Musk-like figure to work on the world’s most ambitious space program, to the flight logs that document his 10-year journey aboard a flight to one of Jupiter’s moons, as he and his colleagues long for the comforts of home. It’s this contrast between Ollie’s cool, cerebral approach to life in space—Pin wears her impressively researched knowledge of astrophysics lightly, never letting it bog down the page-turning yarn she’s spinning—and the beating heart of his passionate relationship with his wife that makes the book sing, finding powerful new ways to examine the sacrifices we all have to make in order to pursue our passions. —Liam Hess
A strangely appealing book, Gunk (Knopf) by Saba Sams tells the story of an aimless 30-something bar manager who has found herself in possession of a baby she did not give birth to. The biological mother, an enigmatic teenage employee of the bar, has vanished. While this may seem like a promising start for a plotty caper, what unfolds for the rest of the novel is how this situation came to be—and an exploration of the grottier side of British nightlife, the surrogate families formed after hours, and the allure of mind-altering substances and experiences, whether chemical or biological. A funky, surreptitiously fun debut. —C.S.
Andrew Martin’s first novel, Early Work, marked him as a droll chronicler of what it means to be young, frequently lustful, and offhandedly intent on leading a literary life. The novel, lightly plotted, didn’t cry out for a sequel, but Martin’s new Down Time (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) offers a continuation of sorts (in mood at least). Here are five post-collegiate friends, two men, three women, divided between Boston and Brooklyn and attempting with varying degrees of vigor to figure out how to, basically, get their shit together. Story is not as important here as mood and vividly described amusements, of which Down Time has many. The sexual entanglements are elaborate and fearlessly described; so too are the perils of substance addiction and depression. The novel zips by, with a peculiar if pleasantly disaffected vigor. —T.A.
I expected big things from Madden’s first novel after the success of her gorgeously rendered and often-heartbreaking 2019 debut memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, but it’s fair to say that her novel Whidbey (Mariner)—a literary thriller told from the alternating perspectives of a child abuser’s mother and two of his victims—met my anticipation and raised the stakes. Whidbey is just as closely observed and skillfully narrated as Long Live, but it’s particularly notable for its empathy toward the characters whose intersecting paths it tracks. Madden is uniquely interested in complicating our idea of who “deserves” justice or forgiveness, and the dark, desolate, and stunningly compelling story she knits together in Whidbey is one I won’t soon forget. —Emma Specter
