The Most Anticipated Books of 2026

The past year was unusually generous to serious readers. Big prizes went to surprising places, familiar names took creative risks, and translated fiction continued to do the heavy lifting of reminding English-language readers how large the world really is. It was a good year to read attentively and to argue about books at dinner.

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The International Booker Prize went, for the first time, to a short story collection: The Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq (in translation), a quiet but decisive signal that the form still has teeth. Kiran Desai returned with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, David Szalay’s Flesh confirmed his precision as a chronicler of modern masculinity by winning the Booker Prize 2025 , and Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me reminded us that reading can still feel genuinely new politically, formally, and emotionally. It was a year that rewarded attention, patience, and argument.

Which raises the obvious question: what comes next?

2026 is shaping up to be a year of writers at the height of their powers, returning with books that feel both timely and unruly. These are novels and nonfiction works promise friction between languages, nations, bodies, memory, and ambition. In other words: the good stuff.

Here are the books worth clearing space for.

Sister in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami

Translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio
Kawakami has made a career out of turning interiority into something volatile. Through Sister in Yellow expect a novel that is intimate, unsettling, and quietly radical. The novel revolves around a gritty, vivid tale set in 1990s Tokyo, Sister in Yellow that follows 15-year-old Hana, who starts a bar with an older woman named Kimiko and discovers how fragile hope can be when survival is the only skill you have. It’s a story of friendship, ambition, and betrayal that confirms Kawakami’s commanding voice in contemporary fiction

Release Date: March 19, 2026

Rebel English Academy by Mohammed Hanif

No one skewers power, hypocrisy, and linguistic colonialism quite like Hanif. This promises to be sharp, funny, and politically alert—satire with teeth, and no interest in politeness. Set against the tumult of late-1970s Pakistan after the hanging of a political leader, this novel blends satire and historical insight. When a woman on the run seeks refuge at an English tuition center, her life and the lives of others including a disgraced intelligence officer — intertwine in a portrait of dissent, language, power, and survival

Release Date: February 17, 2026

Now I Surrender by Álvaro Enrigue

Enrigue writes like a man allergic to neat categories. History, obsession, art, and ego collide in his work, and this book is poised to be another elegant dismantling of narrative certainty.

Release Date: March, 5 in 2026

Light and Thread by Han Kang

Han Kang’s fiction operates at the intersection of violence and grace in Korean culture. Expect something spare, luminous, and emotionally exacting from Ligth and Thread, a book that asks more of the reader, and rewards them for it. A departure from pure fiction, this hybrid collection of essays, diary entries, poems, and images is Han Kang’s meditation on connection — between people, language, and the act of making art itself. It’s a reflective, luminous companion to her award-winning fiction

Release Date: Early March 2026

Fieldwork as a Sex Object by Meena Kandasamy

Kandasamy is fearless on the page. This book looks set to interrogate power, desire, and intellectual labor with her trademark clarity and rage—uncomfortable in the best way.

Release Date: April 23, 2026

Abandoning a Cat by Haruki Murakami

One of the most popular Japanese writers Haruki Murakami at his most reflective tends to be Murakami at his most affecting. Memory, inheritance, and the quiet oddities of family life take center stage in the upcoming 2026 release Abandoning a Cat that is rendered with his familiar, disarming calm. The master of contemplative, gently surreal prose returns with a meditation on memory, family, and the peculiar ways we connect with the creatures we live with. Early notes suggest the titular feline serves as a quiet fulcrum for reflections that are typically Murakami: subtle, resonant, and quietly philosophical.

Release Date: September 2026

The Midnight Train by Matt Haig

When your life flashes before your eyes, where would you stop? No one can change the past, but the Midnight Train can take you there. The chance to re-live the moments that meant most. To see what kind of person you really were. A magical, time-traveling love story, from the world of The Midnight Library.

Release Date: May 26, 2026

Biting Off More Than I Can Chew by Rahul Akerkar

Part memoir, part cultural document, this is a portrait of ambition and appetite—personal and professional. Sharp, self-aware, and unexpectedly revealing.

Release Date: Expected 2026