Fiction | Nonfiction
We’re a third of the way through 2026 and we at The Book Review have already written about hundreds of books. Some of those titles are good. Some are very good. And then there are the following.
We suspect that some (though certainly not all) of these will be top of mind when we publish our end-of-year, best-of lists. For more suggestions for what to read next, head to our book recommendation page.
Fiction
I want a lush historical novel about sisterhood
Kin
by Tayari Jones
Annie and Niecy are best friends and neighbors in 1950s Louisiana, bound by a shared childhood without their mothers. Jones’s fifth novel explores how their lives diverge as they both seek out the family they’ve always yearned for. “When reading ‘Kin,’ I wanted nothing more than to keep reading it,” our reviewer wrote. “That’s the circle Jones creates, the one that connects her voice, her characters and her readers.” Read our review.
Give me a sweeping family epic
This Is Where the Serpent Lives
by Daniyal Mueenuddin
In his first novel, Mueenuddin weaves a tale of class conflict and ambition in Pakistan, focusing on members of a wealthy clan and those who serve them. Some are strivers who find that corruption, violence, tragedy and even love get in the way of their dreams; others occupy powerful perches already and are disinclined to share them. It’s epic in scale, but “the magic in ‘This Is Where the Serpent Lives’ is the up-close work,” our critic Dwight Garner wrote. Read our review.
I love literary thrillers
The Keeper
by Tana French
In the third and final volume of French’s detective series starring Cal Hooper, a young woman’s drowning brings to light the ugliest secrets of a small town in rural Ireland. As the community grieves, longstanding feuds and rivalries implicate nearly everyone in the search for the truth behind the girl’s death. “I would crawl across a field of glass to get my hands on a new Tana French book,” our thriller columnist wrote. This book is French at the height of her powers. Read our review.
How about a tender meditation on technology?
Transcription
by Ben Lerner
A journalist’s nightmare — a smartphone recorder that breaks just before an important interview — is the jumping-off point for this slender meditation on artistic legacy, which showcases Lerner’s “combination of erudition and lightness,” our critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote. The novel’s narrator has come to Providence, R.I., to talk with his 90-year-old mentor, and doesn’t want to let on that he can’t record the conversation. How, then, in a technological age, can we hold memories close? Read our review.
I want a rivals-to-lovers road trip romance
Star Shipped
by Cat Sebastian
A beloved stalwart of historical romance, Sebastian turns her attention to this century with her first contemporary novel, about rival co-stars on a science fiction TV show. While the carriages and Rolodexes of her previous work may have been replaced by hot rods and cellphones, her trademarks remain: a tender, grumpy-sunshine slow burn, queer joy and oodles of yearning (plus an emotional support dachshund). Read our review.
A time-traveling tradwife thriller? Say no more!
Yesteryear
by Caro Claire Burke
To conservative vloggers — and many of her millions of followers on social media — Natalie Heller Mills is living the “true American dream”: Pregnant with her sixth child, she purports to spend all day frolicking on her organic farm in Idaho with her perfect kids, her cowboy husband and the flock of chickens she calls her “ladies.” Then one morning she wakes up and finds herself in the mid-19th century, where her cosplay life becomes a gritty, grueling reality. It’s “an ingenious, exquisite, be-careful-what-you-wish-for,” our reviewer wrote. Read our review.
Nonfiction
I’d like the intimate story of an imploding marriage
Strangers
by Belle Burden
In 2023, Burden went viral with an essay for The New York Times, “Was I Married to a Stranger?” Here, she explores the full heart-shock of that episode — the sudden disintegration of a long and largely joyful marriage, undone just weeks into the pandemic by the revelation that her husband had not only been unfaithful but also seemed to wish to vanish almost entirely from their shared life, which included three young children. The book is striking in its candor, exposing both Burden’s native “fantasy land of wealth and success,” our reviewer wrote, and the harsh realities that come crashing into it. Read our review.
I want to understand the roots of our political climate
Fear and Fury
by Heather Ann Thompson
When did white rage become normalized? This is the question that drew Thompson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, to the story of Bernie Goetz, a white man who shot four Black teenagers on a subway in 1984. In Thompson’s deeply researched account, the Goetz case becomes a through line to the present: the event that, against a backdrop of growing inequality and racial resentment in the early 1980s, first gave legal cover to white vigilantism, creating a template increasingly embraced on the right today. Read our review.
Give me a deeply human account of a revolution
Days of Love and Rage
by Anand Gopal
This chronicle of Syria’s 14-year civil war tells the story of a revolution through the experiences of six dissidents and agitators in the city of Manbij who fought against tyranny. Based on years of reporting and 2,000 interviews, Gopal’s epic account immerses readers in its characters’ lives as they struggle to advance the democratic experiment in the 21st century. The book highlights “the heroic beauty of the city’s people,” our reviewer wrote, and is “destined to stand out as the definitive text of the war.” Read our review.
I’d like a spellbinding true crime story
London Falling
by Patrick Radden Keefe
Keefe’s latest book opens with a young man plunging to his death from a balcony overlooking the Thames and retraces, through immersive reporting, the tumultuous path that brought him there. This portrait of an ambitious London teenager consumed by a desire for extreme wealth is embedded within a panoramic account of an urban underworld awash in violence, corruption and greed. Read our review.
I love absorbing biographies that bring icons to life
The Boundless Deep
by Richard Holmes
Readers who picture Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as a bearded Victorian eminence will discover a new person in this incisive biography. Holmes shows us a young man uncertain of his place in this world or the next — a writer coming of age in a moment of revolutionary scientific discovery and religious upheaval, questioning everything and finding the voice that would become his enduring poetic legacy. Read our review.
I want a fresh perspective on familiar history
The War Within a War
by Wil Haygood
In this “clarifying and richly insightful” history of the whiplash experienced by Black Americans, and especially Black soldiers, in the Vietnam era, Haygood wings his way from the bloody battlefields of Southeast Asia to the American streets where civil rights protesters were met with violence. Haygood affirms his “reputation as a temperate and perceptive social historian,” our reviewer wrote, as he “explains why the full picture of Black Vietnam went unseen by most Americans.” Read our review.
A brilliant critic on a brilliant writer? Sign me up!
On Morrison
by Namwali Serpell
The first clue that this study of Toni Morrison’s work is not your usual academic exercise is the opening essay: “On Difficulty,” a bracing defense by Serpell — herself an accomplished novelist, critic and scholar — of her subject’s barbed intelligence, contrarian politics and exacting, still too often misunderstood attention to Black aesthetics. Drawing on archival research and close readings, this book offers a revelatory encounter with the Nobel laureate’s oeuvre. Read our review.
The post The Best Books of the Year (So Far) appeared first on New York Times.
