We’re about halfway through 2026, and we at the Book Review have already written about hundreds of books, many of which we’ve found smart, gripping, thought-provoking or just plain fun. Thousands of you have also registered your enthusiasm by saving books to your personal reading lists. As summer kicks off, here are the books published so far this year that New York Times readers say they’re most eager to dive into, any one of which could be a perfect companion for the season.
You can save the books you’re most excited about to a personal reading list, and find even more recommendations from our book experts.
Fiction
1. Whistler
by Ann Patchett
After a chance encounter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Daphne and her former stepfather, Eddie, re-establish their relationship and reflect on the choices that separated them 40 years earlier. Read our review.
2. The Things We Never Say
by Elizabeth Strout
Beneath his picture-perfect life, the high school teacher Artie Dam is in quiet agony — lonely, depressed and overwhelmed by how little he knows about the people around him. Read our review.
3. The Keeper
by Tana French
In the final volume of the Cal Hooper series, the death of a young woman roils a bucolic Irish village. As Hooper, a retired Chicago detective, peels back the mystery, he finds himself in the town’s cross hairs. Read our review.
4. Land
by Maggie O’Farrell
Ireland, 1865: Working for the British military’s land survey project, a man and his young son Liam document the aftermath of the famine that ravaged Ireland for nearly a decade. Read our review.
5. The Calamity Club
by Kathryn Stockett
“The Help” author’s sophomore novel transports readers to Depression-era Mississippi, where the meeting of a 24-year-old spinster bookkeeper and a motherless 11-year-old girl sets off a chain of events that will transform both their lives. Read our review.
6. 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. Read our review.
7. Yesteryear
by Caro Claire Burke
A tradwife influencer wakes up one morning and finds herself in the mid-19th century, where her cosplay life becomes a gritty, grueling reality. Read our review.
8. Country People
by Daniel Mason
When a Russian folklore scholar decamps to a college in Vermont with his family, he gets swept up in a local legend that may not be as fantastical as it sounds. (This book publishes on July 7.)
9. The Midnight Train
by Matt Haig
The second installment in Haig’s Midnight World series centers on Wilbur, a man who boards a mystical train that allows him to time travel back to his honeymoon in Venice in an attempt to correct a catastrophic mistake. Read our review.
10. John of John
by Douglas Stuart
A recent art school graduate returns to his family home in Scotland’s Hebrides Islands to care for his ailing grandmother — and learns the bigger task will be facing family secrets, past relationships and a father at odds with his son’s queer transformation. Read our review.
Nonfiction
1. London Falling
by Patrick Radden Keefe
Keefe’s excavation of the London underworld revolves around the mysterious death of a 19-year-old man, whose grieving family discovers he had been leading a secret life posing as the heir of a phony Russian oligarch. Read our review.
2. Strangers
by Belle Burden
In 2023, Burden went viral with a New York Times essay, “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. Read our review.
3. The Land and Its People
by David Sedaris
In his newest collection, the prolific humorist takes on the indignities and freedoms of aging with his characteristic wit. Read our review.
4. Stay Alive
by Ian Buruma
How do people get by under authoritarianism? That’s the question that haunts this human-scale chronicle of Berlin during the Third Reich. Read our review.
5. The Wreck of the Mentor
by Eric Jay Dolin
The author of “Black Flags, Blue Waters” unspools the dramatic yarn of an American whaling ship that sank in 1832, stranding 11 survivors in the Pacific. Read our review.
6. A World Appears
by Michael Pollan
Pollan, who explored “the hard problem” of human consciousness through experiments with psychedelic drugs in “How to Change Your Mind,” returns with this dive into the depths of the brain as seen by the neuroscientists, psychologists, artists and philosophers trying to make sense of it all. Read our review.
7. Cave Mountain
by Benjamin Hale
What begins as a day hike gone wrong quickly veers into ghost story territory. The disappearance of a 6-year-old girl — Hale’s cousin — may be only the latest twist in this stranger-than-fiction tale of a doomsday cult deep in the Arkansas Ozarks. Read our review.
8. This Vast Enterprise
by Craig Fehrman
Fehrman takes the well-known story of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s journey into the western reaches of North America and reframes it as a profoundly human adventure, told through the perspectives of people who traveled with them, including the Shoshone teenager Sacagawea and an enslaved man named York. Read our review.
9. Trash!
by Simon Pare-Poupart
This memoir, translated from the French by Pablo Strauss, scrutinizes overconsumption, the politics of refuse and the sanitation profession’s Sisyphean nature from the perspective of a veteran Montreal garbageman. Read our review.
10. Small Town Girls
by Jayne Anne Phillips
The celebrated novelist’s memoir in essays is a nostalgia-steeped ode to Appalachia, with pieces ranging from a history of the feuding Hatfields and McCoys to sketches of small-town beauty salons and more. Read our review.
The post The Books Times Readers Are Most Excited About This Summer appeared first on New York Times.
