The best books of 2026 so far

Two motherless girls grow up together in a small Louisiana town in the 1950s, and their lives split: one goes to college in Atlanta and marries into a wealthy family, the other sets out to find the mother who left her.

Tayari Jones's first novel since An American Marriage was Oprah's first book club pick of 2026, and it opened the New York Times Book Review's best-of-the-year-so-far list. Publishers Weekly called it a tour de force. It is a book about friendship, class and what we owe the people who made us, and Jones writes both women with so much sympathy that you will argue about which of them made the right choice.

It covers decades, so the pace is unhurried. The story of a mother's abandonment can be painful to read.

Cal, a 22-year-old art school graduate, comes home to his family's croft on the Isle of Harris in the late 1990s, hiding that he is gay from his father John, a deacon and weaver who has secrets of his own.

Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize for Shuggie Bain, and his third novel is on the 2026 Booker shortlist. The Boston Globe called it his finest novel yet. The father-and-son deceptions drive the plot, but the book's warmth comes from the island community around them, and the grandmother is the character readers love most. Kirkus, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly all gave it starred reviews.

The Wall Street Journal's critic found the grown men's childish behavior hard to engage with. The Scottish island setting and dialect take a few chapters to settle into.

In 2019, 19-year-old Zac Brettler fell to his death from a luxury apartment by the Thames. His parents discovered he had been living under a false identity among London's super-rich, and set out to find out why.

Patrick Radden Keefe wrote Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, and he is the best in the business at true stories that read like novels. London Falling grew out of a 2024 New Yorker piece. Foreign Policy found the story sadder and more intimate than the mystery first promised, and that is its strength: a portrait of a family's grief inside a city of dirty money. Bookreporter called it more bizarre than fiction could invent.

The Boston Globe wondered whether Keefe was trying too hard to play detective. If you want a neat solution to a crime, this is not quite that book.

Natalie Heller Mills, a rich influencer who built her brand on old-fashioned rural homemaking, wakes up in 1855 and has to live the life she has been selling.

Caro Claire Burke's first novel is a darkly funny satirical thriller, and it was on NPR's and Amazon's lists of the best books of the year so far. Natalie is wickedly unreliable, and the mystery of what is happening to her, hoax, reality show or something worse, keeps the pages turning. Readers keep talking about the ending.

Natalie is hard to like, which is the point but puts some readers off, and a fair number of early readers gave up before the payoff.

Murderbot, the security android who would rather be watching TV, goes on a rescue mission to a space station with its growing group of humans and a rogue SecUnit called Three.

The eighth Murderbot Diaries book got a starred review from Booklist, which called it one of the funniest in the series and a return to form. Martha Wells keeps the scale small this time, and the found-family dynamic between Murderbot, its humans and Three gives the jokes real feeling. It is the best science fiction comfort reading there is.

Start with the first book, All Systems Red. Each one is short, so catching up is easier than it sounds.

AJ, an aspiring comedy writer working in a Massachusetts video store, and Noah, an actor from a Hollywood dynasty, meet again seven years after he vanished from her life, when they end up on the same TV production.

A Reese's Book Club pick and one of the year's most talked-about love stories. USA Today called it intoxicating and heart-wrenching, and Booklist said it is for the yearners. It is a romance that takes its characters' ambitions as seriously as their feelings, and the TV-industry detail is half the fun.

Long for a romance, and the relationship is messy rather than sweet. Readers who want a tidy, low-angst love story should look elsewhere.

Alix, raised in foster care and working three dead-end jobs, finds a hidden door in the Boston Public Library to a secret library whose patrons escape into their favorite books, and then someone starts hunting them.

Kate Quinn, best known for historical novels like The Rose Code, tries magical realism for the first time. The rules are clever (the book must be in the public domain, and you cannot change the story), and Publishers Weekly called it a charming tale about the joy of reading and the need for public libraries. It is a love letter to books that works best for people who already love them.

Reviews were more mixed than for Quinn's historical fiction. Fans of her earlier books may find it lighter than they expect.

Lena Dunham's second memoir looks back at the success of Girls, her years in the public eye, and the long, often hidden fight with endometriosis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and addiction that ran alongside it.

Whatever you think of Dunham, Famesick is unusually candid, and it was written without a ghostwriter. The Irish Times read it as the story of a talented young woman caught in the Hollywood machine, and Harper's Bazaar praised how readable it is. Much of it is about her health, written with the specificity of someone who was not believed for years.

Reviews were mixed. The Washington Examiner found the prose clunky in places, and Midbrow felt it stays on the surface of a celebrity story.