New year… new bookshelf! At least that’s how we feel around here; nothing quite beats the thrill of a new book season.
In that spirit, we present to you the best books we’ve read so far in 2026. As is the case in years past, this isn’t a comprehensive list. There are plenty of books you won’t find below that we’re excited to read: Tayari Jones’s Kin, a follow-up to her breathtaking American Marriage; new short story collections from Lauren Groff and Colm Toibin; the final installation in a Tana French trilogy; a new release from the Booker-winning Douglas Stuart. Perhaps because of all these forthcoming books by known literary heavyweights, we have skewed this early iteration of the list toward debuts—and we’ve been delighted. Read on to find a new discovery for yourself!
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden (January)
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 lends 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
I Could Be Famous: Stories by Sydney Rende (January)
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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 eleven quippy and relatable anecdotes from ten female narrators, with one twisted, hotshot male actor connecting them all. Each woman shares—in their own way—their various desires and dreams, yet are 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 lack thereof) and delusion, that we all, one day, could be famous. —Kylee McGuigan
Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash (January)
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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.
White River Crossing by Ian McGuire (February)
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A decade ago the English novelist Ian McGuire made a name for himself with the bleak hyperrealist 19th-century set whaling adventure novel The North Water (which was made into a fantastic BBC adaptation.) McGuire’s new novel, White River Crossing (Crown), offers similarly rugged wintry pleasures. Set in the frozen Canadian wilderness of the Hudson Bay in the late 18th century, the propulsive story follows a dangerous expedition by English traders into the sub-arctic wilderness in search of gold. McGuire’s goal here is entertainment (achieved) but his empathetic treatment of the indigenous tribes the English come into contact and conflict with gives his novel a mournful air of tragedy. —Taylor Antrim
This Is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman (February)
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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 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.
Celestial Lights by Cecile Pin (March)
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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
Gunk by Saba Sams (March)
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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 exexperiences, whether chemical or biological. A funky, surreptitiously fun debut. —C.S.
Down Time by Andrew Martin (March)
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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.
Whidbey by T. Kira Madden (March)
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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
Porcupines by Fran Fabriczki (April)
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Porcupines (Summit) is another debut that heralds the arrival of an ambitious writer, seemingly unafraid to write well beyond her personal experience. The novel tells the story of a young Hungarian woman, Szonja, visiting her sister in Los Angeles after the fall of the Berlin Wall. (How her sister came to be in LA is another unlikely story—a marriage to an Orthodox Jew—that, somehow, in the context of this rangey novel, works.) Szonja is not enchanted by her sister’s rule-bound life and soon strikes out for a more adventurous American experience. Flash forward 10 years and she is still living in America, now mother to a nine-year-old. You can guess what happened. The book is not explicitly political, nor is it sanctimonious in the slightest, and yet I couldn t help reading it with appreciation for its humanity—for a funny, amusing, clever story of migration. —C.S.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (April)
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How do women present themselves to the world? The question has been complicated by a billion (gazillion?) tiny screens through which we beam images of ourselves. The canniest fictional dissection of femininity and the panopticon of social media arrives this spring in Yesteryear (Knopf), a rollicking satirical debut from Caro Claire Burke. Yesteryear’s protagonist, Natalie, is a tradwife, making a living and a name for herself by broadcasting her old-time-y (but—surprise!—quite inauthentic) life to her many followers. (She enjoys an offscreen trip to Target and finds farm life stressful.) Natalie’s online haters, deemed “Angry Women” by her, are another archetype: burnt-out overachievers. Natalie has attempted to escape their fates by meticulously projecting a simpler life, and in the process created a new kind of prison for herself. The book cleverly alternates between the story of how Natalie ended up an influencer and a more sinister plot, in which she appears actually trapped in a 19th-century existence. —C.S.
A Real Animal by Emeline Atwood (July)
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During her senior year in college, Lucy, the protagonist of Emeline Atwood’s A Real Animal (Catapult) becomes convinced she is a leopard and positions herself high up in a tree before campus authorities can remove her. Are we in a fictional realm that blends postgrad ennui with magical realism, or just reading about a mental breakdown? “Nothing like the leopard would ever happen to me again,” the narrator tells us, but also: “I know now something about fear that’s
not quite human.” A Real Animal chronicles the effect of three long-term relationships (with a stolid college boyfriend; an explosive, dangerous older man; and an upright citizen with a fundamentally distinct disposition) in affirming or disintegrating what the narrator believes about herself. Even after the visions have passed, her animal instincts play a forceful
role in how she interacts with the world. —C.S.