10 new fiction books to kickstart your 2026 reading list
There’s something for everyone with this first batch of must-read fiction for early 2026, including the return of George Saunders. We’re talking crypto, gangs, horror flatshares, life, death and everything in between.
The Jeffrey Preston Bezos-owned Washington Post just killed its entire books section, to which we say boo, hiss and WTF.
Perhaps the billionaire class is getting antsy about fiction because one of the most talked about books of 2026 so far is George Saunders’ mind-bending new novel Vigil, in which various ghosts try to get an oil exec to repent for his sins on his deathbed?
Perhaps not.
Either way, stick a chic V sign up to our tech overlords by reading these ten new books at your leisure.
City Like Water (Dorothy Tse)
Dorothy Tse’s matter-of-fact magical realism is, wonderfully, the perfect, precise tool for conveying how contemporary Hong Kong slipped into its current political climate. In her short, spiky 85-page novella, City Like Water, Tse navigates us through trippy, slippery encounters with a dream logic that shifts and splinters but just about holds through classroom memories, hotels with sealed off rooms and floors, housewives and police battling over lotus roots..
Known for her first novel, Owlish in 2023, in which a professor falls in love with a mechanical ballerina, with this book, Tse is doing something very tricky: capturing the sensations of those caught up in terror, people disappearing, people in hiding, people left behind, a little sister floating away on an umbrella. Translated by Natascha Bruce, Tse has a brilliant handle on the specifics that stick in the mind, too, whether that’s a maze of bricks, “tasteless time” or toe cleavage.
All Them Dogs (Djamel White)
What a debut. All Them Dogs takes place in Djamel White’s beautifully lived-in and scuffed-up world of West Dublin in the years just before the pandemic. Tony Ward has just returned to town after five years in England and he goes straight to work for local big boss Angus Lavelle, as an enforcer alongside Flute Walsh. But what sets this apart from your usual crime and drug-filled coming-of-age tale is White’s interest in, as he puts it, the ‘upper’ working class suburbia — the sparkling kitchens and kids studying at college that co-exist with the dealers and the pitbulls and the estates.
We get right inside Tony’s head as he gasses himself up, waiting for the rage needed to carry out what he needs to do. And there’s some really touching details — his Ma staring into space, the tidbit that he’d once considered studying fashion — alongside a queer romance that more than complicates things inside this violent, macho hierarchy. The denouement is quite astounding, too. If this doesn’t get at least a prestige TV adaptation, we’ll eat our Air Max 97s.
Helen of Nowhere (Makenna Goodman)
Fuck yes. This is already one of our favourite books of the year and it’s only February. Makenna Goodman makes the novel genuinely thrilling again as she masterminds us through Helen of Nowhere’s six ‘acts’ and a heady mixture of perspectives and audiences. As you’re reading, you’ll think to yourself ‘did she just... are we... is this...?’ and you’re fully with Goodman for the entire ride. Just to be clear: this is literary experimentation of the non-annoying variety. So it’s no wonder her high-profile fans include Sheila Heti and Rachel Cusk.
The less we say the better but the premise is: an unnamed professor is viewing a house in the countryside, which includes the estate agent — or ‘realtor’ in Vermont-speak — telling him stories about the previous owner, Helen. The book pokes and prods ideas about reputation, creative work, nature and what we owe our partners, colleagues and neighbours. But it’s not all heads-on-sticks, with plenty on sex, swimming, beauty and ageing too. Just read it.
Lost Lambs (Madeline Cash)
The highest praise we can give this very funny American novel Lost Lambs is that these characters, the Flynn family, are characters you can laugh at and laugh with, ones that you root for and kinda love by the end. Put it this way —if Madeline Cash found herself at a cosmic cocktail party with Muriel Spark, the Coen brothers, Loren Bouchard and JD Salinger, nobody would need to be rescued.
The Flynns are Bud and Catherine (exploring nonmonogamy in their marriage) and their three wayward daughters, Abigail (exploring being a hot, thin teenager), Louise (exploring following instructions from her chatroom boyfriend) and Harper (exploring how not to end up bored when you’re twelve and the smartest person in town). There’s family chaos, school chaos, church chaos and a mystery involving the shady local billionaire who throws mysterious parties. Throughout, the iconic Flynn girls continue to be their absolute best selves and every time the plot gets more bizarro, one of them is there to make things even screwier. An instant classic and a comic novel about family you could recommend to just about anyone.
Eradication (Jonathan Miles)
Fables are so back. We’ve been predicting this trend for a while: as the world gets scarier, meta-ironic splodges of pop culture looping back in on themselves just don’t seem quite so clever. American writer Jonathan Miles’ entry into this canon, Eradication, sees schoolteacher Adi heading for the remote Isla Santa Flora in the Pacific to see about some goats and birds and plants on behalf of an eco foundation.
The story that follows could be seen as an allegory for corporations playing god with nature, for the treatment of immigrants, or any number of other readings. In fact, you might feel the urge to immediately re-read it. The interplay of the moss, basalt and (remaining) cloud forest of the island with the ugly human instincts which have arrived there is deftly conducted, the meditations on failing to ‘save’ something hit with real impact and the final pages are just about as satisfying as you can get.
Vigil (George Saunders)
George Saunders, who found mainstream literary fame with his Booker Prize-winning masterpiece Lincoln in the Bardo in 2017, seems to be quite enjoying the wide range of reactions to his latest novel, Vigil. Similarly interested in liminal spaces between life and death, self and ego, Vigil is a valiant effort to take on the subject of the world-building, and possibly world-destroying, fossil-fuel billionaires. Hey, at least he isn’t hiding out in historical fiction or intimate family dramas like most big-name novelists. He’s really going for it!
Saunders hones in on one oil tycoon in particular, his KJ Boone, who is lying in a bed dying in his Dallas mansion when a supernatural spirit, Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine is sent to comfort him in his final hours. Jill is joined by all manner of other apparitions who have something to say to Boone, not all of it comforting. It’s A Christmas Carol meets A Matter of Life and Death meets Twitter but much sillier, lighter and less straightforward than a simple climate change morality play. Saunders is endlessly inventive and when Vigil sings, it really sings. One to play-fight with your friends about.
My Bags Are Big (Tibor Fischer)
Or, 'Crypto Bros Have Feelings Too, Mate'. We like a protagonist with a strong but slightly warped worldview and Dan, Tibor Fischer’s sixty-year-old crypto trader, Catford-born, currently living in Dubai, certainly has that. He’s preoccupied with people’s Big Moments, luckiness and unluckiness, who’s winning, who’s losing, and most importantly whose ‘bags’ of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other coins and tokens are big, bigger and biggest.
The novel clips along — you could easily read this in one sitting — in large part down to Dan’s hustle-propelled, crime-adjacent life story (past and present) and a cast of eccentric characters with delicious names like Math Cat, NotGuilty, Disaster Dimitri and My Big Cousin. There’s real feeling bubbling beneath all the new money trinkets, though, as Dan can’t seem to decide if he’s ultimately a sadsack or if he, with his beat-up Citroen and his eggs in multiple baskets, is above it all. Sneaks up on you.
He’s The Devil (Tobi Coventry)
Delicious, an absolute breath of putrid air. This camp, pulp-y queer horror debut from Tobi Coventry takes place in an unnamed city where ‘good boy’ Simon finds himself, all of a sudden, living with a sexy stranger named Massimo in his nice, clean flatshare. He’s The Devil is both very cinematic and very interior; less surprising when you know that Coventry is a book-to-screen scout who’s produced a horror short named Blood Rites.
We get some tour de force scenes and literary set-pieces — the bathroom... the bedroom... the woods... a houseboat... and one night in which Simon turns very naughty at his job at a restaurant. With a series of exquisite reveals, driving both the emotional arcs and the horror plot in the final pages, Coventry is always fully in control, even as his little demons spiral out.
Sisters In Yellow (Mieko Kawakami)
What if Michael Corleone was a Japanese teen girl rookie? Stick with us here as Sisters In Yellow, from best-selling author Mieko Kawakami, is that and so much more. It’s the mid-90s and we follow fifteen-year-old Hana and the much older Kimiko as they leave Hana’s unreliable mother behind in a suburb of Tokyo to set up a dive bar called Lemon. As Hana drifts further and further away from the traditional world of IDs, rules and regular jobs, she encounters all sorts of alternative counter-structures offering security, money and a sense of family.
Mieko Kawakami is a true maestro, here translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio, as she patiently reveals the mechanics behind bar hostesses, sugar daddies, low-level scams and the network of people involved in all this nightlife underworld to Hana and her friends. There are a few moments which will make your blood run cold as you read. The anxieties racing through our narrator’s brain rarely let up and the female relationships here are just as complex and shape-shifting as anything in Ferrante. Plus, more power to Kawakami for laying out the actual numbers of every last sum of money that Hana consumes herself over: earnings, outgoings, savings, shares, buy-ins and, of course, losses. If that isn’t life, we don’t know what is.
Glyph (Ali Smith)
The excellent Scottish writer Ali Smith is back with another very topical novel, Glyph. This is a standalone read but also “family to Gliff”, the dystopia she put out in 2024, which is, in fact, discussed by two characters in this book who’ve read it. When you’re Ali Smith, you can do that. Glyph focuses on two sisters, Petra and Patricia (known as Patch), and Smith elegantly weaves in and out of the present day, childhood memories, conversations, thoughts and meta-fictions concerned with families, ghosts, imaginations and in-jokes.
This is also an “anti-war novel” with stories from WWI, WWII and current wars including Gaza. Some themes and motifs, including the figure of the horse, as per the cover artwork from Edvard Munch’s The Pathfinder, appear across the two homophonically-titled books. Smith is in conversation with myth, saints and truth-telling here. Her characters contemplate communicating with the dead and how to not become dead to other people’s suffering, with nods and winks to AI, asylum hotels, flags, education and the police state. Lovely stuff.
Want more great reads? Try...
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