Our 25 most anticipated fiction books for 2026

A lot of pressure on fiction these days, huh? Can’t be too long or metaphorical or the English students will give up.

Can’t be too slow or uneventful or it might be the last book someone reads before fully succumbing to the TikTok vortex. Can’t be written by anyone but a white man because that’s too woke again.

For the time being, with all that very much ignored, here’s the fiction we’re most anticipating in the year ahead.

(Prefer non-fiction? Check out our 25 most anticipated non-fiction books for 2026...)

Vigil (George Saunders)

The first of the 2026 big-hitters in fiction. Not only has the American writer George Saunders mastered the short story (from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline onwards) and the novel (Lincoln In The Bardo), he’s also a contagiously enthusiastic teacher and lover of fiction, whether it’s through classes or his Substack or his gorgeous book about classic Russian writers. Vigil, his latest, takes place in Dallas where an oil tycoon, who says he has no regrets, is dying and it features a cast of "otherworldly visitors”. We’ll read anything Saunders writes.

Out 27th January (Bloomsbury)

Helen of Nowhere (Makenna Goodman)

This Fitzcarraldo title from Vermont-based writer and editor Makenna Goodman comes in at a tight 160 pages and it sounds - delightfully - like something of an intellectual haunted house tale. The premise: a “disgraced” professor is being shown around a lush countryside property and the estate agent is telling him stories about the previous owner, Helen, and how she lived her life there. When the sun goes down things - as they so often tend to do - get wiggy.

Out 29th January (Fitzcarraldo)

The Persian (David McCloskey)

A spy thriller from former CIA analyst David McCloskey, The Persian is set to be a page-turner full of clandestine meetings, dastardly deceptions and international espionage. The difference with your run-of-the-mill globe-trotting spy novel: McCloskey’s not afraid to get stuck into some extremely current geopolitics. Our hero is, in fact, a Persian-Jewish dentist who finds himself in Iran, spying for Mossad and getting caught by Iranian security forces.

Out 29th January (Swift Press)

Glyph (Ali Smith)

The first thing you must do before reading Glyph by Ali Smith is to read Gliff by Ali Smith. This January release is, very curiously, a companion piece to, or “family to”, her 2024 book of the same(ish) name. The acclaimed Scottish author of, amongst other things, the Brexit-infused Seasonal Quartet, is back with what’s described as an anti-war novel. We follow two sisters, Petra and Patch, from the made-up ghosts of their childhood to an estrangement later in life.

Out 29th January (Hamish Hamilton)

The True, True Story of Raja The Gullible (And His Mother) (Rabih Alameddine)

We first heard about this book from Lebanese writer and painter Rabih Alameddine last year when it was released in the US - it won the National Book Award for 2025 - and now yay, it’s arriving here. As you can probably tell from that perfect title, this is a darkly comic narrative, told in a non-linear fashion. Alameddine begins with a gay 60-odd year-old philosophy teacher living with his aging mother in a tiny Beirut flat and opens up to encompass more than half a century of Lebanon’s political and military history.

Out 5th February (Corsair)

Lost Lambs (Madeline Cash)

This debut novel looks fun. Lost Lambs promises “magical nihilism” as per Lena Dunham’s blurb and a brutally funny take on a very dysfunctional American family. The writer, 29-year-old Madeline Cash, has a collection of shorts titled Earth Angel and she founded Forever Magazine together with Anika Jade Levy, author of Flat Earth, one of our faves of 2025. Lots of hipster soft power here.

Out 5th February (Transworld)

He’s The Devil (Tobi Coventry)

Another debut, He’s The Devil comes from Tobi Coventry, a book-to-screen scout living in Rye. It’s a flat-share horror story that sounds part fever dream, part wet dream. The set-up: tidy, neurotic and all-round good boy Simon has to contend with a stranger moving into his living space and bringing all kinds of mess along. Jodie Harsh says it’s Stephen King/ Ottessa Moshfegh/ John Waters energy. Our kind of drama.

Out 12th February (4th Estate)

My Bags Are Big (Tibor Fischer)

Son of Stockport Tibor Fischer broke out in the early ‘90s with his short stories and Booker-nominated novel Under The Frog. Lately he’s been immersed in the world of Bitcoin and the like for this Dubai-set satire of money, masculinity and well, the crypto bro mindset. Should deliver nicely in the schadenfreude department.

Out 18th February (Salt)

Look What You Made Me Do (John Lanchester)

The latest from John Lanchester, author of 2012’s Capital, has a multiple-pepper-symbol spicy idea at the heart of it: Kate is a North London Boomer who’s in a decades-long marriage to Jack. She starts watching a buzzy new TV show Cheaters, created by a young writer named Phoebe, when she begins to suspect, from all the details about the characters, that it’s based on her own life. Black Mirror for the middle classes, sounds glorious.

Out 12th March (Faber)

Sisters in Yellow (Mieko Kawakami)

You might know Japanese writer and poet Mieko Kawakami’s name from her 2019 bestseller Breasts and Eggs. This March we’re getting an English translation, from Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio, of her 2023 book Sisters in Yellow. What sounds at first like a fun hang - two women, teenage Hana and the older Kimiko, open a dive bar in a Tokyo suburb in the 90s - is of course much darker and more complicated, with Kawakami unravelling the knotty twists of friendship and betrayals.

Out 19th March (Pan Macmillan)

Wimmy Road Boyz (Sufiyaan Salam)

Wimmy Road Boyz is set to be a high, high, high-energy debut from Sufiyaan Salam, a writer and former animator from Blackburn. Set over the course of one night in and around Manchester’s ‘Curry Mile’, we strap in with three twentysomething rude-boi mates named Immy, Khan and Haris looking for a wild night out. Salam was the winner of Merky Books’ New Writers Prize in 2024, winning a publishing contract with Stormzy’s imprint: this coming-of-age book is the result.

Out 28th March (Merky Books)

On The Calculation of Volume IV (Solvej Balle)

The 2025 English translation of Volume III of Solvej Balle’s On The Calculation of Volume series ended on quite the cliffhanger - how dare they - so we’re keen to snap up the next installment of this time loop literary phenomenon. Slight spoiler alert ahead: our scrappy little group, who have been experiencing the 18th November over and over again in III, has now expanded as Tara, Henry, Ralf and Olga encounter some more time loopers. There’s seven books in total and six have already been published in Danish so expect a steady drip-drip in translation from Faber.

Out 9th April (Faber & Faber)

Communion (Jon Doyle)

Port Talbot in South Wales holds a very particular place in Welsh cultural history and it’s here that Jon Doyle, who lives in the town, has set his first novel. His protagonist Mack O’Brien has returned to Port Talbot after a decade at a seminary and Communion sees him caught up in labour strikes against job cuts at the steelworks and contending with a woman from his past, who once swore him to secrecy over a confession.

Out 2nd April (Atlantic)

Son of Nobody (Yann Martel)

We still think about Life of Pi, a book that came out in 2001, from time to time. Strange, really. The Canadian author of that bestseller, Yann Martel, has a new one coming in April and it’s one for the sack-of-wine scholars among us. A classics prof is rooting through papyri in the Bodleian library at Oxford when he discovers a lost account of the Trojan War from a commoner named Psoa of Midea. We are seated.

Out 2nd April (Canongate)

The Palm House (Gwendoline Riley)

The Palm House is a title that’s popping right now in the fiction previews. Gwendoline Riley is a British novelist and short story writer, much admired for her prose style and precise observation, and as such she’s been a regular fixture on fiction prize shortlists for the past 20 years or so. Her next book is intriguing, eavesdropping on two old friends Laura and Edmund who meet up in old London pubs and are dealing with grief, precarity and a nightmare media boss.

Out 2nd April (Picador)

Transcription (Ben Lerner)

Another much-hyped title this year is the novella Transcription. It’s from the American author, essayist and critic Ben Lerner, who made his name with Leaving The Atocha Station and The Topeka School in the 2010s, and its concerns are memory, technology and the connections between friends and mentors. The inciting incident involves dropping a smartphone in a hotel sink before a big interview so expect a sideways look at what the phones are doing to us.

Out 9th April (Granta)

Yesteryear (Caro Claire Burke)

In a list full of genius premises, this might be our favourite. A social media Trad Wife named Natalie is busy posting her faux-idyllic farmhouse life with her cowboy husband when one day she wakes up to find herself a Trad Wife in, wait for it, 1805. This is Caro Claire Burke’s first book; she’s a writer who co-hosts a culture and politics podcast called Diabolical Lies. And yes, a Yesteryear movie with Anne Hathaway in the lead is already in development - in the meantime, this one will be blowing up BookTok come spring.

Out 9th April (4th Estate)

Welcome To The Chaoskampf (Jane Flett)

“The year that Florida fell into the sea, I killed a man and joined a cult and ran away to Mexico. I ate human flesh for the first time.” That’s a tease from the second book from Jane Flett, a queer Scottish author based out of Berlin. Look, we’ve got New Orleans, we’ve got climate disasters, we’ve got a boxer named Marcy and we’ve got a doomsday cult of “degenerate filmmakers”. What more could you possibly want.

Out 14th May (Doubleday)

John of John (Douglas Stuart)

Last year we had Muckle Flugga, this year John of John - in the micro genre of a father-and-son living on a remote Scottish island, we mean. The Glasgow-born Douglas Stuart, award-winning for Shuggie Bain, is back with a story set on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides which, we can confirm, is rugged, beautiful and exquisitely short on phone signal. The son, John-Calum or Cal, ends up broke after art school, returns to Harris and to his Presbyterian sheep farmer father John.

Out 21st May (Picador)

Land (Maggie O’Farrell)

Maggie O’Farrell is the author du jour for book clubs both sides of the Atlantic, on account of Chloe Zhao’s film adaptation of her much-loved 2020 novel Hamnet, starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley. So her next book Land, arriving in June, is an Event. This is another historical novel, set in Ireland in 1865. Here, O’Farrell is using the Ordnance Survey project, which set out to map the whole of the country, as a way in to exploring the famines, social crises and tensions with the British military during the mid nineteenth century.

Out 2nd June (Knopf)

Sail Away Land (Ben Pester) - no cover pic yet

This is a treat. London-based writer Ben Pester, one of our discoveries of 2025 for his brilliant novel The Expansion Project, has a short story collection with Granta due this summer. As with his previous cerebrally surreal work, Pester is concerned with temporal and spatial confusion, ghosts and resurrections. The ‘Sail Away Land’ refers to a space we go to when we’re no longer alive, “sometimes only temporarily”.

Out 4th June (Granta)

Cool Machine (Colson Whitehead)

We love that between 2015 and 2020 New York novelist Colson Whitehead tackled big injustices against African Americans with style and grace, including the slave trade (in The Underground Railroad) and abuses in reform schools (in The Nickel Boys) winning two Pulitzer Prizes along the way. We also love that since then, Whitehead has turned his attention to a trilogy of incredibly entertaining Harlem-set crime novels, following fence and furniture salesman Ray Carney from the 1960s. Cool Machine is the last book in the series, set in the Reagan-era Harlem of the 80s.

Out 21st July (Doubleday)

The Newer World (Sebastian Barry) - no cover pic yet

Another literary sequel, Irish author Sebastian Barry’s The Newer World, which will be published this September, takes up the saga of the McNulty family - initially based on a fictionalised version of one of Barry’s ancestors - which have populated many of his previous books. Here we’re in northwest Tennessee in the mid nineteenth century and the focus is on the enslaved Tennyson Bouguereau, who works in the tobacco fields, his sister Rosalee and a lost chance at freedom.

Out 10th September (Faber)

Exit Party (Emily St John Mandel)

Emily St John Mandel’s excellent Station Eleven made us all think about what skills we’d have to offer in a post-pandemic apocalypse - memorising Shakespeare is key - so we’re stoked for her next slice of speculative near-future fiction. Exit Party opens in 2031, amid an American Civil War, with characters Ari and Gloria joining in celebrations to mark the declaration of a Republic of California and then jumps forward in time as Ari looks back, years later, from Paris. We can already taste that sweet, sweet futuro-melancholy.

Out 17th September (Picador)

The Rouse (China Miéville) - cover to be revealed pic

You might need to start your Goodreads training now for the next speculative epic from the Arthur C. Clarke and Hugo Award-winning China Miéville: it runs to 1,264 pages and he’s been working on it for the past twenty years (in and around publishing his ‘New Weird’ fiction and a book with Keanu Reeves). Details are few and far between, aside from the fact that the ambitious story spans decades and continents but the blurb is thus: ‘forced to investigate a devastating personal tragedy, an ordinary woman stumbles on dark conspiracies, and provokes the attention of uncanny forces’. *Rubs hands with glee*.

Out 17th September (Picador)

Want more great reads? Try...

• The best books of 2025
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• 10 must-read winter fiction books to get you through the cold snap

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