If adding more reading is part of your New Year’s resolution, this is a good place to start. Or maybe you’re already an avid reader, ready to tackle your next list. Whatever brings you here, there’s a whole slew of great titles we’re excited about. We narrowed our list down to some of our top picks for the most anticipated upcoming books of 2026.

What are the most anticipated upcoming books of 2026?

There are a lot of great books slated for release this year, if we’re being honest. Other titles that didn’t make our final breakdown include Babylon, South Dakota by Tom Lin, The Keeper, Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead, Worse Than a Lie by Ben Crump, The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout, and London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe.

Vigil – George Saunders (January 27)

Vigil is one of the most anticipated novels of the year, due in part to George Saunders’s popularity following his Booker Prize win for Lincoln in the Bardo. The novel has already received rapturous early reviews, with Publishers Weekly calling it “staggering… Saunders has outdone himself with this endlessly irreverent work of art.” Once again, readers can expect the sense of playfulness and imagination we’ve come to associate with Saunders’s work.

The novel follows the final evening of a deeply complicated, dying man, as worldly and otherworldly visitors — both living and otherwise — begin to arrive, each demanding a reckoning. One particular visitor, Jill “Doll” Blaine, descends from the heavens, tasked with ushering his soul into the afterlife. A seasoned professional who has performed this sacred duty hundreds of times before, she quickly realizes that this charge is unlike any she’s encountered.

Days of Love and Rage – Anand Gopal (March 3)

From Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist Anand Gopal (No Good Men Among the Living) comes Days of Love and Rage, a nonfiction account of the Syrian war told through the lives of six Syrians fighting for a world where equality is possible. The book takes us to a small city in northern Syria in 2011, where a handful of citizens spark a movement to overthrow one of the most brutal dictatorships in the modern world. While the story of revolution is powerful in its own right, Gopal’s intimate portrait of the people of Manbij—and the way it captures both the best and worst of humanity—makes it unforgettable. Above all, these are stories of the human spirit.

Now I Surrender – Álvaro Enrigue (March 3)

Now I Surrender offers fans of historical fiction a compelling story about a woman’s desperate flight during an Apache raid in the turbulent era of the Mexican–American War of the 1840s. Even if you think you know stories of the American West, this novel brings a fresh and unexpected perspective—an epic alt-western that keeps you turning the pages.

Now I Surrender — winner of the Barcelona Prize for Fiction, the Herralde Prize, and the Elena Poniatowska International Novel Award in Mexico — is Álvaro Enrigue’s first novel to be translated into English. This is an author well worth keeping an eye on.

The News from Dublin – Colm Tóibín (March 26)

From the bestselling author of Brooklyn comes a collection of nine short stories about lives lived far from home, stretching from Ireland to Argentina to America—and places in between. A mother grieves the loss of her son during the First World War. Elsewhere, an Irishman living in Spain is haunted by his past crimes. A young woman navigates pregnancy during the Spanish Civil War, while an undocumented worker is forced to leave San Francisco after thirty years in the U.S.

Tóibín fills these stories with the complexities of love, a deep sense of longing for belonging, and captures people suspended between the places they left behind and the lives they now inhabit.

Good People – Patmeena Sabit (February 3)

The Sharaf family looks like the perfect immigrant success story. After fleeing their home country of Afghanistan during Russian occupation, they’ve made an enviable life for themselves, having started with nothing. They’re prosperous, successful, and most importantly — happy. But an unexpected tragedy strikes, dismantling this picture-perfect story of the American dream. The Sharaf family is now thrust into the court of public opinion, as their narrative is interrogated. Told through multiple perspectives, Good People is a provocative and haunting story of family and community.

How we picked the most anticipated upcoming books of 2026

We narrowed down our picks to authors with a longstanding reputation for great work, along with novels we’re especially eager to read. We opted to include a few titles that might be overlooked in favor of more popular genres or bigger-name authors (aside from George Saunders, of course). These choices also feel particularly resonant for 2026.