The Best Books of 2026 So Far

• 
  World Cup Fever

  by Simon Kuper (Pegasus)

  Nonfiction

  Kuper, a journalist for the Financial Times, was born in Uganda to South African Jewish parents, raised and educated in the Netherlands and in Britain, and is now both a French citizen; as a “rootless cosmopolitan,” he’s well positioned to observe the chauvinisms and zealotries of soccer’s most ardent fans. He has attended nine World Cup tournaments—held every four years in different parts of the globe—and his book is based on the notes he took while rushing from match to match. The result is a chronicle that encompasses history, national cultures, and politics. Kuper’s account captures the raw nationalism, corruption, and ritual vengeance surrounding the matches, but it’s also a tale of love and devotion, told by someone who knows the feelings well.

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  Read more: “Why the World Cup Can Feel Like War,” by Ian Buruma

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Why I Am Not an Atheist

  by Christopher Beha (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Beha, who grew up a devout Catholic, began to lose his faith after his brother almost died in an accident. His book is an account of the years that followed—years during which he read widely in science and philosophy, searching for a tenable secular world view, before returning, finally, to the church he had left. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  Good People

  by Patmeena Sabit (Crown)

  Fiction

  This devastating début novel takes the form of an oral history about a tragedy that shatters a family. At its heart is a couple who arrived in the U.S. in the late nineteen-nineties as refugees from Afghanistan. They prospered, and brought up four children in an affluent suburb in Virginia. Rotating testimonies from people they know—family friends, a cousin, lawyers—offer theories about what led to the novel’s central catastrophe. Once the nature of the tragedy has been revealed, the book transforms into an intimate study of an Afghan immigrant community forced to reëvaluate what it means to raise children in America. One friend says, “The money wasn’t the issue. . . . It was about one thing and one thing only: They forgot who they were.”

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Books & Fiction



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• 
  To Catch a Fascist

  by Christopher Mathias (Atria)

  Nonfiction

  This absorbing book documents attempts by activists who are part of the Antifa movement to expose and sabotage far-right-wing groups. Mathias, a seasoned journalist who has long covered the far right, shows how activists variously confront and infiltrate such groups and reveal their members to the public. These campaigns rely on the notion that being found to be part of a white-supremacist group has social costs, like the loss of a job. But, as a former member of Patriot Front, a fascist organization, tells Mathias, the rise of figures such as Donald Trump could be taken to indicate that, in the U.S., “there’s almost already no stigma” around white nationalism.

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• 
  The Pain Brokers

  by Elizabeth Chamblee Burth (Atria)

  Nonfiction

  A little more than a decade ago, hundreds of women were persuaded to travel to surgery centers and strip malls several states away from where they lived to have pelvic mesh removed from their bodies. They did so at the urging of marketing firms that were working with lawyers and finance companies in pursuit of big payouts in a product-liability lawsuit. The women weren’t necessarily better off without the mesh, and they were often charged exorbitant fees; what’s more, the law firm that enlisted them as clients never expected to represent any of them in court. It instead planned to bundle them like mortgages and sell them to the highest bidder. Burch, a law professor at the University of Georgia, unspools the story of this galling scam, and lucidly explains how our legal system, and its approach to mass torts, has made such swindling possible.

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  Read more: “A Terrifying Scam and the System That Made It Possible,” by Casey Cep
• 
  Every One Still Here

  by Liadan Ní Chuinn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  The stories in this début collection grapple with the Troubles, in part through an accretion of charged moments: cars are hijacked; people protest a museum’s display of human remains. The names of Northern Irish civilians killed by British armed forces are listed, accompanied by frank descriptions of their deaths, for ten pages. Ní Chuinn maps tense ideas onto a strikingly varied cast of characters. As sharp details accrue stealthily in the author’s subdued prose, the effect is one of chilling recognition. The Troubles, which ended in 1998, the year Ní Chuinn was born, sing the same plain and painful tune as our present.

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• 
  Injustice Town

  by Rick Tulsky (Pegasus)

  Nonfiction

  Since the founding of the Innocence Project, in 1992, which uses DNA evidence to overturn convictions, exoneration stories have become somewhat familiar. But Tulsky’s comprehensive and sobering new book provides a twist on the wrongful-conviction genre, showing how deep the rot can be when sexual violence is involved. For years, Detective Roger Golubski of Kansas City, Kansas, was known by the community he policed to be a sexual predator. While investigating a murder, Golubski zeroed in on a man named Lamonte McIntyre, who was eventually given two life sentences. Golubski had previously sexually assaulted McIntyre’s mother, and had also been involved with an eyewitness. Compared with the extensive coverage of police violence in recent years, there’s been relatively little discussion of sexual exploitation by law enforcement, and Tulsky’s book makes for a worthy entry in the canon of American injustice.

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  Read more: “When Sexual Exploitation Is Fundamental to Police Corruption,” by Rachel Monroe
• 
  Southern Imagining

  by Elleke Boehmer (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  A lyrical study of global literature, this book, by a professor at Oxford, seeks to explore “what it is to inhabit the far south of our planet in the mind.” A section on pre-modern Polynesian knowledge traditions reveals a world view dominated by a profound awareness of water and stars; other portions, on twenty-first-century fiction from Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, highlight a shared concern with environmental fragility and the ways in which land, ocean, and living beings continually intersect. The theme of exploitation runs through many of the works under consideration, such as the Aboriginal Australian writer Alexis Wright’s novel “Carpentaria,” in which a mining corporation descends on a largely Indigenous town.

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Last Week’s Picks

• 
  A Hymn to Life

  by Gisèle Pelicot, translated from the French by Natasha LehrerRuth Diver (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  In the fall of 2020, police showed Gisèle Pelicot evidence that over the past decade her husband, Dominique, had repeatedly mixed sleeping pills into her drinks so that strange men could rape her. Soon he confessed. Four years later, the trial of Pelicot’s rapists seemed like a referendum on the relations between men and women in France. In the end, fifty-one men, including Dominique, were convicted. In her new memoir, “A Hymn to Life,” an elegant and remarkably affecting account of her ordeal and its aftermath, Pelicot writes that only recently did she “grasp what this conflict between men and women was all about.” The subtitle of the book is “Shame has to change sides”—a phrase Pelicot used at the trial. One of the defendants told her, in response, “I take your shame upon myself, Madame!”

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  Read more: “The Trial of Gisèle Pelicot’s Rapists United France and Fractured Her Family,” by Rachel Aviv

Previous Picks

• 
  The Boundless Deep

  by Richard Holmes (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  This treatment of Alfred Tennyson by a master biographer focusses on the poet’s fascination with unknowable immensities. Holmes’s central claim is that the crucial factor in the poet’s formative years was the scientific advances of the nineteenth century and the challenge they posed to conventional Christian faith. By the time Tennyson entered adulthood, the British intellectual class—and, for that matter, much of the rest of the world—had been turned on its head by scientific breakthroughs, above all in geology and astronomy. These radical insights, Holmes argues, were fundamental to Tennyson’s maturation. Holmes does not set out to dwell on Tennyson the Laureate or Tennyson the lord. His fascination lies with the plain, untitled youth, and with how this newly disorienting, newly dazzling world helped to shape his greatness.

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  Read more: “In an Age of Science, Tennyson Grappled with an Unsettling New World,” by Kathryn Schulz
• 
  From Our Pages

  One Sun Only

  by Camille Bordas (Random House)

  Fiction

  The first collection by Bordas, the author of several novels in French and English, ranges in location from Chicago to Paris and in premise from arranging the return of a dead body to winning the lottery. The stories, several of which first appeared in the magazine, nest questions of existence and death in narratives of dailiness and relationships.

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• 
  Leaving Guantanamo

  by Eric L. Lewis (Cambridge)

  Nonfiction

  With procedural exactitude and mounting anger, this book recounts how Kuwait extracted twelve of its citizens from the “forever prison.” Lewis, a lawyer who helped shepherd those cases through the State Department, the Pentagon, interagency task forces, and federal habeas litigation, makes clear that Guantánamo is part of an offshore detention regime built to evade ordinary adjudication, nourished by unverified intelligence, and maintained as a result of politics. As he shows how a small Middle Eastern state learned to negotiate with America’s security bureaucracy, the limits of litigation become painfully apparent; releases arrive only through diplomacy and assurances that the detainees will be subject to travel bans and surveillance. The book’s bleak contemporary lesson is that stranding people in a quasi-legal black site is easier than releasing them.

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• 
  Eating Ashes

  by Brenda Navarro, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Liveright)

  Fiction

  In this grief-ridden novel, a nameless narrator mourns the loss of her younger brother Diego. When they are children, their mother leaves the two of them in Mexico City, where they live in poverty, to go to Madrid, in hopes of improving their circumstances. Nine years later, the siblings finally go to join their mother, but find themselves marginalized and still poor. Avoiding melodrama, Navarro writes in a matter-of-fact tone, using short, clipped sentences suited to the wretchedness of her subject. This is a book that treats its characters and incidents seriously and—at its best—ruthlessly.

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• 
  The Wall Dancers

  by Yi-Ling Liu (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  China’s first private internet provider launched in 1995. Today, more than one billion people in the country use the web. This sensitive début depicts the Chinese internet as a kind of “walled garden,” closed off from the outside world, pruned by government censors, yet filled with life. Liu, a Hong Kong-born journalist, profiles people on the fringes of Chinese society—a feminist activist, a gay entrepreneur, a sci-fi writer, a rapper—who find purpose and community online even as the space for free expression narrows. Foreign observers, Liu argues, tend to portray Chinese people as either the enablers or the victims of their government’s excesses. But reality, her book suggests, is messier, as the state and its citizens participate in a “dynamic push and pull.”

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• 
  Bonfire of the Murdochs

  by Gabriel Sherman (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

  The Murdoch empire represents a story of profit and power unlike any other—a tale of chaos and scheming, of dynastic crimes and intergenerational power plays. Sherman, a correspondent for Vanity Fair, proves a reliable chronicler of the Murdoch family’s Oedipal dynamics as well as their shaping of the media world. For years, Rupert Murdoch’s children scrambled for control of their father’s empire; Sherman chronicles their machinations with élan, illustrating how Murdoch’s sons, in particular, picked up their habit of burning through various decencies from their old man himself. In the end, Rupert got his revenge on his recalcitrant children in two ways: first, by shaping their understanding of reality, and, second, by selling the guts of the company from underneath them in 2019. “Over seventy years, Rupert said he was building a family business,” Sherman writes. “But what he built was a business that destroyed his family.”

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  Read more: “How the Murdoch Family Built an Empire—and Remade the News,” by Andrew O’Hagan
• 
  Strangers

  by Belle Burden (The Dial Press)

  Nonfiction

  This engrossing memoir of divorce, by a former corporate lawyer who hails from two of America’s wealthiest families, begins in March, 2020, at the start of Covid lockdown, on the day Burden learns that her husband of two decades has been having an affair. The following morning, he tells her, “I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t,” and leaves. As the divorce unfolds, Burden discovers that their prenuptial agreement favors her husband, who worked as a hedge-fund executive while she left her career to raise their children, and who has quietly amassed “a fortune” held “in his name alone.” Though this story of betrayal hits familiar beats—shock, grief, self-recrimination, resignation—it is enlivened by its particulars.

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• 
  A Very Cold Winter

  by Fausta Cialente, translated from the Italian by Julia Nelsen (Transit)

  Fiction

  This novel, the first of the undersung writer’s books to appear in English, opens in 1946, just as winter is descending on Milan. An extended family of nine is preparing to hunker down in an attic apartment, a dilapidated space “divided up with curtains and partitions.” Though they share tight quarters, the family members—siblings, cousins, in-laws—are all preoccupied by disparate fixations. An omniscient narrator roves through the characters’ perspectives, illuminating their individual desires—to become an actor and a writer, to marry and to move out. Trapped “in the middle of a barren, frozen plain, without horizons,” a reality for which winter is not solely to blame, the family contends with what it means to move on in the aftermath of war.

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• 
  The Copywriter

  by Daniel Poppick (Scribner)

  Fiction

  This novel, the first by Poppick, a poet who has published two collections, orbits the perennial tension between art and commerce. Its narrator, referred to only as D__, is a poet with a day job writing advertising copy. In spare moments, he jots down questions, observations, stylized scenes that he labels parables, and glancing mentions of historical events. The notebooks that result, spanning two years, from 2017 to 2019, are an inquiry into the nature of time and how it is shaped by labor—creative and otherwise.

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  Read more: “The Perennial Predicament of the Artist with an Office Job,” by Katy Waldman
• 
  The Revolutionists

  by Jason Burke (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  For a brief season in the nineteen-seventies, West German radicals and Palestinian liberationists shared the same Marxist-Leninist vocabulary, and the same faith that they could transform their societies via political violence. In this timely history, Burke, a longtime foreign correspondent for the Guardian, returns to the era of this unlikely coupling, examining the world view that motivated these actors—in particular, West Germany’s Red Army Faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—and also the reasons that their shared revolutionary dreams never came to pass. He shows how their attacks, often planned with an eye to the spectacular, helped produce the modern concept of “terrorism,” a term that spread in foreign-policy circles as governments learned to respond to a new kind of threat. Ultimately, the sense of common cause subsided as the liturgies of the left on which it depended gave way to the radical Islamism of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden.

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  Read more: “Marx, Palestine, and the Birth of Modern Terrorism,” by Thomas Meaney
• 
  The Death and Life of Gentrification

  by Japonica Brown-Saracino (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  This wide-ranging study explores how the term “gentrification” has slipped the bonds of its original, “brick-and-mortar” usage, becoming a way to signal loss while addressing “structural inequalities and concomitant social changes.” As a metaphor, its meaning has become fluid; it is now commonplace to read of the “gentrification” of subjects as varied as music, the internet, sandwiches, and queer culture. Brown-Saracino also zeroes in on a crucial aspect of the term’s appeal: in an era of ideological land mines, “gentrification,” she writes, “is politically charged without evoking a specific, narrow political stance.”

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• 
  Lost Lambs

  by Madeline Cash (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  This comic novel centers on a fracturing family in an unnamed American suburb. Bud Flynn, the patriarch, is sleeping in a minivan, and his insecure wife, Catherine, has embarked on an affair with their pompous neighbor. Meanwhile, their three daughters, aged twelve, fifteen, and seventeen, have been exhibiting increasingly unruly behavior, including punching another kid in the face and preparing to commit an act of domestic terrorism. Playing backup to the Flynn family breakdown are the antics of an evil tech billionaire. The novel’s more sophisticated critiques, though, aren’t of unbridled corporate greed or the über-wealthy, but of ordinary people who have lost the ability to reimagine their lives, stuck as they are in bad marriages, pointless jobs, and crippling regret.

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  Read more: “A Début Novel About the Quest for Eternal Youth,” by Hannah Gold
• 
  Departure(s)

  by Julian Barnes (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Though subtitled “A Novel,” Barnes’s twenty-seventh book defies categorization, incorporating memoir, fiction, and philosophy. The narrator—also a writer named Julian—opens with a meditation on memory, before clambering through the recesses of his mind to retrieve the story of friends he unsuccessfully set up in the sixties and again decades later. In recounting their romance(s), Julian realizes that he had been confusing fiction and life, believing that he “could gently direct them towards the ends” he desired. He makes peace, too, with the end of his own story. More than anything, this book, published the day after Barnes’s eightieth birthday, is a letter to his readers—a thank-you, and a goodbye.

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• 
  Volga Blues

  by Marzio G. Mian, translated by Elettra Pauletto (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  In this travelogue of the Volga River—“Russia’s epicenter of culture, faith, and identity”—an undercover journalist grapples with contemporary Russia. Between the river’s source, entrusted to an order of Orthodox nuns, and its southern delta, where caviar bound for the Kremlin is harvested, the author journeys through a defiant country transformed by war, sanctions, and reinvigorated patriotism. Braiding snapshots of the present with history, Mian depicts a country haunted by threats to its national integrity, where people have come to believe that “questioning their leaders . . . creates social conflict and exposes the country to foreign occupation”—a tension that, he argues, has arisen in Western democracies as well.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Snakes That Ate Florida

  by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  In this collection of essays, reported pieces, and criticism dating back to the nineteen-seventies, Frazier’s sharp eye for finding the complex in the quotidian is on full display. From tales about monster trucks and the Maraschino-cherry empire to musings about lantern flies and Lolita, the collection—much of which was published in this magazine—spotlights the vibrancy of topics often under-noticed. In the playful and diligent hands of the seasoned staff writer, these ordinary things feel extraordinary.

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• 
  Island at the Edge of the World

  by Mike Pitts (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

  The belief that Indigenous monuments, like those on Easter Island, must have been made by outsiders has long shaped Western accounts of such cultural achievements. In this crisp, confident, and convincing new account of the island—known to its inhabitants as Rapa Nui—and of its chroniclers, Pitts, a British archeologist, calls theories of lost European civilizations and alien drop-ins “demonstrable claptrap.” Yet, he argues, a much more reputable but equally insulting theory about Easter Island has remained influential, even dominant: the idea that the island is a cautionary tale of a people who destroyed themselves and their paradise. The story he tells—drawing on new archeological findings, a fresh reading of eighteenth-century visitors’ accounts, and a reconsideration of the archaeologist Katherine Routledge’s neglected work—is quite different, and reflects a broader shift in the consensus around Rapa Nui studies.

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  Read more: “Easter Island and the Allure of “Lost Civilizations”,” by Margaret Talbot
• 
  Jean

  by Madeleine Dunnigan (Norton)

  Fiction

  An English boarding school for troubled boys is the backdrop of this quiet yet accomplished début novel, set in 1976. Jean, one of the school’s teen-age charges, is the child of a single mother—a Jewish woman who was sent away from Berlin as a child, during the Second World War. Though something of an outcast, Jean finds snatches of intense companionship with another boy, with whom he has secret lakeside trysts at night, and whose fondness for Jean waxes and wanes, often depending on whether they are alone. While the novel stages Jean’s experience of being “driven uncontrollably” by desire, it also examines the weight of his and his family’s history—and the imperfect self-awareness of a young person carrying great pain.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Hated by All the Right People

  by Jason Zengerle (Crooked Media Reads)

  Nonfiction

  Zengerle, a staff writer at The New Yorker, first met Tucker Carlson in 1997, when Zengerle was an intern at The New Republic and Carlson was a star reporter at The Weekly Standard. Carlson, who was not yet thirty, “seemed so much older, wiser, and worldlier,” Zengerle writes in his new biography. “He had a wicked sense of humor and a strong contrarian streak.” Zengerle set out to investigate—in a thoroughly reported, often hilariously told portrait—how Carlson went from a gifted young political writer to the leader of a right-wing media ecosystem that has become increasingly beholden to the viewpoints of Donald Trump. An excerpt appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  One Bad Mother

  by Ej Dickson (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

  When being a good mother represents a structurally unattainable standard, it’s no wonder there has been a countervailing embrace of the opposite identity, that of the self-declared “bad mother.” Dickson counts herself among such mothers, listing the credentials that earn her the badge of dishonor. “I text my friends Patti LuPone TikToks while Marco is on the floor playing with his toys,” she writes. “I don’t enjoy pretend play or cooking or cleaning or birthday parties.” Dickson, who is a senior writer at The Cut, satirizes the good mom she fails to be and offers a brisk tour of the bad-mother trope as it now circulates in popular culture, from the question of how mothers are meant to combine parenthood with paid work to considerations of the stage mom and the MILF. Dickson writes with a refreshing absence of self-pity, and with empathy even for mothers whose practices and preferences differ vastly from her own.

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  Read more: “What Makes a Good Mother?,” by Rebecca Mead
• 
  Bernie for Burlington

  by Dan Chiasson (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  In 1971, Bernie Sanders moved to Burlington and made his first run for the U.S. Senate, winning 2.2 per cent of the vote. That same year, blocks away from Sanders’s apartment, Dan Chiasson was born. Chiasson, a poet, a longtime contributor to this magazine, and the chair of the English department at Wellesley, had a front-row seat to Sanders’s rise, and his revelatory new book is nearly as much a memoir of its author as it is a biography of its subject and, not least, a history of the Green Mountain State. Sanders’s attraction to Vermont can be traced back to a moment when he, as a young man, came across a brochure from a Vermont travel bureau. “It is no small irony,” Chiasson writes, “that hill farms marketed to well-heeled city people piqued the interest of a thirteen-year-old Brooklyn Jew and future socialist who would arguably do more to impact Vermont’s traditional culture than anyone in the state’s history.”

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  Read more: “When Bernie Sanders Headed for the Hills,” by Jill Lepore
• 
  Everything Is Photograph

  by Patricia Albers (Other Press)

  Nonfiction

  This biography tracks the triumphs and the travails of the twentieth-century Hungarian photographer André Kertész. Kertész’s compositions are notably strange—often off center and taken from high angles, they appear like nervous half glances at scenes of pedestrian shuffle—and many are reproduced here, enriched by thorough commentary by Albers. Her exploration of Kertész’s time as an infantryman in the First World War is especially illuminating, as she documents the curiously “flirtatious tender touch” with which he photographed his surroundings. This kind of artistic contradiction becomes a theme, as Albers unfurls details about Kertész’s romantic life, his move to America, and his later fame.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  This Is Where the Serpent Lives

  by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Mueenuddin’s powerfully absorbing novel charts the intricate interplay between landowners and their servants in a feudal Pakistan. Among other narratives, he traces the trajectory of one man, Bayazid—orphaned, or abandoned, as a young child in the years after Partition—who comes to accept that, though he may have left his lowly job at a tandoori stall behind, he will never rise beyond his role as a chauffeur to a wealthy family. Years later, Saqib, a similarly ambitious young man, whom Bayazid has championed, dreams of acquiring some of the riches of his employers but instead discovers that his deviously brilliant scheming could destroy him. Parts of the novel first appeared in The New Yorker.

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