Halfway through the year and so many great books. Our favorite is the amazing short story collection Brawler by Lauren Groff. Here are our Best Books of 2026 (so far).
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Best Books of 2026 (so far)
I am the Ghost Here by Kim Samek
A woman’s limbs disappear into “the cloud” during wildfire-induced power outages. A lonely DoorDasher accidentally becomes the star of someone else’s reality show, forced to resolve her fraught relationship with her immigrant mother for the narrative. Succumbing to a widely denied pandemic, a gymnastics coach must carry her heart around in a Mason jar, using her disability to become an influencer. Two chronically single, chronically ill people become soulmates, only to discover their meeting was algorithmically orchestrated by ad tech. Other dramas unfold as icebergs melt and island-sized trash heaps burn.
Threaded with sharp social commentary, these stories question the engineering of human connection through technology, social media, and reality television. Warm, endlessly strange, and filled with dark yet hopeful humor, I Am the Ghost Here casts familiar crises of contemporary life in a wholly unique light, offering a pathway towards our shared humanity even as reality comes crumbling down.
This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Moving from Pakistan’s sophisticated cities to its most rural farmlands, This Is Where the Serpent Lives captures the extraordinary proximity of extreme wealth to extreme poverty in a land where fate is determined by class and social station.
Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Lives paints a powerful portrait of contemporary feudal Pakistan and a farm on which the destinies of a dozen unforgettable characters are linked through violence and love, resilience, and tragedy. Yazid rises from abject poverty to the role of trusted servant to an affluent gangster; Saqib, an errand boy, is eventually trusted to lead his boss’s new farming venture, where he becomes determined to rise above his rank by any means necessary. Saqib’s boss, the wealthy landowner Hisham, reminisces about meeting his wife while she was dating his brother while Gazala, a young teacher, falls for Saqib and his bold promises for their future before learning about his plans to skim money from the farm’s profits.
In matters of both business and the heart, Mueenuddin’s characters struggle to choose between the paths that are moral and the paths that will allow them to survive the systems of caste, capital, and social power that so tightly grip their country.
Kin by Tayari Jones
Vernice and Annie are ‘cradle friends’, both born in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, both destined never to know their mothers. The girls are inseparable, bound by a friendship far deeper than sisterhood, but as they grow up, their lives start to look very different in the segregated America of the 1950s and 60s.
Both girls leave Honeysuckle in search of something that might fill the hole left by their absent mothers: a university education, the promise of a first love affair, the hope offered by the simmering civil rights movement. But it is Annie whose bad decisions pull her into a world of danger, leaving her oldest friend to battle to save her.
Tayari Jones returns with an exuberant, richly told novel about mothers and daughters, about a lifelong friendship, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South.
Eradication by Jonathan Miles
A moving fable in which a grieving man, confronts a broken world on an island overpopulated by goats.
Reeling from tragedy, a former jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher named Adi answers a job listing advertising a chance to save the world. The assignment: to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora and reckon with its invasive population of goats that’s sent the ecological balance severely out of whack..
What follows, however, is anything but balanced. The threats to the once-Edenic island, Adi soon learns, aren’t exactly what his employers said they were – and, complicating things further, he discovers he’s not alone on the island. Fearful for his own life, and for the fate of the island, Adi spends his sun-drenched days rooting out the true threat to Santa Flora, and, by extension, to the world it occupies – and the desperate steps he must take to eradicate it.
Eradication is an utterly unforgettable reading experience and the work of a truly singular imagination.
The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard
London. 1985. A city rife with possibility and desire. One young man who wants it all.
Kristian Hadeland, newly arrived in the city, seethes with ambition and contempt. His family in Norway never understood him; his fellow photography students bore him. But he knows he and his art are destined for more.
Then he meets Hans, an eccentric Dutch artist. With Hans, the future Kristian yearns for is tangible. All art is possible. Any line can be crossed.
But success comes at a price. And when Kristian does the unthinkable, will he be prepared to pay it?
Electrifying and unflinching, The School of Night is a singular novel about artistic creation and human corruption. It is the story of one terrible man’s rise and fall, and a reckoning with the darkest parts of human nature.
Whistler by Ann Patchett
When Daphne notices an older gentleman following her around the Met museum in New York, she doesn’t expect it to be Eddie – her former stepfather.
Married to her mother for a short time when Daphne was nine, she hasn’t seen Eddie for many years; not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives.
But meeting again now, time falls away; while their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both. And reflecting on the short, intense time they spent with each other, they begin to piece together the moments that have defined them and shaped who they have become.
A moving, luminous story about how family, memory, and love endures, Whistler paints an intimate portrait of how the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change everything.
Transcription by Ben Lerner
The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has travelled to Providence, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor, and the father of his college friend, Max. But after the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.
What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to each other, that store or obliterate the memories that make us who we are.
Underwater by Tara Menon
When six-year-old Marissa loses her mother, she is taken by her father to live on a small Thai island in the Andaman Sea. There, she forms a deep friendship with Arielle and together they explore the fragile wonders of its forests, reefs, and beaches. Holding their breath for minutes at a time, they learn to dive into the deep, as effortlessly synchronized as the manta rays they come to know by name. Then, on Boxing Day 2004, when the Indian Ocean tsunami makes landfall, they are swept up by the first wave and separated.
Eight years later, Marissa is living in New York. She spends her days wandering through the city and her nights seeking solace in the beds of strangers. As the city prepares for a devastating storm, Marissa reflects on her past and learns how to sustain herself in a precarious world.
Under Water is a story about friendship and grief, but also ecological change and natural disasters. It is a meditation on loss, a tribute to our dying oceans and forests, and a love letter to the disappearing coral reefs.
She Who Remains by Rene Karabash
High in the Accursed Mountains, in a village ruled by the ancient laws of the Kanun, Bekija escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin, renouncing her womanhood to live as a man. Her decision sets off a brutal chain of events, destroying her family and separating her from the one she loves the most.
Years later, as Bekija – now Matija – tells their story to a visiting journalist, long-buried truths come to light, along with the realization of all that might have been.
Brawler by Lauren Groff
Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region – from New England to Florida to California – these nine stories reflect and expand upon a single shared theme: the ceaseless battle between the dark and light in all of us.
Among those caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling; a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult; a mother blinded by the loss of her family; and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by human fallibility, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can.
Precise, surprising and provocative, anchored by profound insight into human nature, Brawler reveals the repeated fracture points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and survival. It is a timeless, stunning achievement from one of the very best short story writers working today.
Good People by Patmeena Sabit
The Sharaf family is the picture of success. They arrived in America as refugees with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. And now, after years of hard work, they live in the most exclusive neighbourhood, their growing family attending the most prestigious schools. Zorah, the eldest daughter, is the apple of her father’s eye.
But when Zorah dies in an unthinkable tragedy, the family is thrust into the court of public opinion. There is talk that the Sharafs’ happy household was anything but, and soon the veneer of the model immigrant family starts to crumble.
Those who knew her best – and those who never met her – all have an opinion on who Zorah really was, and what really happened to her…
Told through the chorus of voices surrounding the Sharafs, Good People is a riveting, provocative and unforgettable story of community, family and identity.
Upward Bound by Woody Brown
Woody Brown’s vibrant and profoundly moving debut novel takes us to sun-bleached California, to a daycare centre for Los Angeles’s disabled community.
Among the clients and staff are Carlos, a charismatic aide who lost his mother as a boy, and Jorge, who is gentle, nonspeaking and prone to escape despite Carlos’s best efforts. Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy, pines for Ann, the lifeguard for the summer who feels out of her depth. Then there’s Dave, the centre’s director. He wanted to be an actor, but finds himself on a very different path.
At the heart of Upward Bound is Walter, a recent college student returning to the company of his peers after a family tragedy. Around him, a story unfolds of friendships forged, connections missed and the dreams – some new, others almost forgotten – that shape us. With his wit, empathy and astonishing gifts as a storyteller, Woody Brown immerses us in life as we have never experienced it before.
If you enjoyed out 12 Best Books of 2026 (so far), check out 15 Best Books of 2025