Word has it we’re in a post-literate age; thankfully, novelists haven’t yet got the memo. The 12 months throng with exciting new titles from authors young and old, with no little measure of additional intrigue in the decisions to be made by a lively Booker prize panel that includes, among others, the classicist Mary Beard, Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and the American novelist Patricia Lockwood, who recently predicted that the rise of AI slop and internet-fried attention spans will herald a welcome resurgence of “weird literature with a stronger human fingerprint”. The kind of fiction she’s looking out for, she said, has its own “language, customs, time zone”.
The year opens with a clutch of books exploring leave-takings and exits of various kinds. Departure(s) (Jonathan Cape, January), possibly Julian Barnes’s final novel, is a teasing meditation on memory and mortality, while George Saunders returns, after winning the Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo in 2017, with Vigil (Bloomsbury, January), a novel about a dying oil executive reckoning with his life’s work. In The Delusions (Hutchinson Heinemann, March), the fifth novel by Scottish author Jenni Fagan, the afterlife is a bureaucratic dystopia; in Amie Barrodale’s debut Trip (Jonathan Cape, February), it allows a dead mother to come to the aid of her neurodivergent son.
Religious belief is something novelists seem curious about once again, especially when it rubs up against sex and desire. The British-American poet Stephanie Sy-Quia’s sensitive first novel, A Private Man (Picador, February), draws on the true story of her grandfather, a Catholic priest. Louder, brasher, hornier is My Lover, the Rabbi (Granta, March), from the US cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum. Brandon Taylor, Booker-shortlisted for his debut Real Life, turns away from campus fiction for the first time in his fourth book, Minor Black Figures (Jonathan Cape, March), about a same-sex encounter between a painter and a lapsed cleric during a sultry New York summer. An ex-seminarian is also at the heart of Communion (Atlantic, April), an absorbing first novel by the Welsh writer Jon Doyle, whose main character abandons the Church for precarious employment as a security guard at a closure-threatened steelworks.
Uneasy homecomings are key to Kae Tempest’s Having Spent Life Seeking (Jonathan Cape, April), about a non-binary convict fresh out of jail, and John of John (Picador, May), a third novel from Douglas Stuart, who won the Booker Prize with Shuggie Bain (2020). The book’s gay protagonist returns to his family in the Outer Hebrides, broke after graduating from art school.
The politics of rich and poor across the countries of the Global South play out to powerful effect in Daniyal Mueenuddin’s Pakistan-set panorama of feudal conflict, This Is Where the Serpent Lives (Bloomsbury, January), and in Tahmima Anam’s Uprising (Canongate, May), about enslaved sex workers in climate-threatened Bangladesh. Ecological crisis appears, too, in Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost Eye (John Murray, April), a family saga set between 1960s Calcutta and post-Covid Brooklyn. The trials of Lebanon are the backdrop to Rabih Alameddine’s tragicomic tapestry about a teacher living with his mum in Beirut, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Corsair, February), winner of last year’s National Book Award in the US.
The East Asian translation boom continues. Mieko Kawakami, author of international bestseller Breasts and Eggs, returns with Sisters in Yellow (Picador, March), in which four young women open a bar in 1990s Tokyo. Asako Yuzuki looks set to repeat the global success of her culinary murder mystery, Butter, with Hooked (4th Estate, March), her novel about a perilous parasocial bond between two Japanese women. Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue (& Other Stories, March) is a metafictional lesbian romance between a writer and an interpreter, styled as a rediscovered colonial-era novel in translation, complete with footnotes.
A trip to Taiwan also emerges as the focus of Taipei Story by RF Kuang (Borough Press, September), the Yellowface author’s seventh novel in eight years. This one is coming-of-age story set during a year abroad. Other big US novels this year include Ben Lerner’s Transcription (Granta, April) and Valeria Luiselli’s Beginning Middle End (4th Estate, July), both authors who operate teasingly on the edge of autobiography.
Of course, there is no such reserve in France’s youngest literary star, Édouard Louis, famous for his self-baring cycle of novels. This year, two instalments are released in English, Monique Escapes (Harvill Secker, January), in which his put-upon mother takes centre stage, and Collapse (Harvill Secker, June), in which his late half-brother does; both teeter characteristically between fiction, memoir and sociology.
Other novel cycles continuing or concluding in 2026 include Leïla Slimani’s I’ll Take the Fire (Faber, April), in which the Lullaby author brings the fictionalised story of her French-Moroccan bloodline into the post-pandemic present. Sebastian Barry’s The Newer World (Faber, September) picks up the action of his prize-winning Days Without End in the company of a freed slave after the American Civil War. Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine (Fleet, July) is a sequel to his previous New York crime capers, following stolen-goods middleman Ray Carney into the 1980s Wall Street boom.
Three new novels give a shot in the arm to the adultery plot. John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do (Faber, March) is a dark revenge comedy about a woman whose 30-year marriage is uncannily echoed in a hit TV show. Lust sparks between two new parents at a baby group in Erin Somers’s hugely enjoyable The Ten-Year Affair (Canongate, January). Sophie Mackintosh’s Permanence (Hamish Hamilton, April) features a pair of adulterous lovers who dream of ditching their everyday obligations – before they wake up in a city populated only by unfaithful couples.
A similarly eye-catching premise is to be found in Amanda Craig’s 11th novel, High and Low (Abacus, May), about a group of writers forced to take shelter in a London café under armed siege. Will Self’s topical satire The Quantity Theory of Morality (Grove, March) calls back to his 1991 debut, The Quantity Theory of Insanity. Tibor Fischer, another of Granta’s best young British novelists from the class of 1993, returns in My Bags Are Big (Salt, February), a bitcoin satire set in Dubai.
Of debuts, Brodie Crellin’s A Sense of Occasion (Jonathan Cape, June), about estranged cousins coming together after a bereavement, will raise eyebrows with its prolonged passages of graphic sex. Djamel White’s edgy gangland novel, All Them Dogs (John Murray, March), is told by a Dublin drug lord’s hired muscle. UK readers will finally get a chance to discover the reason behind the buzz across the Atlantic about Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds (Canongate, April), which follows two friends in the art scene of 1990s New York. In Max Lury’s No Ghosts (Peninsula Press, April), astringent comic realism is twinned with an eerie plot about Big Tech’s power to reframe death.
Past winners of the New Statesman Goldsmiths Prize for mould-breaking fiction return in idiosyncratic style. Ali Smith’s Glyph (Hamish Hamilton, January), a standalone companion to 2024’s Gliff, is a playful and political tale of two sisters. As If (Hamish Hamilton, February), by Isabel Waidner – one of Britain’s most exciting writers – turns on a meeting between two men whose circumstances are symmetrically opposed.
Deborah Levy, twice shortlisted for the Goldsmiths and the Booker, returns with My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein (Hamish Hamilton, April) – a novel that doesn’t sound like one – in which a woman wrestles with the significance of the celebrated modernist. Rousseau’s Lost Children (John Murray, February), by the Irish writer Gavin McCrea, does something similar, splitting its action between 18th-century Paris and the present. Also weaving fiction around real-life figures is Sophie Ward’s Our Better Natures (Corsair, February), set in 1970s America and featuring as characters the anti-pornography activist Andrea Dworkin and the American poet Muriel Rukeyser.
Old-school storytelling is equally well represented this year, with new novels from Ann Patchett – Whistler (Bloomsbury, June) – and fellow Orange Prize-winner Tayari Jones, who returns with Kin (Oneworld, March), about the lifelong bond between two girls who come of age in the Jim Crow era.
One of literary publishing’s growth industries is reissuing forgotten gems dug up from the backlist. Who can resist Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was (Penguin Classics, July), a story collection by the Argentine speculative realist Angélica Gorodischer (1928-2022)? The text was first published in 1983 and translated 20 years later by the late Ursula K Le Guin, who liked the book so much she learned Spanish properly to translate it. Equally intriguing is Woman Alive (Manderley Press, March), a 1936 post-pandemic dystopia by Susan Ertz, a forgotten contemporary of Orwell and Huxley, attractively repackaged with an introduction by Graham Norton and illustrations by Tom Gauld. Javier Cercas’s The Anatomy of a Moment, about the failed 1981 coup in Spain, is also interesting: originally published in English only 15 years ago by Bloomsbury, it’s being rebadged by Fitzcarraldo in August as a non-fiction novel. Will its track record of snapping up rights to future Nobel winners lead to shorter odds on Cercas – a long-standing also-ran – getting a call from Stockholm?
I’ve said nothing yet about some of the books that most interest me personally this year, among them The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley (Picador, April), one of Britain’s best novelists, and Luke Kennard’s Black Bag (John Murray, March), about an out-of-work actor hired by a psychology lecturer for an experiment, which had me laughing from page one. I can’t wait to get lost in M John Harrison’s The End of Everything (Serpent’s Tail, June), billed as a seaside novel of typically unspecified catastrophe; ditto, the Hawthorn & Child author Keith Ridgway’s Dooneen (Fitzcarraldo, June), whose protagonist, walking through a London park, suddenly finds himself in Dublin. And then there’s a new novel by China Miéville, flying solo this time after co-writing The Book of Elsewhere with Keanu Reeves. The Rouse (Picador, September) is said to be a continent-spanning epic about a woman stumbling on “dark conspiracies” and provoking attention from “uncanny forces”. Twenty years in the making, 1,264 pages long, it sounds like just the ticket for at least one of this year’s Booker judges.
[Further reading: Books of the year 2025]
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This article appears in the 07 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, What Trump wants
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