7 January 2026

The best non-fiction to read this year

From memoirs by politicians to biographies of poets, this will be a year in which life-writing abounds

James Baldwin. Illustration by Shannon Scates

Ours is the era of Everybody’s Autobiography, and 2026 will not disappoint with a bonanza of memoirs by politicians, actors and rock celebrities. Mostly they amount to solipsistic spouting. However, one memoir I am looking forward to is Brian Dillon’s Ambivalence (Fitzcarraldo, May). In glancingly allusive prose, Dillon conjures his native Dublin in the 1980s and 1990s, when he lost both his parents to illness but found a consolation in literature. The book’s amalgam of confession, anecdote and essay is triumphantly Dillon’s own. When is a life worth telling? The Village on the Edge of the World: Writing and Surviving Ceaușescu’s Romania (Granta, May) by the Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller, is certain to be brilliant: Müller was born in Romania’s German-speaking region, where Nazi misrule was superseded in the postwar years by communist misrule. Expect grim revelations.

Melvyn Bragg’s account of his formative years at Oxford University, Another World (Sceptre, February), promises to be droll. And I’m eager for Christopher de Hamel’s The Migrants: A Memoir with Manuscripts (Allen Lane, April), in which the author recounts his childhood spent in drab 1950s New Zealand. (De Hamel, an illuminated manuscripts expert, can make anything interesting.) If you’re in the market for political memoir, Sajid Javid’s portrait of his childhood as the son of Punjabi immigrants, The Colour of Home: Growing up in 1970s Britain (Abacus, February), and the Bradford-born Labour MP Naz Shah’s Honoured: Survival, Strength and My Path to Politics (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, March), are likely to be bestsellers.

I look forward to a number of biographies. Top of the list is Baldwin: A Love Story (Bloomsbury, March) by Nicholas Boggs, which exalts James Baldwin as the most important black literary voice of mid-20th-century America. John Berger is a difficult quarry for biographers but Tom Overton’s The Storyteller: John Berger’s Lives (Verso, September) reveals all there is to reveal about the counter-cultural novelist and critic. Another standout biography is Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life (Bloomsbury, July) by Gerald Martin, a comprehensive account of the Peruvian novelist’s literary and political career. Grigori Rasputin (in the words of Boney M, Russia’s “greatest love machine”) is the subject of Antony Beevor’s Rasputin: And the Downfall of the Romanovs (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, March).

Traditional cradle-to-crematorium biography is not dead yet. Peter Ackroyd, whose lives of Blake, Dickens and Turner were so memorable, will publish his Auden (Reaktion, March), an account of WH Auden and his circle. The travel writer Jan Morris already has a biography out (by Paul Clements), but Sara Wheeler’s Jan Morris: A Life (Faber, April) surely will improve on it. Not quite biography, but almost, is Caroline Bicks’ Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton, April). King, a horror writer of towering brilliance, has found his match in Bicks, who trawls like a ghoul through his life and private archives. On different territory is Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant (Reaktion, February) by Robert C Austin and Artan R Hoxha, which reappraises the life of the Albanian communist dictator known for his vengefulness but also for his love of Norman Wisdom films.

Many of the history books to look out for in 2026 chronicle the once mighty USSR, the last colonial empire on Earth. In Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991 (Allen Lane, January), Mark B Smith considers the lives of ordinary Russians trapped in the post-Stalin dictatorship, while Robert Service, one of the world’s great Russia hands, returns with The August Coup: The Destruction of the Soviet Union and the Making of New Russia 1985-1991 (Picador, June), which examines in forensic detail the last days in power of the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who learned too late that an absolutist regime is at its most vulnerable when it sets out to reform itself. Some big names have Second World War histories out next year. Ian Buruma, former editor of the New York Review of Books and a first-rate historian, publishes Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945 (Atlantic, March), an account of Nazi Berlin during the final years of the Hitler nightmare. In the summer, Martin Sixsmith brings out Suing the Kremlin: The Battle for Putin’s Billions (Swift, June), in which Vladimir Putin emerges as a kleptocrat in the megalomaniac lineage of Tsar Ivan IV, known to history as Ivan the Terrible.

For readers drawn to Middle Eastern affairs, Daniel Neep’s A History of Modern Syria (Allen Lane, January) looks salutary and sobering. I’m excited, too, by the prospect of Loubna Mrie’s Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion and Survival in Syria (Little, Brown, February), which chronicles the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal 24-year rule. Adjacent to Mrie’s memoir-reportage, but equally compelling, is Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life: Voices from Gaza (Fitzcarraldo, May), in which the Syrian author and filmmaker Samar Yazbek deploys interviews and raw observation in her account of the Israel-Gaza conflict. (The book’s title is adapted from one of the flyers dropped by the Israeli military.) The prolific Simon Sebag Montefiore is back with The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, August), an authoritative history of how the Middle East under Ottoman rule became the Middle East of today. Moving on to Central Asia, the great American journalist Jon Lee Anderson, whose 2010 life of Che Guevara was a masterpiece, will publish his collected writings on Afghanistan in To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban (Fitzcarraldo, February). The collection is bound to be superb.

Amid the abundance of books on Italy for 2026, I could not be more excited about A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul (Chatto & Windus, February) by Caroline Moorehead, an appraisal of the great Sicilian detective novelist and essayist Leonardo Sciascia and his diatribes against Mafia corruption and clan loyalty. Relatedly, Ryan Gingeras’s eagerly anticipated Mafia: A Global History (Simon & Schuster, February) offers a social history of organised crime in Sicily, as well as in Russia, Japan and the US.

Venetian Jewry is commemorated in all its millennial glory in Ghetto: The Jews of Venice (Picador, March) by Alexander Lee, while the Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto, author of Primo Levi’s Resistance, investigates the life of a little-known French proto-fascist and anti-Semite in The First Fascist: The Life and Legacy of the Marquis de Morès (Allen Lane, February).

Much travel writing is deservedly maligned but I like the sound of Borrowed Land: A Highland Story (Jonathan Cape, April) by Kapka Kassabova, a hosannah to a Scottish glen and its inhabitants. Unsurprisingly, the popular science books on offer for 2026 are concerned above all with AI. In Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming our Relationships (Faber, January), James Muldoon turns an appalled eye on human-computer interactions. No less the stuff of sci-fi dystopia is Adrian Woolfson’s On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence (Bloomsbury, February), which considers the ungodly convergence of AI and synthetic biology. For those who have not yet had enough of politics, Centrists of the World Unite! The Lost Genius of Liberalism (Allen Lane, March), by the Economist journalist Adrian Wooldridge, warns against the dangers of autocracy and the new “populism”. Anthony Seldon’s forthcoming book on Rishi Sunak, Sunak at 10: The Last Conservative Prime Minister (Atlantic, May) will be an absorbing, if not to say quite dispiriting, read. Ditto, Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unravelling of the Conservative Mind (Scribe, February), Jason Zengerle’s portrait of one of Trump’s more fluent ideologues.

In music and culture, Vocal Break, by the essayist and feminist commentator Lauren Elkin (Chatto & Windus, May), looks at the power and plurality of women’s singing voices through the decades, from Maria Callas to Beyoncé. I’m keen to get my hands on copies of Jim Windolf’s Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other – and the World (White Rabbit, April) and After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace by Robert Polito (Liveright, March). The consolation and beauty of the music composed by the jazz harpist Alice Coltrane is explored in Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane (White Rabbit, March) by Andy Beta, already hailed in the US as a feat of “lyrical and cinematic storytelling”.

I’ll close with a couple of books that are not so easy to categorise. A Chorus of Ears: On “the Voice of the Poem” (Picador, June) is a collection of lectures Denise Riley gave recently at Cambridge University on the role of language in our lives: the book is bound to be wondrous, as Riley is one of the great poets of our time. And finally: booze. The illusion of drink-fuelled happiness is familiar to many of us at New Year’s, even if the hangover seems a cruel price to pay. Why We Drink Too Much: The Hidden Science of Just One More by Dr Charles Knowles (Macmillan, January) should provide be a sobering warning for all.

[Further reading: Books of the year 2025]