The Books I’m Looking Forward to in 2026

A few weeks ago, Jake Casella Brookins posted on BlueSky: “curmudgeonly thought this morning is that “anticipation” is bad for arts & art culture”. Which, given how much the “most anticipated” genre has blown up over the last decade, with just about every entertainment news venue posting lists of movies, TV shows, comics, video games, and yes, books to read in the coming year, is a sentiment that makes sense. I wish I could say the more modest title of this series of posts—these are the books I’m looking forward to, not my most anticipated ones—was a calculated strike against that industry, but to be honest I don’t remember why I chose it. What I will say, in an exciting peek behind the curtain, is that these are not all the titles I have jotted down in the endless text document in which I log books I might want to read and review. They’re the ones that I think I could persuasively peddle to other people (hence the perhaps exaggerated presence of books by authors whose previous work I’ve loved). If that sounds interesting, read on, or sound off in the comments about the books you’re looking forward to.

January:

Vigil by George Saunders – Arguably the greatest short story writer of his generation, Saunders proved that he was just as nimble and surprising at novel length with 2017’s Lincoln in the Bardo. His new novel is, similarly, a story about the afterlife, in which figures from the past and present gather at the deathbed of an oil tycoon.

The Iron Garden Sutra by A.D. Sui – When a derelict, centuries-old generation ship shows up in orbit of their planet, the team of archeologists assigned to study the wreck is joined by a monk who plans the lay the ship’s dead to rest. Things do not go exactly to plan. I greatly enjoyed Sui’s debut novella, The Dragonfly Gambit, and their first novel is even better.

February:

The Forest on the Edge of Time by Jasmin Kirkbride – I’ve had the privilege of speaking with Jasmin several times in recent conventions, where she’s spoken with incredible insight about the capabilities and potential of climate fiction. Now she’s turning her own hand to the subject, with a novel about two women who travel in time to prevent climate catastrophe.

Loss Protocol by Paul McAuley – For more than thirty years, McAuley has been writing erudite, thought-provoking science fiction in a variety of modes. Though hardly unsung, he sometimes feels like a writer’s writer, not always getting the recognition he deserves. It was those writers, however—chiefly Adam Roberts—who informed me that Loss Protocol, a noir-inflected climate thriller, was not to be missed.

The Best of Adrian Tchaikovsky – I’m not going to list every forthcoming Adrian Tchaikovsky book in this post, or there would be no room for anyone else. But as far as works that I’m personally interested in are concerned, this collection of his short fiction is at the top of the list. Best known for his novels, Tchaikovsky is no less compulsively readable at a shorter length.

Pretenders to the Throne of God by Adrian Tchaikovsky – The reason the short story collection is at the top of my anticipated Tchaikovsky books for 2026 is that I have already read (and reviewed, see Locus in February) this book, the fifth installment in his Tyrant Philosophers series. I recently wrote about why I think this wide-ranging, stunningly imaginative fantasy series is Tchaikovsky’s finest achievement, and this novel—which plants itself in the middle of a siege on a fantasy city—only confirms me in that opinion.

The Misheard World by Aliya Whiteley – The best kept secret in literary science fiction returns with another gut punch of a novel, a puzzle box that keeps pulling the rug out from under both its characters and its readers. In the midst of a brutal civil war, a young prison guard is tasked to observe the interrogation of an enemy agent. As she listens to his stories, she learns truths about her world that change her understanding of reality.

March:

Now I Surrender by Álvaro Enrigue – A novel about the Mexican-American wars by the author of the trippy, deliberately wrongfooting You Dreamed of Empires? Sign me up.

Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, Or, As the Bear Swore by Farah Mendlesohn – Critical studies of Joanna Russ, one of the key writers of the mid-century New Wave movement and of the flowering of feminist SF that accompanied it, are not nearly as plentiful as they should be. Famed SFF critic and academic Farah Mendlesohn is here to fill the gap with this look at Russ’s best-known—and, recently, most controversial—novel.

Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg – It’s been eight years since Rosenberg’s mind-blowing debut Confessions of the Fox, in which an eighteenth century crime story became a tale of trans liberation. His follow-up is described as the fictional memoir of a dying Jewish woman—who just happens to share Rosenberg’s last name. Which sounds like a complete departure, but is sure to be no less wild and unexpected.

Star Shipped by Cat Sebastian – In 2025 I read and enjoyed Sebastian’s We Could Be So Good and You Should Be So Lucky, both romances about gay men in 1950s New York. Her new novel seems a little less high stakes but also possibly more in tune with my interests—it’s about two actors on a long-running science fiction show who unexpectedly fall in love.

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford – You never quite know what you’re going to get with a new novel by Spufford, who has written historical fiction, alternate history, mainstream fiction, and other genres. His latest sounds like a blend of all of the above, combining Blitz-era London, time travel, and the new technology of television.

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood – If you haven’t read Wood’s Booker-nominated Stone Yard Devotional, in which a group of nuns in rural Australia grapple with the meaning and purpose of their calling, waste no time in seeking it out. For those of us who have already been blown away by that delicate yet unflinching work, comes a reprint of Wood’s 2015 novel, in which women who have spoken up about sexual abuse are imprisoned together.

April:

How to Fake it in Society by KJ Charles – After a brief foray in mystery and suspense fiction with novels such as Death in the Spires and All of Us Murderers, Charles returns to historical romance with this novel, about a con artist in 18th century London who unexpectedly falls in love with his mark.

If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Choyeop, translated by Anton Hur – Keeping up with Anton Hur’s output of translated Korean SFF is almost as daunting a task as keeping up with the writing of Adrian Tchaikovsky, but I’m choosing to highlight this short story collection because early reviews have compared it favorably to the writing of Ted Chiang.

Piper at the Gates of Dusk by Patrick Ness – It’s been fifteen years since Ness concluded the Chaos Walking trilogy, one of the finest series to emerge out of the YA craze of the early 00s, in which human colonists on an alien world grapple with both its local population and a force that turns men into projective telepaths. This new book picks up the story years later, with the juvenile protagonists now grown up and worrying about their own children.

The Illuminated Man: Life, Death, and the Worlds of J.G. Ballard by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan – At the time of his death in 2024, Christopher Priest was working on a biography of J.G. Ballard. It has now been completed by Priest’s wife, Nina Allan—herself a writer of SFF whose books have been mentioned in these posts many times—and doubles as a meditation on grief and loss.

What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed – In 1996, Reed published the cyberpunk novel The Fortunate Fall, and then faded away from the SFF community. She returns now, new name and pronoun in tow, with a novel about a castaway on an alien planet.

Questions 27 & 28 by Karen Tei Yamashita – Slipstreamy chronicler of the Japanese-American experience Yamashita sets her sights on the still-painful wound of Japanese internment. The title refers to the questions that required imprisoned Japanese-Americans to swear allegiance to a country that had dispossessed and interned them, and the novel followed the people who answered them and their descendants.

May:

Plastic, Prism, Void by Violet Allen – I’ve been waiting for a novel from Allen for years, but I’m not sure I expected her to deliver something this idiosyncratic. An interdimensional love story between a former goddess and a mech pilot, it describes itself as a romantasy but sounds much wilder and stranger than that.

Mostly Hero by Anna Burns – Milkman, Burns’s Booker-winning 2018 novel about a young woman in Northern Ireland trying to evade the attentions of an IRA commander, was an absolute adrenaline shot of a novel, effortlessly juggling its difficult subject matter with a stream of consciousness narrative and a surprising amount of humor. While we wait for her to take the top off our heads again with a new novel, her publishers are reaching into the past with this novella (originally self-published online), which is, unexpectedly and delightfully, a superhero story.

The Republic of Memory by Mahmud El Sayed – I’m always a sucker for generation ship stories, and this debut, which was inspired by the Arab Spring and follows a revolt against the ship’s class system, sounds right up my alley.

Radiant Star by Ann Leckie – Continuing to expand and complicate the setting of her Imperial Radch series, Leckie delivers a novel about a society about to join (or perhaps be absorbed by) that intergalactic empire, when a concession to local religious customs has ripple effects that touch all its levels.

June:

Foundling Fathers by Meg Elison – Described as “Hamilton meets The Boys From Brazil“, cheerful provocateur Elison’s novel imagines that right wing billionaires have cloned the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in the hopes of using them to usher in a new era of originalist government, and instead end up with rambunctious, uncontrollable teenagers on their hands.

The End of Everything by M. John Harrison – Now in his ninth decade, Harrison is still producing new and startling work. His latest novel is about a beachcomber in a post-collapse Europe who discovers something that might be an alien artifact, or an alien creature, and which upends his understanding of reality.

Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim – I was already looking forward to Kim’s debut novel based on her excellent short fiction, but when it was optioned for TV before its publication date was even announced, my anticipation rose to a fever pitch. Sublimation is set in a world in which immigrants divide themselves into two copies, one of which goes ahead while the other stays behind.

The Heart of the Nhaga by Lee Young-do, translated by Anton Hur – Describing an author as “the J.R.R. Tolkien of South Korea” may not be the most original way to get me interested in their work, but it’s at the very least intriguing. Epic fantasy has often been treated as the purview of Western authors, and it will be interesting to see how someone from a different context approaches it.

As If by Isabel Waidner – Author of the Clarke-nominated Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, in which aliens and otherworldly creatures help to express an author’s ambivalence about winning a mainstream literary award, Waidner shows off their determination to continue writing weird, unclassifiable novels with this story about two men who are each other’s equal and opposite, each having made the choices the other did not.

July:

Traitor’s Nest by Frances Hardinge – I’d like you to imagine that there is a giant klaxon at my house that begins blaring whenever Frances Hardinge, perhaps the best writer of YA fantasy since Diana Wynne Jones, announces a new novel. And after being silent for far too long, it is finally making some noise! Traitor’s Nest is set in a fantasy world where a mysterious Great Game treats the land like a game board and people like pawns.

We Were Forbidden by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz – BookTok rediscovered Belgian author Harpman a few years ago when it made a bestseller of her novel I Who Have Never Known Men. Publishers have been quick to capitalize—I reviewed another reissued Harpman novel, Orlanda, just a few months ago, and on the strength of that reading, I am very much looking forward to this volume, which collects several of her shorter pieces.

Lowly Creatures by Gaspard Koenig, translated by Stephanie Smee – Climate fiction is a growing and wide-ranging field, and one of its tendrils is fiction about species extinction and efforts to prevent it. Koenig’s novel is about two friends who band together to save the humble earthworm, and ropes in questions of class, and of how to live honestly in a world that seems bent on its own destruction.

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead – The third (and reputedly the last? Say it ain’t so, CW!) novel in the delightful, whip-smart Ray Carney series, Cool Machine returns to the sardonic Harlem furniture salesman and sometimes-crook in the 1980s, still dealing with economic downturns and upturns, with New York City’s transformations, and with an impulse towards crime when the system that is tilted against him shows its teeth.

August:

The Art of Charming a Changeling by Sylvie Cathrall – Regency-inspired romantasies are hardly uncommon these days, but what makes this example—in which a museum curator discovers that one of her paintings is inhabited by a fairy—intriguing is its author. Cathrall’s Sunken Archive duology, a pair of epistolary novels in which scientists explore an underwater world, was an unexpected delight, and I anticipate no less enjoyment from her new novel.

September:

Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel – Mandel erupted into global fame a decade ago with Station Eleven, a cozy post-apocalypse novel about what one keeps from the past, and what you leave behind (it was then made into one of the best, albeit little-watched, television series of the last few years). It’s perhaps unsurprising that her new novel focuses on a more violent sort of global calamity. Set in the period following the collapse of United States, it follows a woman trying to unravel a disappearance in a world where normality has been shattered.

October:

A Wall is Also a Road by Annalee Newitz – Getting in on the dark academia trend while the getting is good, Newitz puts their own unique spin on the material by imagining a grad student who is also an amoeba, who travels to an alien planet to study its inhabitants’ ways and hopefully pass their exams.

Frankenstein Rex by Adam Roberts – Long-gestating, this new novel by Roberts has a premise that sounds typically satirical: what if Frankenstein—the monster, not the scientist—was immortal, and so strong that he eventually came to rule the world? I expect gonzo inventiveness and a hefty philosophical underpinning.

Fall:

Alston Moor by Anne Charnock – Nearly a decade after winning the Clarke award with Dreams Before the Start of Time, Charnock returns with a new novel. Described as “a work of eco-fiction with two parallel storylines set 500 years apart”, it sounds like a departure from the more grounded science fiction of her previous work, but no less fascinating for it.

Murder School by Paul B. Rainey – Between Why Don’t You Love Me? and There’s No Time Like the Present, Rainey has made a name for himself as the author of graphic novels that are at once cutting meditations about middle class ennui, and mind-blowing science fiction stories. His new books is described as a fictionalization of his school years, but the publisher is already promising that there is more to the tale.