Discover the must-read literary fiction, thrillers and contemporary novels of the summer
Every year brings a new wave of books that readers can’t stop recommending: novels that dominate book clubs, spark conversations online and become the stories everyone is talking about.
Whether you’re looking for literary fiction, gripping thrillers, contemporary novels or exciting debut voices, these are the standout new releases worth adding to your reading list in 2026. Browse by genre, discover your next favourite author and find the latest books everyone is discussing.
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Best new literary fiction
Matilda works at Bocca, one of Sydney’s buzziest restaurants, where appetite is everywhere and control is everything. She has learned to suppress her cravings, including her desire for her celebrity chef boss, Colson, keeping her life carefully contained through strict rules and private rituals.Then her younger half-sister Lara returns to town, bringing with her the chaos of their family history and secrets Matilda has tried hard not to swallow.
Set between fine dining and emotional hunger, Jacqueline Maley’s novel is witty, unsettling and humane: a story about sisters, bodies and the past that refuses to stay buried.
Read if you like: Sweetbitter Luster The Bear , complicated sisters, dysfunctional families, women on the edge.
Close to the shore is a wild, uninhabited island with only a battered lighthouse for shelter. Ori was found there as a small child, carrying stones, with no memories and no mother. Years later, as she becomes a mother herself, sleeplessness and the pressure of care begin to loosen her grip on reality, drawing her back towards the mystery of her origins. In another strand, ten-year-old Ruth watches a woman and baby disappear into the river, only to be disbelieved and confined by her mother.
Daisy Johnson’s Long Wave is a hypnotic, unsettling novel about mothers, daughters, survival and escape.
Read if you like: Everything Under
After years living in a hostel for young homeless women, Jaycee finally has a place to call her own: a flat high above north London on the Sky City estate. Still haunted by a difficult childhood, she’s trying to build a new life when Sol, her first love and the boy who once looked out for her, unexpectedly returns.
Alongside Jaycee’s story, two other lives become entwined in a moving portrait of 1990s London, where loneliness gives way to friendship, community and the possibility of redemption. Jacqueline Crooks writes with warmth, lyricism and deep compassion.
Read if you like: Fire Rush Open Water
Rothko Taylor has returned to their hometown, Edgecliff, fifteen years after leaving it behind. Everywhere they look, the past presses close: the high street, the sea, their mother Meg, their father Ezra and Dionne, the person who once saw them more clearly than anyone else. Years ago, overwhelmed by fear, Rothko fell into chaos. Now, having survived, they are determined that life might turn out differently.
Kae Tempest’s first novel in a decade is a tender, searching story about family, desire, redemption and the communities that shape us.
Read if you like: Douglas Stuart, Max Porter, Shon Faye, state-of-Britain novels, homecoming stories, queer literary fiction, lyrical prose.
Unmissable 2026 debut books
In 1983, Becks is desperate to leave Cincinnati behind, but first she has to finish the computer game left by her late programmer uncle, the one person who truly understood her. That game will outlive Becks by centuries, shaping the lives of a scientist, an astronaut and a pirate captain in ways she could never imagine.
Spanning six hundred years, distant planets, sea voyages and future worlds, Homebound connects four pioneering women and a remarkable robot through creativity, loss and love. Portia Elan’s debut is expansive, tender and full of wonder.
'Eat bitter' is a Chinese proverb about enduring hardship in order to taste sweetness. For Lydia Pang, it becomes a way to understand both her Hakka ancestry and the difficult seasons of her own life: burnout, marriage, fertility struggles and caring for a parent.
Through eight recipes, Pang writes about food as memory, medicine and connection, from the egg noodles her father made when her sister was ill to bone broth cooked in New York and courgettes grown in rural Wales. Honest, sensory and unflinching, this is a book about what we inherit, what sustains us and how we keep going.
Set in sun-bleached California, Upward Bound takes place in a daycare centre for Los Angeles’s disabled community. Among its clients and staff are Carlos, a charismatic aide grieving the loss of his mother; Jorge, who is gentle, nonspeaking and prone to escape; Tom, a young man with cerebral palsy who develops feelings for Ann, the summer lifeguard; and Dave, the centre’s director, whose life has taken him far from his dreams of acting.
At the heart of the novel is Walter, a recent college student returning after a family tragedy. Woody Brown’s debut is vivid, funny and profoundly empathetic.
Read if you like: character-driven fiction, ensemble casts, stories of friendship, disability representation, warm literary debuts.
When Emma-Lee Moss was eleven, the soundtrack to her life was Cantopop. Growing up in Hong Kong in 1995, the city’s biggest stars seemed to be everywhere, their songs filling the streets and shaping her childhood. But when her family moved to England later that year, that music became a private connection to the home she had left behind.
Decades later, a chance encounter with a Cantopop song in a Hong Kong bar prompts Emma-Lee to reflect on family, migration, memory and identity in this lyrical memoir about the music that helped her understand herself.
Read if you like: Minor Feelings
Page-turning novels for book clubs and holidays
Jo and Dave’s marriage has been tested by years of failed IVF, grief and the small disappointments that quietly build over time. When they’re invited on an all-expenses-paid trip to a luxury Mediterranean resort by Dave’s wealthy brother Teddy, it seems like the perfect chance to escape. But beneath the sunshine, family tensions, old resentments and unspoken truths soon rise to the surface.
Set over one scorching weekend, Claire Powell’s warm, funny and emotionally perceptive novel explores marriage, family and how love survives when life refuses to go to plan.
Read if you like: The Wedding People Sandwich The White Lotus , family holidays gone wrong, marriage-in-crisis stories, sharply observed contemporary fiction.
Max is a brilliant pianist whose career has always been carefully managed by his beautiful twin sister, Natasha. But when he begins making mistakes on stage, the twins travel to Paris in search of a cure and find themselves staying in the mansion of the wealthy Count Henri. Away from the familiar structure of their shared life, Natasha’s resentment and Max’s insecurity begin to surface, especially as both become drawn into Henri’s orbit.
Set against the glamorous world of 1950s music and performance, Crescendo is a claustrophobic novel about genius, rivalry and the destructive force of wanting too much.
Modern dating is exhausting, and Daisy is beginning to wonder why so many brilliant women keep settling for disappointing men. After an awkward one-night stand with her frustrating friend James, she and her best friend Maya come up with a plan: The Project . If James can be transformed into the perfect boyfriend, perhaps dating doesn’t have to be such a disaster after all. But as Daisy spends more time with her unlikely test subject, she starts to question whether perfection is really what she’s been looking for.
Warm, witty and sharply observed, Annie Lord’s debut novel is a fresh, heartfelt romcom about love, friendship and the messy realities of dating today.
After twenty-five years of marriage, Adam and Jules discover a time machine hidden in their shed. Suddenly, they have the chance to revisit pivotal moments in their relationship, correcting old mistakes, rekindling lost romance and imagining how life might have turned out differently. But every trip into the past creates unexpected consequences, forcing them to ask whether a perfect marriage is really possible – or whether it’s their beautifully imperfect life that’s worth fighting for.
Warm, funny and full of charm, this is a joyful novel about love, second chances and growing old together.
The best new thrillers to binge
Adam and Aisha’s honeymoon is cut short by devastating news: Adam’s best friend has been murdered. Following the clues he left behind, the couple are drawn into an international conspiracy stretching from India to the United States, where powerful tech billionaires are racing to control a dangerous new form of weaponised AI. As the body count rises and the truth becomes increasingly dangerous, Adam and Aisha must decide who they can trust before they’re silenced too.
Fast-paced and thought-provoking, Eden Falls is a timely thriller about technology, power and the consequences of innovation without limits.
Read if you like: Dan Brown, Michael Crichton, AI thrillers, tech conspiracies, international mysteries.
Kayla has had enough of watching the richest people in the world profit while everyone else pays the price. When she joins forces with an unlikely group of allies, including an elderly millionaire with a surprising past, their campaign against corrupt billionaires begins with carefully chosen targets. But what starts as a series of acts of revenge soon becomes an international movement, attracting the attention of law enforcement on both sides of the Atlantic.
Provocative, funny and unexpectedly heartfelt, Anders Lustgarten’s thriller asks what justice looks like when the system no longer seems to work.
For centuries, St Cordula’s elite convent boarding school has been shaped by ritual, tradition and whispered legends. But as the school prepares for sweeping changes, an unsettling pattern begins to emerge: girls are collapsing one after another, and old stories about a fifteenth-century nun refuse to stay buried. As superstition gives way to scandal, Deputy Head Fiona Fox finds herself caught between preserving the school’s future and uncovering the truth behind its darkest secrets.
Richly atmospheric and fiendishly plotted, Erin Kelly’s latest thriller explores guilt, belonging and the dangers of disturbing the past.
Read if you like: The Secret History
Elena and Stu are exhausted. Their newborn never sleeps, their marriage is under strain and they’re barely keeping their heads above water. Then a company called More You offers an extraordinary solution: a clone of Elena to help with the endless demands of motherhood. At first, it feels like the answer to every problem. But as the other Elena settles into their home, she becomes calmer, more capable and increasingly difficult to distinguish from the original.
Disturbing and deeply addictive, The Other You explores identity, motherhood and the terrifying cost of convenience.
Read if you like: Gillian McAllister, Sarah Pinborough, Severance , speculative suspense, dystopian domestic thrillers.
Welcome to the Pinnacle, Mumbai’s grandest luxury skyscraper, where the world’s richest residents live alongside the workers who keep their lives running. Washed-up Hollywood star George Abercrombie hates almost everything about his new life there — until he wakes from a drunken blackout to find his wife, Bollywood superstar Sweety Sahota, murdered beside him. With no memory of the night before, George quickly becomes the prime suspect. As he tries to uncover the truth, missing evidence, blackmail and long-buried secrets reveal that everyone in the building has something to hide.
Darkly funny, brilliantly plotted and packed with twists, The Pinnacle is a gripping murder mystery set in a world where wealth and power conceal deadly truths.
Read if you like: Only Murders in the Building , The White Lotus , Mick Herron, Lucy Foley, locked-building mysteries, social satire, contemporary crime.
New in translated fiction
Widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of modern Chinese literature, Taipei People brings together fourteen interconnected stories about those who fled mainland China after the Communist victory in 1949. Living in Taipei but haunted by memories of the lives they left behind, Pai Hsien-yung’s unforgettable characters search for love, dignity and connection while navigating exile and profound loss.
Richly observed and emotionally resonant, these stories capture the longing for home and the enduring power of memory with extraordinary elegance and humanity.
Read if you like: Yiyun Li, Jhumpa Lahiri, Dubliners
In a future Korea, the wealthy escape a damaged world through virtual reality simulations of the past. High school student Soop, unable to access VR, is left behind in the real world and bullied by her classmates. Her comfort is K-pop — especially Yichae, one of the few remaining 'real' idols in a culture increasingly shaped by virtual perfection. When Yichae comes to film a music video at Soop’s school, the two are drawn together through music, loneliness and unexpected feeling.
Translated by Joheun Lee, The Forest Called You explores authenticity, desire and connection in an artificial world.
Read if you like: K-pop, speculative fiction, virtual reality, queer first love, idol culture, questions of authenticity.
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Frequently asked questions
Which new debut novels are worth reading?
2026 has introduced several exciting new voices across literary and contemporary fiction, including Homebound Eat Bitter Upward Bound
What are the best new fiction books to read right now?
Whether you’re looking for literary fiction, psychological suspense or contemporary novels, standout recent releases include Long Wave The Pinnacle All In The Project