The 2026 publishing calendar is packed with exciting releases from literary heavyweights and emerging voices alike. A quintet of former male Booker Prize winners return, starting with George Saunders' Vigil in January. The novel, under 200 pages and set over one night, follows a ghost guiding a dying oil tycoon towards redemption. March brings Howard Jacobson's Howl, a tragicomic portrait of a man unravelling in an absurd world.
Julian Barnes marks his 80th birthday with Departure(s), his final book and a hybrid of fiction and memoir. It reflects on ageing, illness and mortality, drawing on his own blood cancer diagnosis during the pandemic. Douglas Stuart's third novel, John of John, follows a young art school graduate returning to a remote Scottish island, described by the author as 'a story about looking for love… a story about looking for self'. Yann Martel retells the Trojan war from dual perspectives in Son of Nobody.
Other notable returns include Sebastian Barry's The Newer World, set in the late 19th century after the American Civil War, and John Lanchester's Look What You Made Me Do, a black comedy about a woman who suspects a hit TV show is based on her marriage. Maggie O'Farrell's Land, inspired by her great-great-grandfather who worked for the Ordnance Survey in 1850s Ireland, tells the story of a father and son mapping the land after the Great Hunger.
Ann Patchett's Whistler sees a middle-aged woman encounter her former step-father at an art gallery after four decades. Meg Mason's follow-up to Sorrow and Bliss, titled Sophie, Standing There, is billed as a sharp and funny reflection on obsession and loneliness. Andrew Sean Greer's Villa Coco follows a 21-year-old American working for a 92-year-old aristocrat in Tuscany, promising a warm and funny read.
Emma Cline's Switzy is a darkly humorous tale of an ageing executive on a final pilgrimage to a Swiss clinic. Elizabeth Strout introduces a new cast of characters in The Things We Never Say, set in a Massachusetts coastal village. Emily St John Mandel returns with her seventh novel in autumn, though details remain under wraps.
