The 2026 publishing slate is brimming with highly anticipated titles from literary heavyweights and emerging voices alike. A quintet of former male Booker Prize winners return, including George Saunders, whose new novel Vigil arrives in January. At under 200 pages, it follows a ghost guiding a dying oil tycoon towards redemption, revisiting themes of death and the afterlife. March brings Howl by Howard Jacobson, described as a tragicomic portrait of a man unravelling in an absurd world.
Julian Barnes’s Departure(s), out in January as he turns 80, is billed as his final book. A hybrid of fiction and memoir, it explores ageing, illness and mortality, reflecting on his own blood cancer diagnosis during the pandemic. Douglas Stuart’s third novel, John of John, follows a young man returning to a remote Scottish island after art school, while Yann Martel’s Son of Nobody retells the Trojan war through a foot soldier and a modern scholar.
Other notable returns include Sebastian Barry’s The Newer World, set in the aftermath of the American Civil War, and John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do, a black comedy about a woman suspecting a hit TV show mirrors her marriage. Maggie O’Farrell’s Land, inspired by her great-great-grandfather mapping Ireland in the 1850s, arrives in June, alongside Ann Patchett’s Whistler, where a chance encounter at an art gallery forces a woman to reexamine her life.
Meg Mason’s follow-up to Sorrow and Bliss, Sophie, Standing There, is a sharp reflection on obsession and loneliness. Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco offers a warm, funny tale of an American working for a Tuscan aristocrat, while Emma Cline’s Switzy follows an ageing executive on a final pilgrimage to a Swiss clinic. Elizabeth Strout introduces a new cast in The Things We Never Say, set in a Massachusetts coastal village, and Emily St John Mandel returns with her seventh novel in autumn.
