by Nate Carroll

There’s no rest for a bookseller! As one year of amazing reading ends it’s time to look ahead to the next and already 2026 looks to be an exciting one for books. There’s some heavy hitters already announced for the start of the year- starting with Vigil in early February , George Saunders’ first novel since his sensational Man Booker winning Lincoln in the Bardo. I’m particularly excited about Glyph from my all time favourite author Ali Smith, the second in her dystopian duology. Expect a story equal parts playful and profound. An author who seems to need no rest at all is Elizabeth Strout, whose next book The Things We Never Say publishes in May. March is a treat for those who like their fiction to get under their skin and unsettle; we have Lauren Groff’s latest collection Brawler and Asako Yuzuki’s (of Butter fame) second novel Hooked. Two great novelists, Sebastian Barry and Colson Whitehead, enter third novels into loosely expanding universes, with The Newer World and Cool Machine, while Booker winner Yann Martel returns at the end of March with the ambitious Son of Nobody. Booker shortlisted author, John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do is out in March. Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction, looks especially intriguing. Levy is one of our great novelists and her writing on art is equally as good- this new novel, which looks to combine the two, promises to be Levy at her lofty best. Perhaps the two biggest literary releases of the year will come a little later, with Maggie O'Farrell's Land and Ann Patchett's Whistler both publishing in June.

On the New Zealand front, two of our very best writers are publishing new books early in the year. After her landmark memoir The Mirror Book, Charlotte Grimshaw returns to fiction with The Black Monk in March. Elizabeth Knox publishes her first memoir in April with Night, Ma, reflections on a three year period marked by a series of calamities to the people closest to her. Knox is such a creative and sensitive writer - an invitation into her head is not to be missed. Similarly, I’m intrigued by Kate Camp's Leather & Chains: My 1986 Diary, wherein one of our best poets responds to her fourteen year old self's diary. We’re also very excited for debut novels by two longtime members of our wider Time Out community, with Elisabeth Easther’s Seed and Karen Holdom’s The End and the Beginning.

A memoir which I’m lucky enough to have already read is Ghost Stories by Booker longlisted writer Siri Hustvedt, centered on the death of her husband, Paul Auster. Her writing on love, absence and grief is remarkable and so too are the small sections of Auster’s final writing- letters to their 1 year old grandson, written after he knew his cancer was terminal. Not an easy read but one with tremendous power. One of the most anticipated books of the year is Gisele Pelicot’s A Hymn To Life: Shame has to Change Sides, the first biography from one of our most courageous modern figures. The other major early year release is Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, new book London Falling. He’s the modern master of non-fiction writing and this new book sounds typical to type- an investigation into the death of a young man which spawns a host of new questions for each single answer.

Two debut novels we’re keeping a close eye on at Time Out are The Bodybuilders by Albertine Clarke and Whidbey by T Kira Madden. I’ve read an early review copy of Whidbey and immediately picked it as a book which could make some noise. In it, a woman meets a stranger and tells him about the man who abused her as a child, and the stranger offers to kill the man and then disappear. From there a constantly shifting narrative unspools, that reads like a cross between A Little Life and a Patricia Highsmith novel. The Bodybuilders is a speculative fiction novel that frays at the border between the body and the mind. All I needed to see was the early review ‘If Phillip K Dick had written the Bell Jar’ to be instantly curious.

I’d be remiss not to mention some excellent global fiction being published in English this year. The On the Calculation of Volume series which has so gripped the literary scene (and our local Time Out one) continues, with its 4th and 5th entries set to come in 2026. The great Mexican novelist Alvaro Enrigue publishes Now I Surrender in the second half of the year and Time Out favourite Elisa Dusapin has a new book The Old Fire out in March. One of my favourite writers around, Vigdis Hjorth, also has a new translation of her book Repetition, wherein a seemingly innocuous memory inspires a dark realisation.