The New York Times released a list of the best books of the year so far.
“We’re a third of the way through 2026 and we at The Book Review have already written about hundreds of books,” the newspaper’s books staff wrote. “Some of those titles are good. Some are very good. And then there are the following.”
The Times’ fiction picks include Tayari Jones’ Kin, which it calls “a lush historical novel about sisterhood”; Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Lives, “a sweeping family epic”; Ben Lerner’s Transcription, “a tender meditation on technology”; Tana French’s The Keeper; Cat Sebastian’s Star Shipped; and Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear.
Nonfiction books to make the newspaper’s cut include Belle Burden’s Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, which it calls “the intimate story of an imploding marriage”; Anand Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution, “a deeply human account of a revolution”; Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage; Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth; Richard Holmes’ The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief; Wil Haygood’s The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home; and Namwali Serpell’s On Morrison.
Looking ahead to the future, the Times books staff wrote, “We suspect that some (though certainly not all) of these will be top of mind when we publish our end-of-year, best-of lists.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
