The Must-Read Books of 2026

Craving the books everyone’s been talking about this year?  Our list of captivating nonfiction and page-turning novels is just what you need!

The Life Impossible

By Matt Haig

New York Times Bestseller

“An odyssey of action and awe.” —The New York Times

“A wry and tender love-letter to the best of being human.” —Benedict Cumberbatch

The remarkable next novel from Matt Haig, the author of #1 New York Times bestseller The Midnight Library, with more than nine million copies sold worldwide

“What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet…”

When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan.

Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.

Filled with wonder and wild adventure, thisis a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.

The Impossible Fortune

By Richard Osman

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The unmissable new mystery in the Thursday Murder Club series from bestselling author Richard Osman, now streaming on Netflix

Who's got time to think about murder when there's a wedding to plan?

It’s been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy with table plans and first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his favorite criminal.

But when Elizabeth meets Nick, a wedding guest asking for her help, she finds the thrill of the chase is ignited once again. And when Nick disappears without a trace, his cagey business partner becomes the gang’s next stop. It seems the duo have something valuable—something worth killing for.

Joyce’s daughter, Joanna, jumps into the fray to help the gang as they seek answers: Has someone kidnapped Nick? And what’s this uncrackable code they keep hearing about? Plunged back into action once more, can the four friends solve the puzzle and a murder in time?

The House of Dragonflies

By Smitha Menon Kizhuveetil

SALIS MANIA CHOICE AWARDS WINNER

The House of Dragonflies by Smitha Menon Kizhuveetil is a novel that unfolds with quiet assurance, drawing the reader into its world through atmosphere rather than event. From the outset, the writing establishes a lush, watchful setting whose stillness carries emotional weight, allowing the landscape to shape the tone of the story as much as the characters who inhabit it.

The novel’s non-linear structure moves across time and generations with an intuitive ease, mirroring the way memory itself works as fragmented, recursive, and deeply personal. Rather than offering immediate clarity, the narrative invites the reader to sit with uncertainty, gradually revealing connections through reflection and emotional resonance. This layered approach gives the novel its distinctive rhythm and depth.

At the heart of the story is an exploration of loneliness, motherhood, friendship, and mental unrest, themes that are handled with restraint and sensitivity. The interior lives of the characters take precedence, and the novel’s emotional power lies in its attentiveness to small moments and unspoken tensions. Healing, when it appears, is subtle and hard-won, emerging through understanding rather than resolution.

Kizhuveetil weaves elements of local folklore, dreams, faith, and inherited belief into the narrative with a light touch. These aspects lend the novel a quiet speculative quality, enhancing its emotional atmosphere without overwhelming its realism. The boundaries between the imagined and the remembered remain deliberately porous, reflecting the characters’ inner landscapes.

Written in an introspective, literary style, The House of Dragonflies unfolds at a measured pace, privileging mood and reflection over plot-driven urgency. Readers expecting a fast-moving mystery may find the novel demanding, but those drawn to nuanced, atmospheric fiction will appreciate its thoughtful construction and emotional depth.

Elegant and contemplative, The House of Dragonflies is a novel that lingers, offering a richly textured meditation on memory, inheritance, and the enduring impact of lives lived quietly.

Hidden Potential

By Adam Grant

New York Times Bestseller

“This brilliant book will shatter your assumptions about what it takes to improve and succeed. I wish I could go back in time and gift it to my younger self. It would’ve helped me find a more joyful path to progress.”

—Serena Williams, 23-time Grand Slam singles tennis champion

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again illuminates how we can elevate ourselves and others to unexpected heights.

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.

Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess—it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.

Many writers have chronicled the habits of superstars who accomplish great things. This book reveals how anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.

We Solve Murders

By Richard Osman

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Madcap fun, with an entertaining new cast of characters and Osman’s trademark wit. Delightful!” —Shari Lapena

From the #1 bestselling author of The Thursday Murder Club Series

A brand new mystery. An iconic new detective duo. And a thrilling new murder to solve . . .

Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He still does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar routines: the pub quiz, his favorite bench, his cat waiting for him at home. His days of adventure are over. Adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s job now.

Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. Working in private security, every day is dangerous. She’s currently on a remote island protecting mega-bestselling author Rosie D’Antonio, until a dead body and a bag of money mean trouble in paradise. So she sends an SOS to the only person she trusts . . .

As a thrilling race around the world begins, can Amy and Steve outrun and outsmart a killer?

Solving murders. It’s a family business.

Unforgettable Classic Stories: A Timeless Anthology

By Deepti Menon

SALIS MANIA CHOICE AWARDS WINNER

In Unforgettable Classic Stories Deepti Menon Invites Us Back Into the Rooms We Thought We Already Knew

In an age of infinite scrolls and shrinking attention spans, Deepti Menon’s Unforgettable Classic Stories performs a quietly radical act: it asks us to sit still with the classics, not as relics to be revered from a distance but as living rooms we can re enter through an unexpected door.

Menon adapts ten of her favourite short stories from the greats including Schnitzler, Dickens, Chekhov, Pushkin, O. Henry, Harland, Maupassant and others, retelling them in a voice that is distinctly her own. The result is not imitation so much as conversation. Her versions offer the reader something akin to a tasting menu of world literature: familiar flavours, new textures, a sense of discovering what you have somehow missed.

For me, the gateway story was Arthur Schnitzler’s “The Dead Are Silent,” which Menon approaches with a restraint that heightens its uncanny stillness. That encounter alone feels worth the price of entry.

The anthology moves with ease from Rip Van Winkle’s myth laden slumber to Dickens’s fog thick London, from the emotional tremors of Chekhov and Pushkin to the tender ironies of O. Henry. Menon’s selections form not a canon but a curated voyage, one that circles Baker Street before sweeping us toward the atmospheric worlds of W. W. Jacobs and Guy de Maupassant.

Unforgettable Classic Stories offers a gentle provocation to the modern reader. It does not simplify the classics, it reanimates them. And in doing so, Menon makes a subtle case for returning to the greats not out of obligation but out of wonder.