The Best Books We Read in 2026

Discover a curated selection of the most compelling nonfiction books that educate, inspire, and captivate readers. From groundbreaking memoirs to thought-provoking essays, this blog explores stories that delve deep into real-life events, personal growth, history, science, and more. Whether you're looking for books to expand your knowledge or gain fresh perspectives, this list has something for every nonfiction enthusiast.

Born to Rise: The Unspoken Principles Behind Power, Riches and Lasting Wealth

By Shree Shambav

Salis Mania Choice Awards 2026 Nominee

In an era that equates visibility with value, Born to Rise: The Unspoken Principles Behind Power, Riches, and Lasting Wealth presents a more profound perspective. Shree Shambav doesn’t offer a manual of optimisation or a list of habits. Instead, he presents a mirror, encouraging readers to look beyond accomplishments and towards their true essence.

The book unfolds in meditative fragments that gain strength through repetition and imagery. A candle, glowing softly, shares its flame without losing its own light. A traveller, without a destination, is guided by stars rather than storms. These images form the spiritual framework of Shambav’s argument. He suggests that mastery is merely the beginning; meaning is the deeper calling.

Central to the book is a redefinition of success. Shambav introduces three forms of abundance: inner richness, material wealth, and true power. When these elements align, a person becomes whole. Wealth supports dreams and service, power uplifts and leads with courage, and inner richness fosters humility and joy. Separated, they distort; united, they provide stability.

Midway through the text, the most compelling question arises: if the world fell silent and all metrics vanished, no salaries, no stages, no applause. What part of you would remain steadfast? In this imagined silence, identity is stripped of performance. Shambav argues that what remains is the only foundation worth building upon.

The book’s “Creator Mindset” chapter encapsulates this philosophy in a single extended metaphor. A creator cultivates land, with ideas as seeds, beliefs as soil, action as water, and presence as sunlight. Distraction is likened to weeds. The creator doesn’t merely consume but nourishes. In this vision, leadership is generative rather than extractive, and influence flows from tending what is real.

Shambav returns often to the discipline of focus. Ten years of daily practice, he reminds us, shape mastery. Yet he cautions against scattering effort across too many pursuits. Become not a master of many things but a force in one. Think in decades. Legacy is a forest grown from a single acorn, long after the hand that planted it has faded.

Relationships, too, are reframed. They are not transactions but alliances rooted in shared purpose and quiet alignment. Seek mentors instead of followers. Build bonds that outlast utility.

At times the language hovers near abstraction, yet its aim is concrete. To create without fear. To love without agenda. To give without depletion. To rest without guilt. In a culture that equates worth with output, this insistence on interior clarity feels both gentle and radical.

Ultimately, Born to Rise argues that the truest ascent begins within. Shambav’s vision of legacy is not spectacle but sustenance, a quiet action today becoming someone’s river tomorrow. The book does not demand speed. It asks for stillness, courage, and the patience to measure a life not by noise, but by meaning.

How To Make The Best Coffee At Home

By James Hoffmann

Sunday Times Bestseller

We all expect to be able to buy an excellent cup of coffee from the many brilliant coffee shops available. But what about the coffee we make at home? Shouldn't that be just as good?

Coffee expert James Hoffmann is the cofounder of Square Mile Coffee, as well as creating extremely informative, and popular, kit and coffee reviews for his YouTube and Instagram channels. In his latest book he demonstrates everything you need to know to make consistently excellent coffee at home, including: what kit is worth buying, and what isn't; how to grind coffee; the basics of brewing for all major equipment (cafetiere, aeropress, stovetop etc); understanding coffee drinks, from the cortado to latte; and the perfect espresso.

Untold Night and Day

By Bae Suah

'As cryptic and compelling as a fever dream... Bae Suah is one of the most unique and adroit literary voices working today' Sharlene Teo

Finishing her last shift at Seoul's only audio theatre for the blind, Kim Ayami heads into the night with her former boss, searching for a missing friend. The following day, she looks after a visiting poet, a man who is not as he seems. Unfolding over a night and a day in the sweltering summer heat, their world's order gives way to chaos, the edges of reality start to fray, and the past intrudes on the present in increasingly disorientating ways.

Untold Night and Day is a hallucinatory feat of storytelling from one of the most radical voices in contemporary Korean literature.

'Highly original... Once I finished it, much of it slipped into my subconscious' Daily Telegraph

Demystify Generative AI for Everyday People

Book by Pritam Sahoo

Salis Mania Choice Awards Best New Author (Editor’s Choice) 2025 Winner

Salis Mania Choice Awards Best New Nonfiction Author (Editor’s Choice) 2025 Winner

In Demystify Generative AI for Everyday People, Pritam Sahoo sets out to explain the most mystifying technology of our times with the affable cheer of a TED speaker and the confidence of someone who has spent enough hours with Google’s AI ecosystem to call it a friend. The ambition is noble: take a complex, shape-shifting subject and make it not only legible but welcoming to the “everyday person.”

But the book’s charisma, much like an overenthusiastic emcee, has a habit of wandering.

Sahoo is at his best when he treats AI as a mischievous companion, “that friend who’s read way too much and always has a clever line ready.” In these moments, the book is charming, warm, and a little bit goofy, giving readers the rare pleasure of learning something technical without feeling they’ve wandered into the wrong classroom. His core premise is sound and even elegant: generative AI is merely a tool, and its brilliance or danger depends entirely on the human behind the keyboard. His argument that ordinary people don’t need to understand the engine to drive the machine feels reassuring in a world overwhelmed by jargon.

Yet this lightness proves difficult to sustain. Midway through the book, the breezy wit gives way to a more formal, lecture-like tone, as if the crowd chuckling at a punchline suddenly realized they were enrolled in a compulsory course. The tonal shifts are jarring. One moment you’re laughing at a metaphor; the next you’re staring at terminology that would make the average person quietly close the book and reach for their evening tea.

Part of the issue lies in the promise made by the title. It gestures toward accessibility and suggests AI for the milkman, the math teacher, the neighborhood uncle who still types with one finger. However, the content skews unmistakably toward entrepreneurs, small business owners, creators, and anyone already curious about AI. If you handed it to someone who has barely made peace with WhatsApp video calling, half the vocabulary would glide cleanly over their head.

To the book’s credit, its use of AI tools in the writing is remarkably restrained. Despite being steeped in Google’s AI platforms, the prose never feels synthetic or machine-lifted. This is perhaps the book’s quiet triumph: it advocates for AI while proving, through its own natural voice, that humans still very much run the show.

Ultimately, Demystify Generative AI for Everyday People offers not a universal guidebook but a thoughtful, occasionally uneven introduction for the curious professional. If Sahoo had fully committed to a single persona, perhaps a more playful and desi-infused storyteller, the book might have achieved the warmth and accessibility its title promises. Instead, it exists in two registers: part stand-up comedy, part seminar.

Still, for those standing at the edge of the AI waters and unsure whether to dip a toe, Sahoo provides encouragement along with a gentle push. Whether it will keep “everyday people” afloat is another question.

Letters from a Seducer

By Hilda Hilst

A grand, perturbing erotic novel in which the wealthy, amoral Karl records his sexual life and search for meaning in letters with a surprising legacy

“Maybe all women wonder what men would be like without their posturing, but it seems to me Hilst had more than an inkling...” – Dodie Bellamy

This epistolary novel tells the story of Karl, a wealthy, amoral and erudite man who records his daily life in a series of 20 letters to his sister Cordelia. She is cloistered and chaste, but the letters are wildly promiscuous – not just in their explicit sexual content, which have earned the novel the epithet ‘pornographic’, but in their form. Ranging in style and register from modernist fragments worthy of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, to letters that could have been penned by Enlightenment libertines like Choderlos de Laclos and the Marquis de Sade, the letters make up a polyphonic text that pushes the boundaries both of fiction and of decency.

The novel – a standalone masterpiece which originally appeared as part of a Brazilian tetralogy – changes form again partway through, when the indigent poet Stamatius finds Karl’s record of his erotic adventures in a trash can, and begins to write stories based on what he reads, and then to break down those stories into even briefer fragments. Karl’s letters inspire Stamatius’ writing, and their narratives and identities become ever more fragmented, until we begin to doubt whether they are truly separate people. What unites them is an abundantly lewd imagination and a fantastically creative relationship to the greatest seducer of all: language.

I Could Be Famous: Stories

By Sydney Rende

Best Book of the Year by Vogue

Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Debutiful

"A terrific debut: fresh, original, and surprising." --George Saunders, Booker-Prize winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo

From a magnetic new voice in fiction "made for this moment and for those coming of age within it" (Jonathan Dee), a debut story collection following ten ambitious women and one male superstar as they pursue their desires--however deluded--for more.

A listless woman befriends an influencer at a rooftop party, only to discover her lifestyle is not as glamorous as it seems. A college freshman gives the world's longest blow job to a boy whose name she's forgotten. A fan-favorite reality TV star joins a dating app after an explosive breakup, ready to move on, but finds she's in control only when cameras are rolling. While working in a hot tub showroom, a struggling actress goes method so she can nail an audition for the role of High School Junkie Girlfriend. Threaded throughout these explorations of neuroses and aspirations is one Arlo Banks, a hotshot actor who faces his own downfall when he's accused of cannibalism.

From the dazzling to the mundane, Rende's unnervingly astute stories hold a mirror to our obsession with how we're perceived and our ache to be adored. Above all else, I Could Be Famous is a love letter to big ambitions and bigger dissatisfactions, belief in ourselves, and the fascination we hold with the idea that we could--somehow, someday--be famous.

Stronger

By Dinesh Palipana

Salis Mania Choice Awards Best Book (Editor’s Choice) 2025 Winner

Salis Mania Choice Awards Best Nonfiction Book (Editor’s Choice) 2025 Winner

In Stronger, Dinesh Palipana recounts a life that has been anything but ordinary. After surviving a devastating accident that left him critically injured, Palipana, Sri Lankan born and Australian trained, emerges as a storyteller of remarkable warmth, humor, and perspective. His memoir doesn’t linger on tragedy; instead, it examines resilience with a sharp wit and a Jeremy Clarkson–like irreverence. Palipana’s journey meanders through Sri Lanka’s turbulence, the corporate grind, and the daunting world of medicine, yet his focus remains firmly on what can be learned from others’ struggles as much as his own.

What sets Stronger apart is its insistence that life’s worth isn’t measured by tomorrow’s promises but by today’s presence. Palipana reminds us that extraordinary lives are rarely built by following the stream; they are forged by jumping out of it. Disability, he argues, is not synonymous with inability. His narrative celebrates discipline: “big things are a collection of little things done well,” and the unseen labor behind every achievement.

Far from being a self-help manifesto, Stronger is a meditation on perspective. Palipana’s wealth lies in relationships, laughter, and memories, not accolades. He extols curiosity, particularly the transformative power of conversations with strangers, and delivers his wisdom with a lightness that makes the book more invigorating than solemn. In a cultural moment obsessed with spectacle and speed, Palipana’s reflections feel radical. Ordinary is easy. Extraordinary requires courage. His story isn’t just inspiring; it is a quiet rebellion against despair.