Releases I'm Ready For, Spring 2026

Another season of books approaches, with new novels from so many of my favorite authors!

→ LAKE EFFECT by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (March 3): I loved the complicated family and marriage dynamics in Sweeney's first two novels, THE NEST and GOOD COMPANY. I'm expecting more excellent relationship drama in this new novel, which starts in 1977 with THE JOY OF SEX and an adulterous scandal that has long-ranging effects.

→ CHERRY BABY by Rainbow Rowell (April 14): Rowell is the author of so many books I've enjoyed, and I'm glad for another novel with adult characters. The premise involves a failing marriage and a successful webcomic that's getting a movie adaptation, and it's sure to be full of emotion and humor.

→ LAST NIGHT IN BROOKLYN by Xochitl Gonzalez (April 21): OLGA DIES DREAMING and ANITA DE MONTE LAUGHS LAST are both fascinating stories that unfold the complex pasts of their characters. In Gonzalez's next novel, set in 2007 (an alarmingly distant past!), a young woman gets a chance to enter the world of glamour and wealth in a changing Brooklyn on the brink of the financial crisis.

→ FIVE WEEKS IN THE COUNTRY by Francine Prose (May 5): I've read a few of Prose's many novels, and when I learned what this one is about, I knew I'd be picking it up. The story is an imagining of the real life episode when Hans Christian Andersen went to stay at Charles Dickens's home in what became a legendarily bad visit. That sounds like a ton of fun.

→ PLATFORM DECAY by Martha Wells (May 5): Yes, it's a new Murderbot Diary, the eighth in the series about a Security Unit who's great at its job but would rather be watching media than interacting with humans. I've been gradually revisiting the previous installments, inspired by the wonderful TV adaptation, so now I have a deadline for my reread.

→ RADIANT STAR by Ann Leckie (May 12): Thrillingly, May is also bringing a new book from my other favorite writer of space adventures! This is a standalone story in Leckie's Imperial Radch universe, featuring politics, religion, and characters from disparate backgrounds.

→ WHISTLER by Ann Patchett (June 2): I always admire Patchett's complicated character relationships, especially among family members in novels like COMMONWEALTH and THE DUTCH HOUSE. I'm excited to see what she'll do with this story of a woman who reconnects in middle age with the man who was her stepfather for only a brief part of her childhood.

→ FOUNDLING FATHERS by Meg Elison (June 23): Elison's previous novels include speculative fiction (a post-apocalyptic series starting with THE BOOK OF THE UNNAMED MIDWIFE) and intense stories set in the real world (FIND LAYLA and NUMBER ONE FAN). I like her work in any genre, and I can't wait to read this science fictional satire about an attempt to save America with clones of the founding fathers.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Baffler, Lydia Kiesling explores the practice of anticipated book lists and the changing internet: "By the time I came on as the editor [of The Millions] in 2016, the previews were creeping up toward a hundred titles. Max, who still owned the site when I was its editor, encouraged me to pare the list down and exert some curatorial influence, but I was constitutionally incapable. First of all, five minutes with the sausage-making of list culture was sufficient to understand how arbitrary the process really was. Secondly, as a new novelist myself, I felt the pain of being excluded. Moreover, the exclusivity denoted by curation was at odds with the revenue possibilities presented by more affiliate links..."

January Reading Recap

I started off the year with a good variety of surprising stories, mostly speculative fiction:

→ WHAT WE CAN KNOW by Ian McEwan opens in 2119 Britain as an academic travels between islands by boat on his way to a library set high on a mountain. Tom is visiting the library to continue his historical research into the life and work of poet Francis Blundy and his wife Vivien. Specifically, he's searching the hundred-year-old archives for information about a poem Francis wrote for Vivien's birthday dinner in 2014, a poem that was never shared publicly but nonetheless became legendary in the decades that followed. While the poem remains elusive, Tom is able to piece together so many details about the dinner and the attendees from an extensive collection of preserved journals, messages, social media, and so on. He's fascinated by these people from the past, and how different their lives and outlooks were in a time before much of Britain was underwater. But even though Tom feels he understands Vivien and Francis as well as or better than his own closest friend, there are limitations to his knowledge.

I was fascinated from the beginning by the unusual layers of narrative and the way they gradually unfold to reveal more of the story. This is a novel where it takes time to understand what's going on, why we're following these people, and what all the pieces have to do with each other, and I enjoy that experience when it's well done, as it is here. What emerges is an exploration of (among other things) love and betrayal, the value and shortcomings of historical perspective, and the impact of climate change. There is also a devastatingly raw story about caretaking a spouse in cognitive decline. I wouldn't give this book to everyone, but if it sounds like your sort of story, I recommend it.

→ LIGHTBREAKERS by Aja Gabel: Maya and Noah's marriage exists in the shadow of his grief. Noah was married before and had a daughter, who died at the age of three. Maya has never quite managed to reach across his sadness, and she carries the baggage of her own past, a once-promising painting career that stagnated. When Noah, a physicist, is offered a job at a secretive science lab in the art center of Marfa, Texas, it seems an ideal opportunity for them both. Maya hopes she'll find artistic inspiration, and that the change of scenery will allow the couple to refocus on each other and their future. But Noah's new project involves a way to travel back into memories, and his great hope is that he might see his daughter again. His fixation on this possibility brings his ex-wife back into his life, and at the same time, Maya reconnects with a great love from her own past.

I liked this more as a relationship story than as the time travel story it eventually becomes. Gabel writes with insight about the complicated relationship dynamics and how the characters love and hurt each other. I found the emotions realistic and affecting. The time travel contributes to the plot in some interesting ways, and the details are fairly well developed, but I expected it to produce a more radical impact on the characters' situation. Though the novel didn't deliver as much as I hoped for on the speculative front, it's a compelling and original story about shared history, memory, grief, and art.

→ THE COMPASS ROSE by Ursula K. Le Guin is a collection of wonderfully varied short stories. It opens with a brief and very Le Guinian story combining imaginative cultural details with surprising developments and humor: "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" presents "extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics," which turns out to be the study of animal language, including writing systems, dialects, and literature. Later stories range across formats, tones, and amount of speculative content, but strong detail of cultures and characters can be found in all of them.

A few stories stood out for especially well-developed emotional situations inside fascinating science fictional plots. "The Eye Altering" is a gorgeous and clever story about the difficulty of adapting to life on a new planet. "The Pathways of Desire" also sends Earthlings to another planet, this time a small team of ethnographers studying the local culture, and the story takes some intriguing and unexpected turns. I'm not sure I completely understood "The New Atlantis," but I was drawn in by the characters and the hope they carry despite their oppressive society. "The Diary of the Rose" features another authoritarian regime and a technology allowing doctors to see and analyze a patient's thoughts.

→ In THE ROAD TO TENDER HEARTS by Annie Hartnett, four people who have survived a variety of traumas take a road trip together. Along the way, more terrible things happen around them, some they experience and some they never even know about. The travelers are a ragtag family, thrown together by accidents of both birth and death: PJ, an aging alcoholic mourning the long-ago death of his daughter; Sophie, his other daughter, who grew up adrift and resentful of her father's neglect; and two children, Luna and Ollie, newly orphaned and left in PJ's questionable care. The four humans are joined by a cat with the ability to detect when someone is going to die, and also a softball cap that occasionally speaks to PJ. It's that sort of quirkily, darkly comic novel.

Quirky humor isn't going to connect with every reader, and in this case it was an imperfect match for me, but I ended up liking the novel pretty well despite that. I grew attached to the characters in all their foibles, and I was genuinely moved by how they (of course) came to care about each other during their journey. But I was often jarred by the story's quick tonal shifts between heartfelt moments, terrible things treated with absurdity, and other terrible things treated more seriously. I get what Hartnett was going for, but I just didn't find it as funny as I was meant to. Still, since I did enjoy the characters and their relationships, I'll be curious to check out her previous novels.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Eli Cugini writes at Defector about fanfiction’s impact on publishing: "Fanfiction's influence is no longer most discernible in specific, singular megahits. It has deeply shaped some of the highest-selling genres, particularly romance, young-adult, fantasy, and their hyperpalatable Frankenchild, romantasy."