After the chaos of the holidays, it's time to get your priorities—and your reading lists—straight. You've already checked out our favorite under-the-radar titles from 2025 and combed over our favorite books of last year. But what's new in 2026? Here are nine titles that PW staffers think you should pick up in the first quarter of the new year.
Delusions: Of Grandeur, of Romance, of Progress
The youngest millennials are turning 30, and David, who's among their number, captures that fraught transition with humor and unrelenting honesty. Staring down the barrel of a new decade, she unpacks the absurdities of contemporary adulthood: social media becoming “the romantic-advice industrial complex,” the pressure to exploit one's “hotness” in their 20s, and the culture's over-the-top obsession with self-care. Pairing blunt social analyses with vulnerable personal anecdotes, David is a relatable voice for anyone who feels like time is running out. —Marisa Charpentier, science and pop culture reviews editor
Honeysuckle
I'm a sucker for a dark fairy tale, and Fridman-Tell's gorgeously rendered debut—featuring a Blodeuwedd, or woman made of flowers, from Welsh mythology—blew me away. Come for the lush prose and horror-tinged romance, stay for the incisive examination of autonomy and agency. —Phoebe Cramer, SFF, horror, and romance reviews editor
Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island
In this riveting real-life mystery, not only is the popular myth of Easter Island as an ecological cautionary tale decisively punctured—the author finds evidence that it was a colonial slave raid that decimated the population—but another hidden history is revealed. Pitts uncovers the story of what happened to the first Western scholar to try to tell the unvarnished truth of Eastern Island’s past, an early-20th-century woman anthropologist who was undermined, discredited, and eventually sent to an insane asylum. It’s a feat of research and a dark reminder that history is full of victors’ propaganda, which will surely be useful to keep in mind for 2026. —Dana Snitzky, history and current affairs reviews editor
The Jills
Parkman’s thriller qualifies as popcorn reading that’s based on a real-life NFL cheerleading squad. The author interviewed former members of New York’s Buffalo Jills to learn about their lives on and off the field, and she pins the drama—in which the practical-minded lead character investigates the disappearance of her party-girl teammate and bestie—to the everyday work and wages of dancers on the squad during the early 2010s. The Jills, not the Bills, get the full spotlight. I read it for Parkman’s research and the Jills’ friendships, but it’s also a good Sunday read for those only half-watching the game. —Nathalie op de Beeck, West Coast & library correspondent
Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!
Not every marquee celebrity memoir is worth one’s time, but I’m on tenterhooks for this autobiography from one of the 20th century’s most electric and troubled entertainers and her friend and frequent collaborator Feinstein. Liza, the offspring of MGM’s greatest star and the studio's longest-running director, has always come across like five-and-a-half feet of pure, uncut showbiz. I’m counting on this book to either complicate that portrait or slap me in the face like a bag of sequins; ideally both. —Conner Reed, mystery and memoir reviews editor
Leo Rising: Queer Spaces, Sexuality, and Fame
I’m an admitted Bongiovanni stan, and have been looking forward to this comic drama set in Alaska ever since I learned the artist, who strikes a city-savvy pose in their dance floor appearances at indie comic cons, did in fact grow up in the isolated north. There’s a catchy conceit here: what happens when a lesbian who has a big social media following for being a strong woman decides they might want to become a guy? But what follows is more grounded, loving, and funny than that log line implies. The comp Bongiovanni often gets to Alison Bechdel is overused but apt, both because Bongiovanni depicts the daily bits of queer life so neatly and because of the cocky winks in their work. They're unafraid to write and draw for a chosen community (expect plenty of sex jokes), and the fresh, flirty, real deets make things work all the better for broader readers. —Meg Lemke, comics and graphic novels reviews editor
The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us
The desire to matter is among the deepest and most unique of human longings, fueling both social progress and crisis, Newberger writes in this persuasive study. Arguing with rigor and sensitivity, she layers her philosophical inquiry with perceptive and surprisingly uplifting insights into how better understanding this universal instinct—and its many applications—could help people better understand one another, and themselves. —Miriam Grossman, religion and self-help reviews editor
Now I Surrender
After dazzling U.S. readers with the story of a 16th-century tennis match played with a ball made of hair from Anne Boleyn's severed head (Sudden Death) and a tripped-out reimagining of the first meeting between Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma (You Dreamed of Empires), Mexican novelist Enrigue delivers his most ambitious book to date—a multilayered epic of the Apache Wars that, for me a least, proved the cliché true: no sooner had I finished the last page than I was ready to start the novel all over again, just to see how he pulled it off. —David Adams, adult reviews director
Transcription
I’m a big fan of Lerner’s earlier novels, which, like this one, explore people's relationships to art, family, and technology. It's about an interview that the interviewer didn’t manage to record, a premise that immediately calls to mind my early reporting days, when dying AA batteries or a jammed tape recorder sometimes caused me to draw from memory. I’ve heard nothing but great things about this book, and have been saving it for a day when I can devour it in one gulp. —David Varno, literary fiction reviews editor
